Resistance fighter Madeleine Riffaud's century of words and wars

Madeleine Riffaud's life was woven by struggle, writing and three wars – a century of resilience and resistance. The renowned French journalist, who fought the Nazis as a teenage Resistance fighter and later covered conflicts from Algeria to Vietnam, died this week in Paris at the age of 100.

"A heroine has gone," wrote the daily newspaper L'Humanité, for whom she worked as a war correspondent. Riffaud's publisher Dupuis confirmed her passing on Wednesday.

Born in 1924 in the Somme, Riffaud was the only daughter of schoolteachers.

By 16, she had joined the Resistance, first as a midwifery student and later as a liaison officer with the communist resistance group, the Francs-tireurs et partisans (FTP).

Operating under the codename “Rainer”, in homage to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, she often said she was “not at war with the German people, but with the Nazis”.

Home village decimated

What led to her taking up arms was the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, the village of her youth, decimated in June 1944 by the Nazis.

Riffaud’s commitment was fuelled by the Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, which left her childhood village decimated in June 1944.

On 23 July 1944, she shot a Nazi officer on Paris’s Solférino Bridge, a defining act in her Resistance activities.

France remembers Oradour, a WWII massacre and the martyred village left behind

She later wrote a book on guerrilla warfare inspired by this experience.

Riffaud died in her Paris apartment on 6 November, 2024.

Read more on RFI English

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