MAdeleine Riffaud died on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, at the age of 100. A resistance fighter during the Occupation, she was, after the war, a war correspondent in Vietnam and Algeria.
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Madeleine Riffaud joined the Resistance in 1942 at the age of 18. She took “Rainer” as her nom de guerre in reference to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In July 1944, a few weeks after the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre, she shot, on the orders of the Resistance, point-blank on a German non-commissioned officer, in Paris, on the Solférino footbridge, who died instantly. .
Captured by the militia during this assassination, she was tortured by the Gestapo. Released following a prisoner exchange organized by the Red Cross, she rejoined the ranks of the Resistance two days later. She participated in the fights for the Liberation of Paris.
Wounded in an OAS attack
After the Liberation of France, she became a journalist. When the First Indochina War began, she met Ho Chi Minh in Paris. Once Vietnam is freed from French colonization, she will report to the Southeast Asian country. She will then cover the Algerian war for Humanity. She will be injured for life in an OAS attack which targeted her personally.
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Finally, after the capture of Saigon by North Vietnam in 1975, she stopped reporting on war to devote herself to subjects on French society. Already, in 1974, she had published, with Julliard, The Cloths of the Nighta book for which she had been hired incognito as a hospital worker in a public establishment in the Paris region.
In 2001, she was decorated as a knight of the Legion of Honor. A comic strip, Madeleine, resistantpublished in 2021 by Dupuis, as well as a book, We called him Rainerpublished in 1994 by Gallimard, which she co-wrote with Gilles Plazy, recounts her journey.
