À Poings Fermés

Marie-Madeleine Riffaud (23 August 1924 – 6 November 2024) was a French Resistance fighter, poet, journalist and war correspondent. After active resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, in the course of which she was imprisoned and tortured, Riffaud reported for the Communist newspaper L'Humanité and other left-wing publications on the Algerian War (during which she survived an assassination attempt) 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 memoir giving them context, On l'appelait Rainer (Called Rainer), appeared in 1994.