Josephine Baker was born to an unwed African-American maid in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. As a child, she stole to help her family. On Tuesday next she will join the ranks of Voltaire, Rousseau and Victor Hugo when she is inducted into the Panthéon. The words "To great men the country is grateful" are engraved on the pediment.
Baker will be the first American, the first performing artist and the first black woman to be "pantheonised". Seventy-five men and only five women have previously been accorded that honour, including the Nobel laureate Marie Curie and the Holocaust survivor Simone Veil.
Legend has it that Baker danced in the streets of St Louis as a child, for pleasure. At age 14, she joined a Broadway show where she was spotted by a French impresario who took her to Paris. At 19, Baker became an overnight sensation in La Revue Nègre.
The ceremony at the Panthéon can be read as a rebuke to the racist, anti-immigrant far right, in particular the presumed presidential candidate Eric Zemmour
The New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner attended Baker's Paris debut and described how the dancer was carried onstage "entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs... carried upside-down and doing the split on the shoulder of a black giant". He spun Baker by the waist and set her down, "an unforgettable female ebony statue... her magnificent dark body... proved for the first time that black was beautiful."
Today, the Revue Nègre would be pilloried for its title, and for making an object of Baker’s beautiful body. The belt made of foam-rubber bananas which she wore as her only costume would be condemned as racist. So too would the words “savage” and “animal”, used liberally by gushing critics.
"Artiste, first international black star, muse to the Cubists, a resistant during the second World War, a civil rights activist alongside Martin Luther King in the US and in France, we think that Josephine Baker deserves a place in the Panthéon," said a petition drawn up by French public personalities, signed by 38,000 people and presented to Emmanuel Macron last summer.
The Élysée announced on August 23rd that the French president had decided to admit Baker to the Pantheon because she chose “the eternal France of universal enlightenment... because she is the embodiment of the French spirit.” By honouring Baker, Macron also sends a signal that France is not racist and remains a tolerant country.
Baker gained French citizenship in 1937, through the third of her four marriages. The ceremony at the Panthéon can be read as a rebuke to the racist, anti-immigrant far right, in particular the presumed presidential candidate Eric Zemmour.
Zemmour has twice been convicted of hate speech and awaits a verdict on January 17th, 2022 for having claimed on French television that “all” unaccompanied, underage migrants are “thieves, murderers, rapists”. The prosecutor has requested that he be fined €10,000.
As a secret agent for the FFL, she hid messages in her underclothes and carried musical scores inscribed with invisible ink
The honour bestowed on Baker is also a reminder, at a time of strained relations between Washington and Paris, that Baker was a star in Paris when she was excluded from fine restaurants and hotels in the US because of her race.
Baker became famous for singing J'ai Deux Amours, about her love for both the US and France. From 1938, she inhabited a 15th-century chateau in Dordogne called Les Milandes. It looked, she said, "like Sleeping Beauty's castle". Baker adopted 12 orphans from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and South America whom she called her "rainbow tribe".
During the second World War, Baker used Les Milandes as a safe house for the French Resistance, installing a radio transmitter in one of its turrets. She was given the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in Gen Charles de Gaulle's Forces Françaises Libres (FFL) and used her fame and beauty to extract information from German officers. As a secret agent for the FFL, she hid messages in her underclothes and carried musical scores inscribed with invisible ink.
Baker's extravagance with money caused her to lose her chateau in 1969. (Today, it receives close to 120,000 visitors each year.) Her dear friend and fellow American, Princess Grace of Monaco, installed Baker and her children in a house in Roquebrune. Grace stood alongside Baker's family at her funeral in Monaco in 1975. The singer, dancer and Resistance heroine was buried in her French military uniform and war medals.
At the request of her 11 surviving children, Baker’s remains will not be transferred to the Pantheon. Instead, a plaque to Baker will be placed on a cenotaph containing earth from St Louis, Paris, Les Milandes and Monaco.
