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The dancer, singer, actress and civil rights activist born in the United States, Josephine Baker becomes the first Afro-descendant woman to enter the mausoleum of historical figures venerated in the Pantheon of France on Tuesday, November 30, almost half a century after her death.
Baker makes history as the sixth woman and the first Afro-descendant to be honored in the secular temple to the “great men” and, belatedly, the great women of the French Republic.
This Tuesday he will have a symbolic funeral in the mausoleum of the Pantheon in Paris, a place reserved for the nation’s greatest figures.
Baker is buried in Monaco, where her body will remain. However, during the ceremony the symbolic coffin will contain handfuls of earth from four places where the iconic artist lived: the American city of St. Louis (Missouri) where she was born; Paris, her “second love”; the Château de Milandes, where he lived in southwestern France; and Monaco.
The coffin will be carried into the building by members of the French Air Force, commemorating their role in the French Resistance during World War II.
Baker also becomes the first artist to be immortalized alongside such characters as Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and Marie Curie.
The “pantheonization” of the world’s first African-American, and French nationalized, superstar culminates years of campaigning by the Baker family and their fans to give him the unusual posthumous tribute.
President Emmanuel Macron accepted the request last August to acknowledge the fact that Baker’s “entire life was dedicated to the dual pursuit of freedom and justice,” his office ratified last week.
Escape segregation
Macron will deliver a speech and some of Baker’s relatives will read short texts that were written by the artist.
Baker’s name will also soon be added to the name of the Gaîté metro station, next to the Bobino theater in southern Paris, where he last appeared on stage a few days before his death in 1975.
Born Freda Josephine McDonald to extreme poverty in Missouri in 1906, Baker dropped out of school at age 13.
After two failed marriages, she took the last name Baker from her second husband and managed to land a spot in one of the first musicals with African-American artists on Broadway.
Like many African-descendant artists in the United States at the time, she moved to France to escape racial segregation in her home country.
The woman nicknamed the “Black Venus” conquered Paris with her exuberant dance performances that captured the energy of the Jazz Age.
First Afro-descendant star to enter the Pantheon of France
One of the defining moments of her career came when she danced the Charleston at the Folies Bergère cabaret hall, wearing only a pearl necklace and a skirt made of rubber bananas, in a sensational representation of colonial fantasies about Afro women.
The performance marked the beginning 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 and became a second lieutenant in the female auxiliary corps of the French Air Force.
He also became a spy for the French leader in exile in wartime, General Charles de Gaulle, obtaining information on the then Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and sending reports to London hidden in his scores with invisible ink.
“France made me who I am,” he said later. “The Parisians gave me everything (…) I am willing to give them my life.”
Baker also fought against discrimination and adopted 12 children of different ethnic origins to form what he called a “rainbow tribe”, at his castle in the Dordogne region.
He died at the age of 68 on April 12, 1975 from a cerebral hemorrhage, days after offering his last cabaret show in Paris, with which he celebrated half a century of his artistic career.
She is the second woman to enter the Pantheon during the Macron government, after former minister Simone Veil, who survived the Holocaust and fought for abortion rights and European unity.
In a display of the indisputable affection with which France still remembers Baker, there was no public criticism of the decision to honor her, including far-right supporters who are generally scathing in anti-racist gestures.
With AFP
* Text adapted from the original in English
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