Madeleine Riffaud, French Resistance heroine who withstood weeks of torture by the Gestapo

Madeleine Riffaud in 1968: her shooting of a German soldier in occupied Paris as retribution for the SS's massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane became one of the legends of the Resistance
Madeleine Riffaud in 1968: her shooting of a German soldier in occupied Paris as retribution for the SS’s massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane became one of the legends of the Resistance - Keystone-France

Madeleine Riffaud, who has died aged 100, was a heroine of the French Resistance and one of the last surviving links with the Liberation of Paris in 1944.

The decisive moment of her life, she believed, came at Amiens railway station in November 1940. Then 16, she was a headstrong, argumentative girl with a penchant for writing poetry. Until the German invasion she had assumed she would become a teacher, like her parents.

That May, she had been strafed by the Luftwaffe in a column of refugees fleeing southwards with her sick grandfather. Six months later, they were returning to Picardy so that he could die at home. Madeleine Riffaud began searching for a stretcher in the station, which was crowded with German troops.

She felt “an instinctive, animal fear… They wanted to have some fun, like all soldiers do.” One pulled her skirt, another touched her bottom. An officer put a stop to this, but then kicked her hard in the backside, sending her sprawling in the gutter.

“I was humiliated, my fear turned into anger,” she recalled. “I remember saying to myself, ‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”

It took her two years. After contracting tuberculosis while studying midwifery she was sent to a sanatorium in Grenoble. Another patient introduced her to his Resistance network when they returned to Paris. Madeleine Riffaud took her nom de guerre, Rainer, from the German poet Rilke, whose Duino Elegies she had read while being treated.

'What kept me going was saying to myself: I am not a victim. I am a résistante'
‘What kept me going was saying to myself: I am not a victim. I am a résistante’

“Hundreds of young women like me were involved,” she recalled. “We were the messengers, the intelligence-gatherers, the repairers of the web. When men fell or were captured, we got the news through, pulled the nets tight again. We carried documents, leaflets, sometimes arms. We walked miles; bikes were too precious, and the Métro was too dangerous.”

As D-Day approached, networks such as hers were short of arms. She would approach policemen in the street to coax or threaten them into giving her their pistols. Shortly before her 20th birthday, a comrade was killed after being recognised by a German soldier whose life he had recently spared. Madeleine Riffaud also learned of the massacre of 643 people by the SS at Oradour-sur-Glane. She knew the village well as she had spent holidays in the area.

Vowing vengeance, on the evening of July 23 1944 she cycled along the Left Bank. At the end of Rue de Solférino, near the Musée d’Orsay, a German soldier was looking across the Seine to the Tuileries gardens. Madeleine Riffaud braked, planted her feet on the ground and shot him twice in the head. “He fell like a sack of wheat,” she wrote later.

“I was very calm, very pure… Maybe he was a good guy. But this… Well, it’s war.” The head of the Versailles Milice, the collaborationist police, was passing. He knocked Madeleine Riffaud off her bicycle with his car and handcuffed her. She was taken to the Gestapo prison in Rue des Saussaies. Catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror, she thought: “I am going to die.”

For the next three weeks she was tortured by being whipped, electrocuted and half-drowned, yet she denied being a member of a Resistance network. She was scheduled to be shot on August 5. In her cell, she wrote poems: “Those who will kill me/ Do not kill them in turn/ Tonight my heart is nothing but love.”

A few minutes before her execution, she was reprieved when a policeman recognised the gun she had used as the one taken from him by partisans. Madeleine Riffaud was tortured for another 10 days for her contacts. She was made to watch prisoners being disfigured and emasculated.

A teenager she knew had his arms and legs broken in front of her. “Don’t you like children?” her interrogator asked.

Madeleine Riffaud in 2021
Madeleine Riffaud in 2021 - CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT

“What kept me going was saying to myself: I am not a victim. I am a résistante.” On August 15 she was put on a train to Ravensbrück concentration camp, jumped off it, but was recaptured. She was finally freed in an exchange of prisoners four days later.

With the Allies advancing on Paris, she went straight back to fighting with the Free Forces of the Interior, in the rank of aspirant (lieutenant). On her 20th birthday she was ordered to take four men and stop a train carrying troops and arms. Firing from a bridge over the track, they forced the engine to halt, and eventually 80 Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered to her.

Paris’s German commander, Dietrich von Choltitz, capitulated on August 25. Madeleine Riffaud had spent the day fighting in the Place de la République, assaulting the SS barracks. “We were fighting floor by floor, dropping grenades through the windows… But you cannot understand how wonderful it was to fight finally as free men and women, to battle in the daylight, under our own names, with our real identities, with everyone out there, all of Paris, to support us, happy, joyful and united.”

After the war, she would be awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Palme. Her shooting of the German soldier had become one of the great tales of the Resistance. In the wake of the Liberation, however, when she applied to join the army with her male comrades and continue the march on Berlin, she was rejected. “I was a minor,” she explained, “I didn’t have my parents’ consent… and I was a girl!”

Marie Madeleine Armande Riffaud was born at Arvillers, near Amiens, on August 23 1924. Her father, Jean Émile, had been wounded in the Great War and was a pacifist. Her mother, Gabrielle, was a staunch Roman Catholic. Madeleine grew up amid memories of the fighting in the area only a few years before.

While the return of peace in 1945 ended a nightmare for many, it plunged her into despair. She had “survivor syndrome”, felt depressed, and found it impossible to return to a normal life. That year, she married Pierre Daix, a communist intellectual who had been in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

They had a daughter, Fabienne, but Madeleine Riffaud passed tuberculosis to her, causing her more feelings of guilt. The girl was brought up by her grandparents, and in 1947 Madeleine and Daix separated.

She was rescued by a group of writers centred on the poet Paul Éluard. He encouraged her to publish her own verses, as Le poing fermé (“Closed fist”, 1945); Pablo Picasso drew a portrait of her for the book.

Picasso's portrait of her
Picasso’s portrait of her

She then worked as a correspondent for L’Humanité, the Communist daily run by another celebrated surrealist poet, Louis Aragon. She would dedicate the next 40 years of her life to a struggle against colonialism and capitalism.

In the 1950s and 1960s she reported on the savage war in Algeria and was one of the first French journalists to reveal the use of torture on activists of the FLN, who were fighting for independence. It was a particular blow to Madeleine Riffaud that this should be taking place at the site of her own ordeal, in the Rue des Saussaies.

Her revelations made her a target for the OAS, who opposed self-determination for Algeria. In 1962, while she was in the country, her car was rammed by a truck – deliberately, she believed. She lost a finger and suffered damage to her head which cost her the vision in one eye and left her with partial sight in the other.

None the less, she spent much of the late 1960s and 1970s in Vietnam, embedded with the Viet Cong. She had met Ho Chi Minh in 1946, and from 1951 was in a relationship with a Vietnamese poet, Nguyen Dinh Thi.

He became minister of culture in North Vietnam, but under pressure from China their relationship was deemed inappropriate, and Madeleine Riffaud was forced to return to France. They remained closely in touch, however, until his death in 2003.

During the 1970s, when she began to distance herself from the Communist Party, she worked as a nursing assistant in Paris. She subsequently published Les linges de la nuit (“Night linen”, 1974), which caused a sensation by shedding light on the lives of poorly paid hospital workers. It sold more than a million copies.

She wrote several other volumes of poetry, as well as a memoir, On s’appelait Rainer (“My name was Rainer”, 1994). Raymond Aubrac, a great figure of the Resistance, told her that year: “You have no right to keep quiet. In the name of the comrades who were shot, you have to say what happened!’ That gave me a meaning in life. I realised I had a duty, of remembrance.”

Madeleine Riffaud was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2001 and to France’s Ordre du Mérite in 2013. Latterly, blind and bedridden, she lived in a fifth-floor flat without a lift and rarely left it.

For her, resistance became “being old and ill in a world that doesn’t give a damn about you”. She consoled herself with a glass of gin and a cigarillo. Her centenary was marked by publication of the last in a three-volume biography of her as a bande dessinée.

Madeleine Riffaud’s daughter predeceased her.

Madeleine Riffaud, born August 23 1924, died November 6 2024