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 anti-colonial war correspondent, died Nov. 6 at her home in Paris. She was 100.

Her death was announced by her publisher, Dupuis.

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.

She enlisted with the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans, the guerrillas organized by the Communist Party to sabotage the German occupiers. She took the nom de guerre Rainer, adopted from Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 1944, she volunteered for a mission to kill a Nazi soldier. Retaliating for a German massacre of 643 villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane, a place she knew well from childhood, she bicycled along the Seine River carrying a stolen pistol.

When she came upon a German soldier gazing across the river at the Tuileries gardens, she stopped and shot him twice in the head. “He fell like a sack of wheat,” she later wrote.

She was captured by a French collaborator, locked in a Gestapo jail, tortured and scheduled for execution.

As she was being transported on a train to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, she escaped. She was captured but apparently freed in a prisoner exchange. Until then, her parents had thought she was dead.

After that dramatic episode, she was lionized as “the girl who saved Paris.”

“Hundreds of young women like me were involved,” she recalled. “We were the messengers, the intelligence gatherers, the repairers of the web. When men fell or were captured, we got the news through, pulled the nets tight again. We carried documents, leaflets, sometimes arms.”

Her greatest wartime escapade was the capture of a Wehrmacht train in 1944. She and three comrades lobbed fireworks and grenades at the train from a bridge over the tracks, forcing the Germans to retreat into a tunnel. The four of them persuaded a retired engineer to detach the locomotive, leaving the Germans trapped in the tunnel. Eighty Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered to her.

After the war, she overcame depression induced by “survivor guilt,” Keren Chiaroni wrote in “Resistance Heroism and the End of Empire: The Life and Times of Madeleine Riffaud” (2017).

She married twice and became a poet and a journalist.

As a reporter and a committed opponent of capitalism and colonialism, she covered the insurgencies against French colonialism in Algeria and Vietnam for L’Humanite — a French communist newspaper — and authored several books.