Josephine Baker, the American-born performer, anti-Nazi spy and civil rights campaigner, was inducted into Pantheon in France, on Tuesday, becoming the country’s first Black woman to be honoured at France’s Pantheon.
Baker’s voice could be heard echoing over the streets of iconic Left Bank of Paris as recordings from her astonishing career started off an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument. Baker was honoured with other French luminaries at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, physicist Marie Curie and author Victor Hugo.
Military officers from the Air Force carried her cenotaph along a red carpet that ran four blocks from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon. Baker’s military honours were displayed atop the cenotaph, which was wrapped in the French tricolour flag and had dirt from her birthplace in Missouri, France and Monaco. Her body was kept in Monaco at her family’s request.
Baker was also the first performer and the first American-born citizen to be inducted into the Pantheon.
She is lauded not just for her world-renowned creative career, but also for her active engagement in the French Resistance during WWII, her work as a civil rights activist and her humanist principles, which she demonstrated via the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world. Nine of them were among the 2,000 people who attended the event on Tuesday.
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