Josephine Baker joins French Pantheon of the
great
Issued on:
30/11/2021 - 08:46
Modified:
30/11/2021 - 08:44
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211130-josephine-baker-joins-french-pantheon-of-the-great
Baker's adopted country is honouring her 46 years
after her death
Paris (AFP)
– French-American dancer, singer, actress and rights activist Josephine Baker
will become the first black woman to enter France's Pantheon mausoleum of
revered historical figures on Tuesday, nearly half a century after her death.
Baker will
be 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's Left Bank.
She will
also be the first entertainer to be immortalised alongside the likes of Victor
Hugo, Emile Zola and Marie Curie.
The
"pantheonisation" of the world's first black female superstar caps
years of campaigning by Baker's family and admirers to give her the rare
posthumous honour.
President
Emmanuel Macron granted the request in August to recognise the fact that
Baker's "whole life was dedicated to the twin quest for liberty and
justice," his office said last week.
Baker is
buried in Monaco, where her body will remain.
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 -- will be placed in
the tomb reserved for her in the Pantheon's crypt.
The coffin
will be carried into the building by members of the French air force,
commemorating her role in the French Resistance during World War II.
- Born into
poverty -
Macron will
deliver a speech and some of Baker's relatives will read short texts written by
the trailblazing performer.
Baker's
name will also soon 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.
After two
failed marriages -- she took the name Baker from her second husband -- she
managed to land herself a place in one of the first all-black musicals on
Broadway in 1921.
Like many
black American artists at the time, she moved to France to escape racial
segregation back home.
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.
'France
made me'
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 region.
She died on
April 12, 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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