Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100. “in this respect, she has grown into a very different person from the stunned, withdrawn young woman Picasso drew in 1945.”

Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100

Humiliated by a Nazi officer as a teenager, she joined the French Resistance. By the time she was 20, she had killed a German soldier, survived torture and captured a supply train.


Madeleine Riffaud in 1945. After serving in the French Resistance in World War II, she had a career as a poet and journalist.Credit...via Private collection/RetroNews-BnF

A charcoal sketch of Ms. Riffaud made by Pablo Picasso in 1945. The artist, a biographer of Ms. Riffaud wrote, “drew the heavy eyelids of a woman who couldn’t forget” what she had been through in the war.Credit...via Fonds Madeleine Riffaud

Seventy years later, she wrote, Ms. Riffaud had grown into a “passionate, vital person,” who had “chosen to confront some of the political and social dragons of her day with effrontery and courage,” and “in this respect, she has grown into a very different person from the stunned, withdrawn young woman Picasso drew in 1945.”

Madeleine Riffaud was a French poet, journalist and war correspondent. She fought in the French Resistance during World War II. After World War II she reported on the Algerian War for the Communist newspaper L'Humanité, and then worked in Vietnam for the Viet Cong resistance for seven years. Wikipedia

Born: August 23, 1924, Arvillers, France

Died: November 6, 2024 (age 100 years), Paris, France