Tributes paid to French Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud, who died at 100
As a teenager she survived torture by the Gestapo after killing a German officer
The Resistance member killed a German officer in Paris and was tortured for months by the Gestapo. She is pictured here after the war, in the 1950s.
Fonds Madeleine Riffaud
Tributes have been paid across the country to one of France’s best-known Resistance fighters who has died aged 100.
Madeleine Riffaud, born in the Somme department in 1924, was just 16 when she joined the movement to topple Nazi rule in occupied France during World War Two.
She said she was compelled to take up arms against the Nazis after the massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane. She later shot a German officer in the head in Paris.
Read more: Families launch appeal to save French WW2 massacre ruins
Following this she was tortured for over a month before being released and joining in the Liberation of Paris.
Her death was announced by friend and artistic collaborator Jean-David Morvan on Facebook.
“Madeleine told me ‘You'll see, you'll live very well with me, and without me.’ So it begins today... (And for the moment, I'm not living it very well),” he said.
French newspaper L’Humanité said “A heroine is gone. Her legacy: a whole century of fighting.”
An homage from an official French government social media page can be seen below.
Symbolic codename
During her operations with the French Resistance, specifically with the Communist-backed Francs-tireurs et partisans, she had the codename ‘Rainer’.
She chose the codename for herself in honour of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. This was her way of showing she was not at war with the German people or German ideas, but the Nazis, France Info reports her as saying.
Post-war career
At the end of the war, she wished to join the army, but was not old enough (she was not yet 21) and was thus refused.
Her torture at the hands of the Gestapo, lack of information about Resistance colleagues who had been imprisoned and sent to Germany, and refusal from the army caused her to enter a deep depression.
Poet Paul Éluard took her under his wing and helped her to publish her first set of poems Le Poing fermé (The Closed Fist) and introduced her to Pablo Picasso, who painted her.
She then began working for Ce Soir, a Communist newspaper of fellow poet Louis Aragon, covering wars in Algeria and Vietnam.
In the former, she was forced into hiding after a reported assassination attempt by the French far-right terrorist group Organisation armée secrète (OAS).
She spent seven years in Vietnam, with Communist leader Ho Chi Minh famously calling her ‘his daughter’ due to her reporting of the war, before she returned to Paris to work as a nurse’s aid in a hospital.
It took her 50 years to talk about her efforts during the Liberation, only doing so after the 1994 commemorations.
In 2021, she published the first of three autobiographical comic books titled Madeleine, résistante !
Earlier this year, legendary resistance fighter Missak Manouchian and his wife were interred in the Panthéon. Mr Manouchian was executed only a few months before the Liberation of France.
Read more: France honour foreign Resistance member: who was Missak Manouchian?
