JOSEPHINE BAKER:
SUPERSTAR,
WAR HERO, ACTIVIST
AND BALMAIN MUSE

Only 80 exceptional French citizens have preceded Josephine Baker into the Panthéon since 1790. Very few were foreign born and only a handful have been women. Josephine Baker is the first Black woman, the first American-born French citizen and the first entertainer to receive the French state’s ultimate honor. In November 2021 French President Macron welcomed her into the historic site with this stirring message: “Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, although you were born American, there is no greater French person than you.”

Socialite Caroline Dudley saw Harlem as "a land of banjos, pianos and the mechanical Victrola, gramophone, radio morning noon and night” as she was determined to bring that distinctive musical spirit to Paris, in the form of an all-Black revue that she named “La Revue Negre.” Josephine Baker arrived in Paris with the show—and it wasn’t long afterwards that she became the toast of the town.

Early images and plot lines associated with Josephine Baker often relied on racial stereotypes that would be rejected today. For those who can speak French, Pap Ndiaye has some interesting takes on this issue. Ndiaye, who is now France’s Minister for Education, is also a very well-respected historian specializing in Black studies. During a 2019 podcast interview on France Culture radio, Ndiaye explained that he believed that Josephine Baker had actually worked to take control of the stereotypes that were part of her acts, dismissing and deriding them at the same time that she was exaggerating them. “It is this French colonial imaginary world which she will capture and which she will play with, obviously with many nods and much distance, because Josephine Baker is not someone to be fooled,” Mr. Ndiaye explains.

Ndiaye also underlines how important it is to remember how Baker must have felt when she arrived in France. In a 2021 interview with the AP, he points out that her new life in Paris allowed for radical changes for Baker: “When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time ... at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation ... no lynching. There was the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to have a romance with white people... That doesn’t mean that racism did not exist in France. But French racism has often been more subtle, not as brutal as the American forms of racism.”

After conquering Paris, Josephine Baker set off on a two-year European tour, welcomed by adoring crowds at each of her stops. Here, we see her greeted by crowds of Dutch fans, as she arrives in The Hague, in 1928.

This YouTube clip shows one of Josephine Baker’s dance scene from the film ‘Princesse Tam Tam.’ Baker’s first film was 1927’s ‘Siren of the Tropics’—a silent film where she was cast as Papitou, who lived in the French West Indies and fell in love with a French man. She made two other films in the ‘30s—‘Zouzou’ and ‘Princesse Tam Tam’— and both were star vehicles for her. Her last movie was ‘Fausse Alerte,’ which finished filming just after the World War II had begun. Because of her film and music success across Europe, many consider Baker to be the world’s first Black global superstar.

As an entertainer, Baker was still allowed to travel around Europe. In 1941, she and her entourage went on a tour through Spain to Lisbon and then on to Morocco, collecting information at the many parties she was invited to. She smuggled dozens of classified documents to British intelligence about German airfields, harbors and troop concentrations in the west coast of France.

For her incredible heroism, Josephine Baker was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation, the Croix de Guerre by the French military, and she was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.

In Morocco, after a miscarriage, Baker became so ill with an infection that she had to have a hysterectomy. She then developed peritonitis and sepsis. Once she recovered, she began touring to entertain British, French and American soldiers in North Africa—but she refused to perform for any troops that were segregated.

Pierre Balmain created several other special couture designs for Josephine Baker. Above, Baker is photographed backstage in a 1951 Balmain gown. The second image shows Balmain's original sketch for Baker’s special gown.

Below is an excerpt from Josephine Baker’s speech on the March on Washington:

“I am not a young woman now, friends.  My life is behind me.  There is not too much fire burning inside me.  And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you.  So that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done.  Then, when my fires have burned out, and I go where we all go someday, I can be happy.

You know I have always taken the rocky path.  I never took the easy one, but as I get older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little.  I wanted to make it easier for you.  I want you to have a chance at what I had.  But I do not want you to have to run away to get it.  And mothers and fathers, if it is too late for you, think of your children.  Make it safe here so they do not have to run away, for I want for you and your children what I had.”

Above, an article from Jet Magazine highlighted Baker's trip to the USA to participate in the March on Washington.

Just a few days after her opening night triumph at the Bobino, Baker suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She was rushed to Paris’ hôpital de la Salpêtrière, where she passed away on April 12, 1975. During her funeral procession, Parisians lined the streets to pay their final respects. At Paris’ famous Madeleine church, many of the same celebrities, royals and politicians who had attended her Bobino premiere just a few days earlier were seated in the pews. Since she was both a cultural and resistance hero, the French government honored Josephine Baker with a 21-gun salute, making her the first American woman to receive French military honors.