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

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

Madeleine Riffaud, a swashbuckling French Resistance hero who survived three weeks of torture as a teenager and went on to celebrate her 20th birthday by helping to capture 80 Nazis on an armored supply train, and who later became a crusading anticolonial war correspondent, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.

Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis.

Ms. Riffaud was propelled into the anti-Nazi guerrilla underground in November 1940 by a literal kick in the backside from a German officer. He sent her packing after he saw Nazi soldiers taunting her at a railway station as she was accompanying her ailing grandfather to visit her father near Amiens, in northern France.

“That moment,” she said in a 2006 interview with The Times of London. “decided my whole life.”

“I landed on my face in the gutter,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I was 17. I was humiliated. My fear turned into anger.”

She decided then and there to join the French Resistance.

“I remember saying to myself,” she said, “‘I don’t know who they are or where they are, but I’ll find the people who are fighting this, and I’ll join them.’ ”

She connected with the Resistance in Grenoble, France, at a sanitarium where she was being treated for tuberculosis. She had contracted the disease while studying midwifery in Paris.