Today in Labor History, July 23, 1944: Madeleine Riffaud, 19, got off her bicycle, pulled out a gun, and assassinated a Nazi military officer as he took a stroll over the river Seine. She was pursued by French collaborators with the Nazis, beaten, tortured and imprisoned in a concentration camp. She escaped, but was later caught, eventually being released in a prisoner swap. She then joined the armed uprising against the Nazis. She had said she wanted to murder a Nazi in broad daylight to encourage the demoralized population. At the age of 18, she worked as a midwife in a Grenoble sanitarium, where she also helped hide Jews and Resistance Fighters, and helped operate a clandestine printing press.
After the war, she was inspired and encouraged to write by the surrealist poet, Paul Eluard. She became a journalist for the communist newspaper L'Humanité, and other left-wing publications, reporting on anti-colonial rebellions in Algeria and Vietnam. She saw her reporting as a continuation of her anti-fascist fighting, writing that "a people who oppress another can never be a free people." In another quote, she said: “I didn't want France to do elsewhere what the Nazis wanted to do here.” She also wrote poetry and a memoir: On l'appelait Rainer (Called Rainer). Her first poetry collection was published in 1945, with a preface by Eluard, and a portrait of herself on the cover, drawn by Pablo Picasso. In 1974, after working in a Paris hospital, she wrote her best-seller “Les Linges de la nuit” exposing the poor working conditions of hospital workers in France. She died, at the age of 100, in 2024.
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