Paris (AFP)

Resistance, anti-racist activist, artist, Joséphine Baker will enter the Pantheon this fall, becoming the first black woman to join the great personalities who are buried there.

The Franco-American artist will enter on November 30 in the Republican mausoleum dedicated to characters who have marked the History of France, we learned Sunday from the entourage of President Emmanuel Macron, confirming information from the newspaper Le Parisien.

"The pantheonization is built over the long term", it was stressed.

The ceremony will make the famous magazine leader, born in Missouri in 1906, died in 1975 and buried in Monaco, the first black woman to rest in the secular necropolis and only the sixth woman to take a seat there, Simone Veil having been the last woman to enter in 2018.

"On July 21, President Macron granted us an interview", tells AFP the entrepreneur Jennifer Guesdon, one of the personalities defending the pantheonization, and "when the President said yes to us, (it was a) great joy and at the same time it was obvious ".

Joséphine Baker in Paris in May 1961 AFP / Archives

"This request for pantheonization has been made by the Baker family since 2013", continues Ms. Guesdon, who was received by the President of the Republic with the novelist Pascal Bruckner, the singer Laurent Voulzy, the essayist Laurent Kupferman and members of Josephine Baker's family.

A first campaign had been launched by the writer Régis Debray and had been reactivated by Mr. Kupferman, recalls Ms. Guesdon.

A petition "Dare Josephine Baker in the Pantheon" has nearly 38,000 signatures.

"Artist, first black international star, muse of the cubists, Resistance member 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 Lira [now Licra: International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism] (...) we believe that Josephine Baker, 1906-1975, has her place in the Pantheon ", according to the petition.

- Medal of the Resistance -

"We made discover the commitments of Josephine Baker who was known for some as an international star, a great artist" but "she returned to the Pantheon because she was resistant", notes Ms. Guesdon.

Married twice at the age of 15, from a very poor background, Joséphine Baker fled the family home by following a black vaudeville troupe.

Noticed by a producer, she left for Paris where, at the age of 19, she became a star of the Revue nègre, a musical show that helped popularize jazz and black American culture in France.

Joséphine Baker poses at Harcourt studios in the 1920s in Paris - AFP / Archives

Magazine leader, cabaret icon, singer, she will be the highest paid artist in Parisian music hall.

On November 30, 1937, she married Jean Lion, an industrialist of Jewish origin, and obtained French nationality.

She will divorce and remarry twice thereafter.

She will adopt 12 children.

She joined the Resistance.

In 1939, she meets Captain Jacques Abtey, who will be responsible for counter-espionage in the Paris region and is recruited as an intelligence agent, passing information written in sympathetic ink on his sheet music.

She was then sent on a mission to Morocco and went on tour for the benefit of the Resistance.

She was appointed second lieutenant of the auxiliary female troops of the French Air Force.

"I had only one thing in mind (...) to help France", she had said in the archives of Ina.

She was decorated with the Legion of Honor, the Croix de Guerre and the Medal of the Resistance.

This "symbolizes the image of a France which is not racist, contrary to what a certain number of media groups say, Josephine Baker is a real anti-racist, a real anti-fascist", Pascal Bruckner reacted to AFP .

She was a "model of a valiant and generous woman", "we owe her this honor", wrote on Twitter the Minister of Culture Roselyne Bachelot.

Asked by AFP, the current owner of the Château des Milandes in Dordogne, owned by the artist between 1947 and 1968, said her "immense joy".

"I've been fighting for 20 years to pay homage to Joséphine at the château. France had forgotten her a bit when we bought her in 2001," said Angélique de la Barre.

laf-jri-ggy-mlb / rh / tes

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