The Franco-American resistance hero, performing
artist and civil rights activist, Josephine Baker, has received the
highest posthumous honour possible in France, being inducted into the
Panthéon.
Josephine Baker has become just the sixth woman to be honoured in the
secular temple to the “great men” of the French Republic, which sits on
a hill in Paris’ Left Bank.
She is the first ‘entertainer’ to be immortalised in the monument
where the bodies of Victor Hugo, Emile Zola and Marie Curie also lie.
During Tuesday’s ceremony a coffin containing handfuls of earth from
four places where she lived – the US city of St. Louis where she was
born; Paris; the Chateau de Milandes where she lived in southwest
France; and Monaco where she is buried – was placed in the tomb reserved
for her in the Pantheon’s crypt.
The coffin was carried into the building by members of the French air
force, commemorating her role in the French Resistance during World War
II.
As the coffin was borne along a street covered in red carpet to the strains of Baker‘s
hit song “J’ai deux amours” (“I have two loves” – referring to “My
country and Paris”) images of her life were projected onto the
Pantheon’s neo-classical facade.
Paying tribute to her in a speech Macron said Baker
“did not defend one skin colour” but “fought for the liberty of all”.
Addressing his remarks to “dear Josephine”, he said: “You are entering
this Pantheon because although you were born American there is no-one
more French than you.”
he honour bestowed by Macron on the world’s first black female superstar
caps years of campaigning by her family and admirers for her place in
French history to be recognised.
Baker’s name will also be added to the name of the Gaite metro
station next to the Bobino theatre in southern Paris, where she last
appeared on stage a few days before her death in 1975.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald into extreme poverty in Missouri in
1906, Baker left school at 13 and managed to get herself a place in one
of the first all-black musicals on Broadway in 1921.
The woman nicknamed the “Black Venus” took Paris by storm with her
exuberant dance performances, which captured the energy of the Jazz Age.
One of the defining moments of her career came when she danced the
Charleston at the Folies Bergere cabaret hall wearing only a string of
pearls and a skirt made of rubber bananas, in a sensational send-up of
colonial fantasies about black women.
The performance marked the start of a long love affair between France
and the free-spirited style icon, who took French nationality in 1937.
At the outbreak of World War II, she joined the Resistance against
Nazi Germany, becoming a lieutenant in the French air force’s female
auxiliary corps.
She also became a spy for France’s wartime leader-in-exile General
Charles de Gaulle, obtaining information on Italian leader Benito
Mussolini and sending reports to London hidden in her music sheets in
invisible ink.
“France made me who I am,” she said later. “Parisians gave me everything… I am prepared to give them my life.”
She also waged a fight against discrimination, adopting 12 children
from different ethnic backgrounds to form a “rainbow” family at her
chateau in the Dordogne.
She died on April 12th, 1975, aged 68, from a brain haemorrhage, days
after a final smash-hit cabaret show in Paris celebrating her
half-century on the stage.
She is the second woman to be entered by Macron into the Pantheon,
after former minister Simone Veil, who survived the Holocaust to fight
for abortion rights and European unity.
In a sign of the universal affection in which Baker is still held in
France, there was no public criticism of the decision to honour her,
including from far-right commentators that are generally scathing of
anti-racism gestures.
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