Josephine Baker to be first black woman buried in French Pantheon
Macron decides to honour Us-born performer for her courage as a resistance fighter against the Nazis
FRANCE is to induct the first black woman into a mausoleum for its most distinguished citizens.
Josephine Baker, the American-born dancer, Second World War resistance fighter and civil rights activist, will be reinterred at the Panthéon in an official ceremony this autumn.
Activists celebrated President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to honour Baker, who died aged 68 in 1975, by placing her alongside national heroes including Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas and Voltaire.
“When the president said yes, [it was a] great joy,” said Jennifer Guesdon, one of 38,000 people who signed a petition calling for the reburial.
Mr Macron’s administration has come under fire in recent months for its approach to minorities, with police brutality and a new law targeting Islamist separatism sparking a backlash.
In reply, Mr Macron has been vocal in his backing for France’s principle of “universalism”, where citizens are expected to place national identity over ethnic or religious ties.
Laurent Kupferman, a writer who launched the petition, said Baker symbolised the principle, having credited it with helping her escape the racism of the United States.
In his petition, Mr Kupferman wrote that Baker “should not be inducted just because she was a woman or because she was black … she should be inducted because of the acts of courage she performed for the country.”
Baker, who became a French citizen in 1937 and was buried in Monaco in 1975, was famous for saying she had two loves, “my country and Paris”.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1906, she moved to Paris in 1925 as part of a wave of black Americans who saw the French capital as a welcome escape from racial segregation and other kinds of mistreatment in the United States.
In 1925, she joined the Théâtre des Champs-elysées to dance in La Revue Nègre, where she introduced French audiences to the Charleston, a jazz dance named after the town in South Carolina where it first originated.
Baker’s performance made her an overnight success. Ernest Hemingway, the writer who was a part of the famed “lost generation” of Americans that lived in Paris in the Twenties, described Baker as “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw”.
In 1927, she became the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, with the French silent film Siren of the Tropics.
Her commitment to France was cemented during the Second World War, when she was recruited by the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence agency, to use her fame and charm to gather information on German troops at parties. “The Parisians gave me their hearts, I am ready to give them my life,” Baker famously told Jacques Abtey, the French spy that recruited her for these missions.
Once Germany invaded in 1940, Baker moved to southern France where she housed members of General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces. De Gaulle later awarded her the Legion of Honour medal.
Even though she remained based in France, Baker also became involved in the US civil rights movement during the Fifties and Sixties.
In 1963, she spoke alongside Dr Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington.
Baker died in Paris in 1975 at the age of 68 after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage.