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By ELIZABETH MURRAY ’26
Global Editor
Content warning: This article discusses state-sanctioned violence.
At the age of 18, Madeleine Riffaud joined the French resistance movement as part of the communist group Francs-Tireur et Partisans, according to Le Monde. Riffaud died at 100 years old in Paris on Nov. 6, 2024, according to Radio France Internationale.
According to RFI, she was born in Somme in 1924, the only daughter of two teachers. Riffaud first was a midwifery student and then a liaison officer in the French resistance. She joined the resistance in Grenoble, France, after being physically assaulted by a Nazi soldier while at a train station with her grandfather. Riffaud operated under the name Rainer after the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, according to the New York Times.
Riffaud took up arms after her village of Oradour-sur-Glane was massacred by Nazis in June of 1944, RFI stated. A month later, she shot a Nazi officer in Paris on the Solferino Bridge. Riffaud was eventually captured, starved and tortured for three weeks and still refused to give up information about her fellow resistance fighters. According to RFI, on her killing of a Nazi soldier, she said, “Can one be mean when one looks at the Seine? He was perhaps a good guy… but well, that’s war. Killing someone is a terrible thing to do. It is never good to kill anyone, even an enemy, you should know that.”
The New York Times stated that Riffaud was supposed to be executed, but escaped the train that was transporting her to a concentration camp. She was captured again, but was then freed in a prisoner exchange. In 1944, Riffaud and three other resistance fighters captured a Wehrmacht train after shooting fireworks and grenades at it. With the help of a retired engineer, they separated the locomotive and trapped 80 German soldiers in a tunnel, who all surrendered.
After the end of World War II, Riffaud became a war correspondent, reporting on the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, according to RFI. In the 1950s and early ’60s, she covered the war in Algeria for the communist newspaper L’Humanite. Riffaud was nearly blinded in a car accident that she believed was caused by French nationalists.
After meeting Ho Chi Minh in Paris in 1946, Riffaud spent seven years with the Viet Cong documenting the Vietnamese resistance and publishing a book on guerrilla war tactics, RFI reported. The New York Times stated she returned to Paris in the 1970s after the communists began to discourage relationships between Vietnamese people and foreigners, and Riffaud had fallen in love with Nguyen Dinh Thi. Thi was a poet and minister of culture in North Vietnam, according to the Telegraph; their relationship lasted five decades.
The Telegraph reported that after returning to France, Riffaud began to work as a nursing assistant and published “Le Linges de la Nuit” about the lives of underpaid hospital workers. It sold over a million copies.
Riffaud published works of poetry in 1945 and in 1972. Her memoir, “My Name Was Rainer” was published in 1994, and, in 2001, she received the Légion d’honneur and the French Order of Merit in 2013. A graphic memoir depicting her life was published in three volumes, and the last one was released on her 100th birthday, RFI stated.
Emily Tarinelli ’25 contributed fact-checking.