Madeleine Riffaud is dead, the resistance fighter and former journalist had just turned 100

HISTORY – “A heroine is gone. His legacy: a whole century of fighting. » These words of Humanity pay tribute to the resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud whose death was confirmed this Wednesday, November 6 by her publisher Dupuis.

“She was a character in a novel, whose existence was woven by struggle, writing, three wars and a 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 for which she was war correspondent in Algeria and Vietnam.

On August 23, 2024, her 100th birthday, Madeleine Riffaud published the third and final volume of Madeleine, resistanthis war memoirs in comic strip, with Dominique Bertail on the 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.

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 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.

The resistance fighter was arrested almost immediately. Tortured by the Gestapo, she was sentenced to death and then deported. With a spy friend, she jumps from the train towards Ravensbrück but is intercepted. Thanks to the Swedish consul, she was released on August 19 thanks to an exchange of prisoners, in the midst of the Liberation of Paris.

Rainer resumed the fight: on August 23, she contributed to the arrest of 80 German soldiers in the attack on a train in Buttes-Chaumont. She will receive the Croix de Guerre with palm.

After the Liberation, she wanted to join the army but was not 21 years old. His commitment ends there. Without news of her deported friends, haunted by the memory of the jails, she plunges into depression as she recounts in We called him Rainer.

Eluard, Picasso and Ho Chi Minh…

Touched by her distress, Eluard takes her under his wing, prefaces his collection of poems The closed fist (1945). He takes her to Picasso who paints her – a determined little face framed by thick brown hair – and introduces her to the writer Vercors. Suffering from tuberculosis, she meets Pierre Daix, a survivor of Mauthausen, in a sanatorium. They get married and have a daughter who is placed with her grandparents for fear of tuberculosis. They separated in 1947.

“Only one profession was indicated then, it was war reporting for those most suffering”she confided once she became an old woman who was almost blind. It begins at This eveninga communist newspaper edited by Aragon. Then for Humanityshe covers the war in Indochina where Ho Chi Minh receives her as “his daughter”. She goes clandestinely to Algeria where she escapes an attack by the OAS (Organization of the Secret Army). She denounces the torture practiced in Paris against FLN (National Liberation Front) activists. Then she returned to Vietnam and covered the war for seven years.

On her return, she worked as a nursing assistant in a Parisian hospital and denounced in The linens of the night (1974), sold a million copies, the misery of Public Assistance. Fifty years later, she reiterates the same criticisms.

After remaining 24 hours left to her own devices on an emergency stretcher, she sent an open letter to the director of the AP-HP in 2022. “They thought I was too old to be worth treating me?” (…) Raymond Aubrac asked me to be a voice of the Resistance – so I will be. I still have a little strength, I have to give it away”.

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