Picardy resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud died at the age of 100, her publisher Dupuis announced on Wednesday, November 6, confirming information from the daily Humanity for which she was war correspondent.
« A heroine is gone. His legacy: a whole century of fighting », greeted Humanity for whom she covered the Algerian and Vietnam wars. “ She was a character in a novel, whose existence was woven by struggle, writing, three wars and one love. A life of crazy intensity, after childhood in the rubble of the Great War, from his first steps in the resistance to the maquis of South Vietnam », Underlined the daily.
On August 23, 2024, her 100th birthday, Madeleine Riffaud published the third and final volume of “Madeleine, Resistance” (ed. Dupuis), her war memoirs in comic strips, with Dominique Bertail drawing, and Jean-David Morvan on the screenplay. The latter paid tribute to her on Facebook by publishing a photo of her, aged, posing on a sofa.
She had chosen Rainer as her resistance name, to signify that she “is not at war against the German people but against the Nazis”
Born in 1924 in Arvillers, in the east of the Somme, this only daughter of teachers joined the resistance at 16 years old.
A student midwife in Paris, she became a liaison agent with her fellow communists from the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP) at the medical faculty. She becomes “Rainer” – in homage to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke – to mean that she “ is not at war against the German people but against the Nazis ».
The massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, a village of his youth decimated in June 1944, provoked his passage to arms. On July 23, she shot a Nazi officer twice in the head on the Solferino bridge in Paris.
« I regret, moreover, having killed this man. You are here. You were looking at the Seine. Can we be mean when we look at the Seine? Maybe he was a good guy. But that… well, it’s war ”, she said.
