The resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud died on Wednesday at the age of 100, after having been a war correspondent and having revealed her secrets late in comic strips.
“It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of resistance fighter, poet, writer, journalist and war correspondent Madeleine Riffaud,” publisher Dupuis said in a press release.
“She passed away this morning, peacefully in her bed surrounded by her loved ones,” he added.
“A heroine is gone. Her legacy: a whole century of fighting,” praised L’Humanité for which she covered the Algerian and Vietnam wars.
“She was a character in a novel, with an existence woven by struggle, writing, three wars and a love. A life of crazy intensity, after childhood in the rubble of the Great War, since her first not 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, resistant” (ed Dupuis), her war memoirs in comic strips, with Dominique Bertail drawing, and Jean-David Morvan to the scenario. The latter paid tribute to her on Facebook by publishing a photo of her, aged, posing on a sofa.
He also praised her “tremendous talent as a storyteller coupled with a keen sense of formula”, in a joint press release with the translator Éloïse de la Maison and the sociologist of work Philippe Denimal.
“I salute the memory of this heroine of admirable and exemplary courage,” reacted the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati in a press release, recalling that Madeleine Riffaud was also a poet and close to Paul Eluard, who published her works.
– “Snub” –
Born in 1924 in 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 signify 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 there. You were looking at the Seine. Can you be bad when you look at the Seine? Perhaps he was a good guy. But that… well, it’s war,” she said.
The political world also paid tribute to him on Wednesday.
The government thus recalled in a publication on
“Arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, journalist engaged alongside the striking miners of 1948, the Algerians and the Vietnamese against the colonial power: she will have led a life of struggle for emancipation,” recalled the left-wing MP for his part. François Ruffin.
The national secretary of the Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, noted that Madeleine Riffaud had died “on the day of Trump's election.” “As a final snub to fascists of all kinds, whom you will have fought all your life,” he wrote on X.
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