Madeleine Riffaud was fifteen when
the Germans invaded France in 1940 and she
found herself in a refugee column from the
Somme, fleeing south with her sick grandfather,
strafed from the air.
She had grown up in Arvillers, a village the
Germans occupied in 1870 and destroyed in 1914,
the daughter of two schoolteachers, and she
expected to teach as well.
Her father had volunteered for the previous war,
been wounded, and joined the mutinies of 1917 in
protest at offensives he considered suicidal.
That November, at Amiens station, German troops
harassed her, and when she answered back one of
them kicked her to the ground.
She said the humiliation turned into anger and
never turned back.
By 1944 she was in Paris, eighteen, out of a
tuberculosis ward and sworn into the armed wing
of the Communist Resistance under the code
name Rainer, taken from the poet Rilke to make
plain that her war was with Nazis and not
Germans.
For months she carried other people’s weapons
across the city for the men in her unit to use, grew
tired of it, and asked for permission to fire one
herself.
A month earlier the SS had destroyed
Oradour-sur-Glane, a village she knew
from childhood holidays, killing more than
640 people. Her Resistance unit issued one
order: each fighter, one German, and do it in
broad daylight.
On 23rd July1944, Madeleine Riffaud cycled
onto the Solferino footbridge in occupied
Paris, stopped behind a German soldier
Watching the Seine, waited for him to turn
so she Would not shoot him in the back, and
fired twice.
The 19 year Madeleine Riffaud
Shoots a Nazi officer on a Pairs bridge.
She was back on her bicycle Within seconds.
A car driven by a French collaborator of the
Milice knocked her down. She reached for
her pistol, meaning to turn it on herself, but
he had her in handcuffs before she could.
What followed on the Solférino cost her weeks in
the hands of the Gestapo and a death sentence
she outlived by minutes.
At Gestapo headquarters they Whipped her
electrocuted her and held her under Water
for Weeks. She didn’t name a single
accomplice, insisting she had acted alone.
She was sentenced to death and reprieved
minutes before her execution.
On 15th August she jumped from a train
bound for Ravensbriick and was recaptured
the same day. Four days later a Swedish
diplomat traded her out in a prisoner
exchange. She rejoined her Resistance unit
Within days.
When Paris was free she asked to stay with her
unit, by then part of the regular French army, and
the army refused her for want of her father’s
permission.
The vote had been extended to French women
that April, though not one of them had yet been
able to cast it.
So she became a poet instead, and then a war
correspondent in Algeria, where a pro—settler
death squad ambushed her car and hunted her for
four days, and in Vietnam.
Madeleine Riffaud turned one hundred on 23rd
August 2024, eighty years to the day after eighty
German soldiers surrendered to a twenty—year—old
in a railway tunnel.
She died in Paris that November, having outlived
almost everyone she fought beside.
