On a bright Sunday morning in occupied Paris, 23 July 1943, a German soldier was standing at the Pont de Solférino, watching the river go by. Suddenly, a young woman on a bicycle approached him, took out a revolver, and shot him twice in the head.
Cycling away, she was spotted by the head of the collaborationists of Versailles, who drove his car into her, knocking her over, then handcuffed her and took her to the Gestapo offices in Rue des Saussaies, where he handed her over and collected his bounty for arresting a “terrorist”.
The woman was Madeleine Riffaud, who has died aged 100. At the time of the shooting she was a 19-year-old trainee midwife and member of a resistance unit based in the Paris Faculty of Medicine. Four years previously, she and her family had left Picardy, dive-bombed by Stukas during “l’Exode” – the mass movement of people fleeing southwards before the invading German forces in 1940.
After the Franco-German armistice, Riffaud had returned home with her sick grandfather. At Amiens, crossing the square to the offices of the Red Cross to find a stretcher for him, she was molested by German soldiers. Their commanding officer reprimanded them, but then kicked her in the backside, sending her flying. Humiliated, she resolved that she would find others who were resisting the Germans, and join them.
She made contact with the resistance in 1942 when she contracted tuberculosis, which she called “the Aids of our epoch”, and was sent to a sanatorium for students at Saint-Hilaire de Touvet, near Grenoble. There she met Marcel Gagliardi, a medical student and young communist with links to the Front National for an Independent France (FN), a front organisation of the Communist party. They returned to Paris, where she enrolled in a midwifery school at Port Royal and joined the FN at the faculty of medicine, taking the nom de guerre Rainer, after the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
The armed struggle was taking off, led by the Francs Tireurs et Partisans-Main d’Oeuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI), which suffered terrible losses. She decided to join the FTP, even though she was told that she would not survive for more than five months. Paris in July 1943 was already being rocked by demonstrations and strikes, and her attack was a dramatic agitprop designed to rouse the Parisians to revolt.
Even more extraordinary than this feat of arms by a female resister was the fact that over six weeks Madeleine survived torture, the firing squad and deportation. Transferred to Fresnes prison and expecting to be shot, she was given a small photo of St Thérèse of Lisieux by a female prisoner, and wondered whether this protected her. In prison she also wrote poetry.
She was freed on 18 August in an exchange of prisoners organised by the Swedish consul Raoul Nordling, and returned to the resistance. As a lieutenant in the Compagnie Saint-Just she forced the surrender of a German train in Belleville tunnel and took part in fighting on the Place de la République in the run-up to the liberation of Paris.
Born at Arvillers, in the Somme region of northern France, Madeleine was the only daughter of Armande (nee Boissin) and Émile Riffaud, both primary-school teachers from the Limousin who had come to find work in this “graveyard” of the first world war. She claimed that her activism was inspired by her great-great-grandfather, who had taken part in the popular uprising against Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état in 1851 and been sent to do forced labour in Algeria, a forçat like Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean.
At the liberation, Riffaud suffered from terrible depression, but her poetry brought her into contact with the surrealist poets. She said that she owed her life to Paul Éluard, who virtually adopted her and saw to the publication of her first poems, Le Poing Fermé (The Clenched Fist, 1945), for which Picasso drew a portrait of her.
She was briefly married to Paul Daix, a young communist who had been deported to Mauthausen concentration camp. She thought that he would look after her, while he imagined that she was like Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people. But, she says, they were both “in pieces” and their marriage did not survive the birth of their daughter, Fabienne, who inherited her TB.
After the war Riffaud threw herself into journalism, writing for the communist paper L’Humanité and other leftwing publications. She claimed not to have read Marx and Engels, citing only the line that “a people who oppress another can never be a free people”.
While reporting on the struggle against French colonialism in Vietnam, she met the poet Nguyên Ðinh Thi in 1951 and lived with him in North Vietnam for four years. During the Algerian war, her car was ambushed by the pro-settler Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) in 1962, and she was injured. In 1965, with the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett, she penetrated the Vietcong maquis in South Vietnam. She embraced the liberation theology of progressive Catholics, saying that “after all, my name is Marie Madeleine”, and quoted Isaiah 58 to the effect that if you side with the hungry and enslaved, “your darkness shall be as the noonday”.
She published a memoir, On l’Appelait Rainer (They Called Her Rainer), in 1994. Blind in later years, she was cheered in her Paris flat by the song of the exotic birds she kept.
Fabienne predeceased her.
• Marie Madeleine Armande Riffaud, resistance fighter and journalist, born 23 August 1924; died 6 November 2024
