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Thursday, December 2, 2021
Today’s Paper
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Europe|Josephine Baker Becomes First Black Woman Inducted Into France’s Tomb of
Heroes

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/world/europe/josephine-baker-buried-pantheon.html
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JOSEPHINE BAKER BECOMES FIRST BLACK WOMAN INDUCTED INTO FRANCE’S TOMB OF HEROES

President Emmanuel Macron hailed the American-born dancer and French resistance
fighter as a symbol of unity in a time of sharp division.

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Josephine Baker Inducted Into France’s Tomb of Heroes

By The Associated Press

0:47Josephine Baker Inducted Into France’s Tomb of Heroes



Ms. Baker, an American-born dancer and French resistance fighter, became the
first Black woman to be honored at the Panthéon, the nation’s hallowed tomb of
heroes.CreditCredit...Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Roger Cohen

Nov. 30, 2021

PARIS — Josephine Baker, born in Missouri and beloved of France, whose life
spanned French music-hall stardom and American civil rights activism, on Tuesday
became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon, the nation’s
hallowed tomb of heroes.

On a gray afternoon, 46 years after her death in Paris, soldiers from the
Republican Guard bore a flag-draped coffin up the red-carpeted stairs of the
Panthéon, where Ms. Baker joined 75 men and five women, including the author
Émile Zola, the scientist Marie Curie, and the resistance hero Jean Moulin.

The coffin carried soil from the United States, France and Monaco — places that
shaped Ms. Baker’s life. Her body, at the request of the family, will stay in
Monaco.

The colonnaded facade of the Panthéon, with its engraved dedication to the
“great men” of France, was lit with a remarkable collage of images ranging from
Ms. Baker’s wild nights performing at the Folies Bergères in 1926 to her
appearance in front of the Lincoln Memorial beside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. on Aug. 28, 1963, as he spoke the words, “I have a dream.”



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The ceremony beneath the cupola that rises above Paris marked the culmination of
an extraordinary journey that began in the misery and racial segregation of St.
Louis; led her to fame as the provocative dance star of “les années folles,” or
crazy years, of 1920s Paris; and took her on to passionate political engagement
in the cause of Europe’s freedom from the threat of fascism and American racial
equality.

At a time of tension in France over issues of race and gender, and of friction
with the United States, President Emmanuel Macron chose to honor Ms. Baker as a
woman with “every form of courage and audacity,” and “an American who found
refuge in Paris and captured what it is to be French.”


Image
President Emmanuel Macron of France delivers a speech during a ceremony for Ms.
Baker at the Panthéon.Credit...Pool photo by Sarah Meyssonnier

Five months from a divisive presidential election, he portrayed Ms. Baker as a
symbol of unity — what he called “the beauty of collective destiny.” He held her
up as an example of immigrant success, and of the multitudes a single life may
contain.

“France is Josephine,” Mr. Macron declared, standing before the coffin. From the
right to the left of the political spectrum, at least for a day, everyone seemed
to agree.



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The longing cadences of “J’ai Deux Amours,” or “I Have Two Loves,” perhaps Ms.
Baker’s most famous song, filled the frescoed mausoleum during the ceremony. Its
avowal that Ms. Baker’s heart went out at once to “Paris et mon pays” — “Paris
and my country” — seemed to capture her unusual odyssey.

At the time the song was recorded in 1930, Ms. Baker was still an American
citizen. She became French in 1937, 12 years after her arrival in France. She is
the first person of American origin to be entombed in the Panthéon, a
distinction that was marked by the lighting Monday of the Empire State Building
in the red, white and blue of the French flag.

“She had a double affection for the two countries,” Ms. Baker’s daughter,
Marianne Bouillon-Baker, said at an American reception on the eve of the
entombment.

After the racial violence she witnessed as a Black American child and the
repeated humiliations of segregation and discrimination, Ms. Baker, who was born
Freda Josephine McDonald, said she found a freedom and dignity in France for
which she was “eternally grateful.”

Other Black American artists, including James Baldwin and Richard Wright, had
similar experiences, with the result that France is particularly sensitive to
American criticism that its avowedly colorblind social model masks widespread
discrimination.


Image

Members of the public attends the ceremony dedicated to Josephine Baker in
Paris, on Tuesday.Credit...Julien De Rosa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Macron said that Ms. Baker’s life had encapsulated “a universal struggle.”
Her goal was not “to define herself as Black before defining herself as American
or French.” Her guiding idea was not the “irreducibility of the Black cause,”
but to be “a free and dignified citizen, completely,” he added.



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His words appeared to reflect his government’s rejection of what it often
portrays as divisive American identity politics that threatens to undermine
French universalism. Mr. Macron’s characterization of Ms. Baker’s beliefs was
consistent with his government’s fierce defense of universalism. Still, her
presence on the Mall with Dr. King and her repeated expressions of outrage at
the treatment of Blacks in the United States make clear that the specific Black
fight for equality was very important to her.

Ms. Baker became an object of wild Parisian fascination when, just 20, she
appeared in 1926 at the Folies Bergères theater dressed in little more than a
skirt made of 16 rubber bananas at a show called “The Negro Review.”

The cabaret played off white male colonial obsessions with Black women and their
bodies in a France then fascinated by Black and African arts. Clowning and
exaggerating, gyrating and waving her arms, Ms. Baker contrived to use and
subvert the stereotypes, ridiculing them through what Mr. Macron called her use
of the “burlesque.”

Her fame extended far and wide; writers from Jean Cocteau to Ernest Hemingway
fell under her thrall. But when artistic folly of the 1920s yielded to the
Fascist military folly of the 1930s, Ms. Baker demonstrated that she did not
take her success, or the gifts of her adoptive country, for granted. She joined
the resistance.

It was in her Free French uniform, hung with her various French military and
civilian honors, that she appeared with Dr. King at the March on Washington. “I
have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of
presidents,” she said. “But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a
cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”

She exhorted the crowd to fight on. “You can’t go wrong,” she said. “The world
is behind you.”


Image

A photograph of Ms. Baker projected on the Panthéon.Credit...Pool photo by
Thomas Coex

Gabriel Attal, the government spokesman, told Europe 1 radio that Ms. Baker was
a “magnificent symbol who incarnates the love for France that can also come from
people who are not born here.”



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His statement seemed pointed at immigration, which remains an explosive subject
in France — the main theme of the election, along with purchasing power at a
time of economic difficulty. If Ms. Baker embraced France, many immigrants,
particularly from North Africa, have found that much harder because of the
prejudice they have encountered.

The Pantheon ceremony came on the same day as Éric Zemmour, a hard-right
polemicist and TV star with fierce anti-immigrant views, declared his candidacy
for the presidency. Polls suggest he has significant support.

Of Ms. Baker, Mr. Macron said: “She did not defend a certain skin color. She had
a certain idea of humankind and fought for the freedom of everyone. Her cause
was universalism, the unity of humanity, the equality of everyone ahead of the
identity of each single person.”








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