While she has been resting in the Monaco cemetery since 1975, Joséphine Baker should return to Paris on November 30, she who during her career had sung her love for the capital.
Above all, according to the
Parisian
citing President Emmanuel Macron in his Sunday edition, this return will be done under the honors of the republic.
The Franco-American artist, a prominent figure in the Resistance and the anti-racist struggle, will indeed make his entry into the Pantheon.
" It's a yes !
», Declared the Head of State on Wednesday July 21 at the Elysee Palace, according to the daily, after an interview with a group of personalities who came to plead for this initiative.
Among them were notably "the novelist Pascal Bruckner, the singer Laurent Voulzy, the entrepreneur Jennifer Guesdon, the essayist Laurent Kuperman and especially Brian Bouillon-Baker, one of the sons of Joséphine Baker".
Active against racism
This ceremony will make the famous magazine leader, born in the United States in Missouri in 1906 and died in Paris, the first black woman to rest in the secular necropolis.
The file in favor of the interpreter of the song
J'ai deux amours
had been examined for the first time at the end of June by the Elysee, according to
Le Parisien
. A petition in favor of the pantheonization of the artist, launched two years ago by Laurent Kupferman, had gathered 38,000 signatures. "Artist, first black international star, muse of the cubists, resistance during World War II in the French Army, active alongside Martin Luther King for civil rights in the United States of America and in France alongside the Lica [International League against Antisemitism] (…) we think that Josephine Baker, 1906-1975, has her place in the Pantheon ”, argues the text.
For more than a century, the Pantheon has been the secular necropolis of the French, whose memory the “grateful homeland” wishes to honor.
Among the 80 "pantheonized" are politicians, writers, scientists, some religious and many military.
Only five women are currently buried there, including Simone Veil, the last personality to have been, in 2018.
These spies who changed the course of history
Society
The Elysée is still considering bringing the feminist lawyer Gisèle Halimi into the Panthéon
Paris
Society
Pantheon