Joséphine Baker enters the French Pantheon : Emotion and Honor

It is with great emotion that I learned that Joséphine Baker will enter the Panthéon on November 30, in Paris. She was a dancer, singer, muse and friend of great artists of cubist and surrealist styles in the boiling Paris of the 1920s : she posed for Picasso, Van Dongen, Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. She also featured in literary works by Fitzgerald, Colette and Paul Morand. In the 1930s, with Mistinguett, Joséphine Baker was the Queen of the Parisian scene !

But Joséphine Baker was indeed a black woman who managed to extract herself from the US State of Missouri, poor and racist, to come to Paris, and by dint of performances to become the star of "La Revue Nègre", at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She popularized Jazz, modern music, hectic and joyful, like the Charleston style in phase with the thirst for life of the French after the horrors of the First World War, and made known the Afro-American culture in the Paris of the Between two wars.

Her deep roots of a very hard youth explain that despite the glitter and the success of the Parisian scene, Joséphine entered into resistance against the Nazis during the Second World War, against these Hitlerites who were going to occupy her Paris, of which she had praised the attractions and recklessness with her famous song : "J’ai deux amours, Mon pays et Paris".

Decorated for her real action within the Resistance, it is these same roots of an oppressed youth in the Missouri State which explains the resolute and international commitment of Josephine Baker against state racism in the USA. In 1963, Joséphine Baker took part in the March on Washington alongside civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, when he delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

In an incredible surge of universal brotherhood, thus giving a reality to the French motto, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", from 1953 Jospéhine Baker adopted 12 children from different countries, ranging from Finland to Venezuela, and installed what she called her "Rainbow Tribe" in a 15th-century chateau in the South of France.

A member of the Baker family sums up her life like this : "She was an artist, the first Black international star, a muse of the cubists, a resistance fighter during WWII in the French army, active alongside Martin Luther King in the civil rights fight."

More widely, she was a "Powerful Woman" who make advanced the respect and the role of Women by sublimating her feminism, with insolence and elegance, and by using her intelligence and her courage in the Resistance against the Nazism and for the Civil rights of the Blacks people in the United States : a feminism "à la française" !

It is why "Paris aime Joséphine Baker !"