She was one of the last great figures of the French Resistance. Madeleine Riffaud died, having just celebrated her 100th birthday. She was, in many ways, admirable and exemplary, engaged at the age of 16 in the Resistance against the German occupation. She experienced armed struggle, confinement, torture and, barely out of adolescence, the impossible return to “normal life” after the Liberation.
Madeleine Riffaud did what few of us will ever be able to accomplish, and told it to as many people as possible so that others, perhaps, might one day be capable of it. The spirit of resistance always guided her, without ever having the wrong enemy – she thus went into hiding under the name “Rainer”, a tribute to Rainer Maria Rilke which meant that she intended to fight against the Nazis, not against “the German people”. She also experimented with this existential choice in her poetic work, which she gave to Paul Éluard to reread. She rubbed shoulders with Picasso, Vercors and Aragon, was one with the humanist struggles of her time, covering as a journalist the wars in Vietnam and Algeria…
In memory of Madeleine Riffaud, many other figures of commitment stand out. Including these images of Ahou Daryaei, literally exposed by the Iranian regime. The young doctoral student in French literature at Azad University in Tehran sat down, in her underwear, to protest against the repression of Iranian youth. Over the images of his act of resistance, over those of his arrest, over the announcement of his confinement in a psychiatric hospital hover these words that Madeleine Riffaud and her comrades repeated to themselves, which command us to have infinite respect: “I am not a victim, I am a resistance fighter. I am not a martyr, I am a fighter. »
