resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud died at the age of 100

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“ A heroine is gone. His legacy: a whole century of fighting », greeted L’Humanité for which she covered the wars in Algeria and Vietnam. “ She was a character in a novel, whose existence was woven by struggle, writing, three wars and one 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.

On August 23, 2024, her 100th birthday, Madeleine Riffaud published the third and final volume of Madeleine, resistant (ed. Dupuis), his 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 mean 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 murdered a Nazi non-commissioned officer with two bullets 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. Arrested, tortured for three weeks, tied up without drinking, eating or sleeping, she had to witness unbearable scenes. She doesn’t speak.

In 2001, she was awarded the Legion of Honor medal by another famous resistance fighter: Raymond Aubrac.

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