Paris (AFP)

The Franco-American artist Joséphine Baker (1906-1975), a prominent figure in the Resistance and the anti-racist struggle, will be pantheonized on November 30, according to information from the Sunday edition of the Parisian citing President Emmanuel Macron.

"It's yes!", Said 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, including in particular "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".

The ceremony will take place on November 30, according to Le Parisien, making the famous magazine leader, born in Missouri and buried in Monaco, the first black woman to rest in the secular necropolis.

The file in favor of the interpreter of the famous song "I have two loves" 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, resistant 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 Anti-Semitism, now Licra: International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, editor's note) (...) we think that Josephine Baker, 1906-1975, has her place in the Pantheon ", argues the text.

Joséphine Baker salutes after receiving the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre with palm in Castelnaud-la-Chapelle (south-western France), August 19, 1961 - AFP / Archives

For more than a century, the Pantheon has been the secular necropolis of French "great men", whose memory "grateful homeland" wishes to honor.

This imposing building dominates the Sainte-Geneviève mountain, one of the hillocks of Paris, in the center of the capital.

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.

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