After the defeat of the Nazis, she went to Germany to sing for former prisoners and deportees freed from the camps. After her plane had to make an emergency landing, they brought “the shipwrecked to the shores, on their large shoulders, Josephine Baker in the front,” the logbook writes.īaker also organized concerts for soldiers and civilians near combat zones. The group’s logbook notably mentions a 1944 incident off the coast of Corsica, when Senegalese soldiers from colonial troops fighting in the French Liberation Army helped Baker out of the sea. In 1944, Baker joined a female group in the Air Force of the French Liberation Army as a second lieutenant. It is estimated she brought the equivalent of 10 million euros ($11.2 million ) to support the French Resistance. She also raised funds, including from her personal money. Charles De Gaulle, including spying on the British and the Americans – who didn’t fully trust him and didn’t share all information. The next year, seriously ill, Baker left France for North Africa, where she gathered intelligence for Gen. “She risks the death penalty or, at least, the harsh repression of the Vichy regime or of the Nazi occupant,” Letang said. That year, she notably brought into her troupe several spies working for the Allies, allowing them to travel to Spain and Portugal. She continued to work for the French Resistance, using her artistic performances as a cover for her spying activities.
Researcher and historian Géraud Létang said Baker lived “a double life between, on the one side, the music hall artist, and on the other side, another secret life, later becoming completely illegal, of intelligence agent.”Īfter France’s defeat in June 1940, she refused to play for the Nazis who occupied Paris and moved to southwestern France. She started working as an informant, traveling, getting close to officials and sharing information hidden on her music sheets, according to French military archives. In September 1939, as France and Britain declared war against Nazi Germany, Baker got in touch with the head of the French counterintelligence services.
She became a French citizen after her marriage in 1937 to industrialist Jean Lion, a Jewish man who later suffered from anti-Semitic laws of the collaborationist Vichy regime. “And that’s why they asked Josephine to dance something ‘tribal,’ ‘savage,’ ‘African’-like.”īaker’s career took a more serious turn after that, as she learned to speak five languages and toured internationally. “She was that kind of fantasy: not the Black body of an American woman but of an African woman,” Theatre des Champs-Elysees spokesperson Ophélie Lachaux told the AP. Her show, embodying the colonial time’s racist stereotypes about African women, caused both condemnation and celebration. She met immediate success on the Theatre des Champs-Elysees stage, where she appeared topless and wearing a famed banana belt. “She arrives in France in 1925, she’s an emancipated woman, taking her life in her hands, in a country of which she doesn’t even speak the language,” Kupferman said. At 19, having already divorced twice, had relationships with men and women, and started a performing career, she moved to France following a job opportunity. “She embodies, before anything, women’s freedom,” Laurent Kupferman, the author of the petition for the move, told the Associated Press.īaker was born in 1906, in St. In addition to honoring an exceptional figure in French history, the move is meant to send a message against racism and celebrate U.S.-French connections. Her body will stay in Monaco, at the request of her family.įrench President Emmanuel Macron decided on her entry into the Pantheon, responding to a petition. On Tuesday, a coffin carrying soils from the U.S., France and Monaco – places where Baker made her mark – will be deposited inside the domed Pantheon monument overlooking the Left Bank of Paris. PARIS – France is inducting Josephine Baker – Missouri-born cabaret dancer, French World War II spy and civil rights activist – into its Pantheon, the first Black woman honored in the final resting place of France’s most revered luminaries.
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