Josephine Baker at the Pantheon: the political messages behind the historic event – The HuffPost

via Associated Press

POLITICS – Was that his pretty dream? Joséphine Baker, activist of all freedoms, resistance fighter and cabaret icon at the two loves and with a thousand lives, will enter the Pantheon on Tuesday, November 30th. “From the Folies-Bergère to the supreme sanctuary”, as Régis Debray wrote in 2013, by launching the idea in the columns of the World.

It will therefore have taken eight years for this proposal with historical aspects, but ultimately consensual, to gain ground … and to impose itself in the eyes ofEmmanuel Macron. The President of the Republic, as tradition has dictated since the 1990s, will deliver the only speech of the ceremony, at the top of rue Soufflot for the third pantheonization of his mandate.

After Simone Veil in 2018 and Maurice Genevoix in 2020, this is a more unexpected choice – or disruptive, some would say. It breaks the codes by widening the frozen profile of those who rest there, for the most part statesmen, war heroes or writers.

The quest for freedom and justice

Joséphine Baker will thus be the first black woman, and the first stage artist to be celebrated in these places. The sixth woman, only, to enter the Pantheon, out of 81 boarders. But the symbol goes much further.

At the Élysée, we weave the laurels of a personality with “an absolutely incredible life, deeply marked by the quest for freedom and justice.” Or the reflection of “what can become of a human being when he shows will and determination to build his own emancipation.”

Next Tuesday, it is indeed the face of a woman with multiple battles that will be displayed on the facade of the Pantheon: born in poor, segregationist America, Joséphine Baker has chosen France to become an iconic magazine leader there. Crazy years. She then took advantage of her notoriety to enter counterintelligence during World War II before leading an international fight against racism by becoming the mother of twelve children adopted from all over the world.

“An exemplary personal story”, sums up the presidential palace, about the one who, without feather or sequins but in the uniform of Free France, had spoken after Martin Luther King and his famous “I have a dream” in 1963, in Washington.

“When I was a child they burned down my house, I got scared and ran away. I ended up running away very far. Until a place called France ”, she had launched to the crowd, in an ode to his adopted country, “I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that in this land that seemed straight out of a fairy tale, I was never afraid.”

An artist, fighter and activist, who therefore carried high “the values ​​of France and the Republic”, insists the Elysee. In this sense, Emmanuel Macron’s decision sends several political messages, as Régis Debray again prophesied, in 2013, explaining that “it is always the present that celebrates itself by consecrating such and such a tutelary ghost.”

For the Head of State, the pantheonization of Josephine Baker ticks all the boxes of the memorial “reconciliation” he has been defending since coming to power. It is part of the “national story” that he maintains, from ceremony to speech, around heroes” or French heroines. And, by celebrating this apostle of living together, constitutes a form of response to those who want to harm it, in her eyes.

“It is a message of universal brotherhood. A choice of the imaginary which leads, against an identity which connects ”, did not hesitate to launch an Elysian adviser to AFP, in mid-November, in reference to the rise of political discourse on identity. “Let us measure the path that we can sometimes travel in the opposite direction and ask ourselves about its meaning,” adds the Château, in another political allusion, recalling that Joséphine Baker became French on her wedding day, in 1937, when , “Some”, today, “intend to extend this period to 10 years.” A straight spike sent to the Republicans right now in Congress.

A journey made of struggles and symbols, which Emmanuel Macron will not fail to tell, in detail, on Tuesday, in front of the Pantheon: a great woman, whose homeland is grateful.

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