France Honors Josephine Baker, First Black Woman to Enter Pantheon

“Josephine Baker fought so many battles with freedom, levity and joy,” Mr. Macron said. “At each turning point in history she made the right choices, always distinguishing light from darkness.”

Tuesday’s ceremony comes five months before France’s presidential election, which has so far been dominated by far-right pundit Eric Zemmour’s criticism of immigrants and Muslims. Mr. Zemmour officially announced his presidential candidacy Tuesday, ending months of speculation about whether he would run.

Mr. Macron’s decision to include Baker in the Pantheon underscores France’s conflicting views on its history and how it tackles racism today. The country prides itself on being a society founded on liberty, equality and fraternity, but some people of color say they experience police brutality and widespread racism.

Rokhaya Diallo, a writer and antiracism campaigner in France, said that while Baker’s enshrinement was something to celebrate, it was easier for the country to honor someone escaping segregation and racism in the U.S. than confronting its own past and present.

“The fact that Josephine Baker is entering the Pantheon is a great symbol, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t work to do,” Ms. Diallo said. “We also have issues with race here.”

Tuesday’s ceremony featured a coffin draped in France’s tricolor flag and holding handfuls of dirt from four places important to Baker: her hometown of St. Louis, Mo.; Paris, where she rose to prominence; the Château des Milandes in the Dordogne, where she raised her adopted children; and Monaco, where she lived for the last years of her life. Baker’s remains will stay in the Monaco cemetery where she is buried alongside her last husband and one of her children.

“It will be a memorable day,” Baker’s son Brian Bouillon-Baker told French radio station France Inter ahead of the ceremony. “She was an idealist who wanted to prove that universal brotherhood was not a utopia.”

Born to a poor family in 1906, Baker left school at 13 and fled segregated America for Paris before her 20th birthday. In France, she quickly became one of the world’s first Black female superstars. Paris at the time was enraptured with Black culture, with French people collecting African art, listening to jazz and dancing the Charleston.

During World War II, Baker joined the resistance against the Nazi occupation of France, using her fame to continue to travel and glean information to assist the Allies.

After the war, she adopted 12 children from different countries in a bid to show, as she once said, that, “We all have the same heart, the same blood, and the same need for love.” She often referred to her family as “the rainbow tribe.”

Laurent Kupferman, an essayist in Paris, started a petition in 2019 to have Baker enshrined in the Pantheon that garnered tens of thousands of signatures and caught the attention of Mr. Macron. Mr. Kupferman said Baker’s message of universal brotherhood was particularly important today.

“The world is fragmenting itself and we need to join together, to remember that we all belong to the human race,” he said. “That was the message of Josephine Baker.”

Write to Nick Kostov at [email protected]