Female, black, performing artist and foreign born, Josephine Baker is only the sixth woman, out of 80 illustrious figures, to enter Pantheon after Simone Veil in 2018. This Tuesday, France pays tribute to Josephine Baker, the American-born 20th century singer and activist, by granting her a place in the Pantheon. She is the first black woman to be commemorated in the resting place of France’s national heroes for her work in civil rights and resistance during World War II.
The French-American Josephine Baker on Tuesday, became the first black woman to enter the Pantheon, France’s “secular temple of the Republic,” in a ceremony presided over by President Emmanuel Macron that will celebrate a life “placed under the sign of the quest for freedom and justice.”
It was to the sound of “Me revoilà Paris”, one of the most famous songs of the artist, that the cenotaph (tomb not containing the body) of Josephine Baker, carried by airmen, entered the Pantheon, before being installed in one of the vaults of the crypt.
The remains of the artist will remain in the marine cemetery of Monaco, not far from the tomb of Princess Grace who had supported her in the last years of her life.
Under the attentive and moved eye of eleven of her children, many politicians, artists and citizens, the icon of the Roaring Twenties, born in 1906 in the United States before adopting French nationality, became the sixth woman out of 80 illustrious figures to be welcomed in this neoclassical building in the heart of Paris, whose pediment proclaims “To the great men, the grateful fatherland”.
