ABSTRACT
Despite the dominant role played by war in Madeleine Riffaud’s life, including the years spent as a war correspondent, her life is not defined by war. It is defined by her resistance to war. An underground movement for fighting Nazism during the occupation of France, the Resistance has become for Riffaud a way of seeing the world, a founding principle for her political activism and a redemption myth for the global community. As was the case for her friends Raymond and Lucie Aubrac, she saw the Resistance as the key not only to vanquishing a foreign army but also to defending a certain vision of France linked to universal humanitarian values – values that Vichy, as well as Nazism, betrayed. Today at 92, Riffaud is still remarkably fluent in the language of freedom and insurrection, solidarity and revolt, she first learned in Paris as a 17-year-old. ‘Résistante’ is understood as both a noun and a verb for the fight for justice and freedom everywhere, a defining feature of her rebellion and a key to her view of humanity: ‘Man is the only living thing that rebels. The very fact of rebelling defines him as human … To be human is also to resist old age, illness, AIDS, and blindness. It means not getting used to the horrors of Bosnia, Hebron, Beirut, Sudan, Angola, Algeria.’3
