About Madeleine Riffaud
Marie-Madeleine Riffaud was a French Resistance fighter, poet, journalist and war correspondent. After active resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, she reported for the Communist newspaper L'Humanité and other left-wing publications on the Algerian War and on the French, and subsequently American, wars in Vietnam. Her reporting on Vietnam was informed by four years she spent in the North in the early 1950s, and in the 1960s by the connections she developed in the South with the Viet Cong. Her first poetry collection, Le Poing Fermé (The Clenched Fist), including poems written in prison, was published in 1945. A few months later, in November 1946, she published a poem in La Vie Ouvrière decrying the French bombardment of Haiphong (the opening salvo of the First Indochina War). In 2013, President Nicholas Sarkozy awarded her the Ordre national du Mérite for her contributions to France and the world. While working as a journalist for Ce soir, a newspaper run by Aragon, in 1945 Riffaud published her first poetry collection, Le Poing Fermé (The Clenched Fist), with a preface by Éluard and a sketch portrait of her by Picasso on the cover.
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