Madeleine Riffaud, resistance fighter, internationalist 1924-2024

My trip through what appeared as a labyrinth of coincidences began when I received an email containing an obituary from the Nov. 23 New York Times about French Resistance hero Madeleine Riffaud, who died Nov. 6 in Paris at the age of 100. 

She was a member of the Communist Party-led Francs tireurs et partisans (FTP − Fighters and Partisans). Riffaud celebrated her 20th birthday in 1944 as she and her comrades captured 80 German troops on an armored supply train.

That news would have been enough to capture my attention. But she had earlier shot a German occupation soldier in the head, killing him. She was captured and tortured, escaped, was caught again, then freed. Still later, she questioned and still affirmed her decision to shoot that soldier.

After helping to liberate France, the French government prevented Riffaud from joining the fight to capture Berlin, because she was a woman and underage. Later she became a poet and revolutionary journalist supporting the liberation struggle against French colonialism in Algeria and embedded with the guerrillas in South Vietnam fighting U.S. imperialism. She was a revolutionary communist and a true internationalist. She led a dense life.

She made a telling statement about the partisans’ role in combating an occupation force that applies to today’s fights for liberation: “The essential was not to give in. When you resisted, you were already a victor. You had already won.” (New York Times, Nov. 23)

The Times obituary had additional information about Riffaud’s personal conviction and courage. I preferred, however, to read the assessment of her comrades. My search turned up someone I had met in 2008 when he opened his home to me after a political discussion in Paris went late.

Léon Landini, a French communist of Italian origins (his parents fled from Mussolini’s fascist regime), is a former officer of the Francs tireurs et partisans−main d’oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI) and a war veteran, decorated by France and the Soviet Union for acts of Resistance, and president of the Pole of Communist Revival in France. He wrote the following eulogy to Riffaud along with Diane Gilliard, secretary of the PRCF women’s commission, translated for publication here.

PRCF eulogy to Riffaud, Nov. 23, 2024 

All the frankly communist militants of the PRCF, and in particular its president Léon Landini who knew her personally, are saddened by the death of the great resistance fighter and communist militant Madeleine Riffaud, a few weeks after she celebrated her 100th birthday.

This indomitable woman lived several lives in one, always serving the cause of peoples and socialism. While studying to be a midwife, she joined the anti-fascist and patriotic fight before the age of 18, as a member of the Francs-Tireurs and Partisans (FTP), the Communist Party-led resistance fighters. This cost her more than three weeks of Gestapo torture during her arrest. 

Barely of age, she joined the anti-colonial struggle in Algeria and Vietnam, where she was one of the first war correspondents. She also knew that the communist struggle had to be fought at home, which is why, back in France, she anonymously signed up as a nurse in several public hospitals, already in a state of disrepair. The result was her book “Night Linens.” 

[Surrealist poet] Paul Éluard loved her poems and had them published; [Louis] Aragon hired her as a journalist for the Communist daily Ce Soir, where she worked for several years.

We could go on for pages and pages about Madeleine Riffaud’s countless militant actions. But, more generally, we already know that she will go down in history as a great Communist journalist. She is on a par with John Reed, the U.S. American communist who recounted the October Revolution in “Ten Days That Shook the World,” or Henri Alleg, editor-in-chief of Alger républicain and then general secretary of [French Communist Party daily newspaper] L’Humanité, before joining the PRCF support committee when the latter was founded in 2004.

Her death saddens all PRCF activists. But her steadfastness, her determination to fight against capitalist barbarism and her political uprightness are a comfort to us all. At a time when obscurantism and unbridled warmongering are celebrating their grim victories, the trajectory of people of integrity like Madeleine Riffaud is comforting proof that humanity will never be reduced to a competition between brainwashed predators and dishonest opportunists. (Initiative Communiste, Nov. 6, tinyurl.com/r45us6tf)

Riffaud,  Landini, Alleg, Reed

Perhaps it wasn’t just another coincidence to see Henri Alleg’s name mentioned in the PRCF article. I had met Alleg a few times at international conferences in the early 2000s before he died in 2013. That this internationalist — born to Polish Jewish parents in London in 1921, educated in France and active as a communist supporting the Algerian fight for independence from France — should be named in a eulogy to Riffaud makes sense.

Riffaud, Landini, Alleg were born in the 1920s. All three were communists, jailed and tortured by fascists. In Alleg’s case, it was the fascist French settlers of Algeria, and he was known throughout the communist movement for writing the pamphlet, “The Question,” about his experience being tortured in prison. (workers.org/2013/07/10045/)

All three were internationalists. Though a clandestine Resistance fighter shooting German occupiers, Riffaud even took the nom de guerre Rainer — due to her admiration for the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Their connections and similarities were not coincidences at all but were driven by their coming of political age as communists under the impact of the Russian Revolution, which John Reed described so well.

Long live the memory of Madeleine Riffaud!