The French Dolly Parton
Josephine Baker’s elevation to the Panthéon comes at a tricky moment of French racial reckoning.
During the past year, the French have undergone a new round of soul-searching about race and identity politics with their own version of a Black Lives Matter movement. In towns, schools, and communities across France, confrontations about structural racism are forcing people to rethink France’s history of colonial oppression and the fact that in a nation that proclaims equality for all, many immigrants and their children still find themselves to be second-class citizens.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in the midst of such a profound grappling with its own racialized past, French President Emmanuel Macron has agreed to honor Baker -- an African-American some have dubbed “the Frenchest of All Americans” -- with one of the country’s highest honors. Doing so allows his government and mainstream French society to claim they are free from racism while masking the complex dynamics of Baker’s own story and France’s attitudes toward race.
There is no question that Baker is a beloved figure in France, and the movement to Pantheonize her has been going on for several years. Her songs are part of the canon of French popular music, and her story is larger than life. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906, she arrived as a 19 year old in Paris in 1925 as part of La Revue Nègre, a Jazz Age stage show trading on racial stereotypes about black people, from the jungles of Africa to the antebellum plantations of the American south. Throughout the 1920 and 1930s, Baker charmed Parisians with her frenetic style, her wide smile, her openness, and her pet cheetah. She became a star of stage, screen, and a major recording artist, as well as an entrepreneur with her nightclub Chez Josephine.
Baker stayed in France because she was successful but also because she felt freer. The absence of Jim Crow laws meant she could live and love as she wished, something she could not have done in the US even with her fame. But race was a double-edged sword for Baker. Her blackness made her famous, but it still framed how the French saw her.
For all her Americanness, in French eyes she was a cypher for France’s African empire. In her debut, she performed a highly-sexualized topless dance in a banana skirt with her partner Joe Alex. The phallic fruit and the tribal drums of the routine evoked an exotic Dark Continent the French claimed to be civilizing. Watching an “African” performance in Paris (even if performed by Americans) tamed blackness, at a time when people from French colonies were sometimes displayed in Paris as part of so-called “human zoos.” Neither the banana skirt nor the erotic dance were her idea. The show’s French producer believed seeing a black woman’s wiggle would appeal to white audiences. A few years later, in 1931, Baker performed as the Queen of the Colonies at the French Colonial Exposition, despite the fact that she was not a French colonial subject. Baker’s blackness still allowed her to represent a civilized version of Africa in the French imagination.
Despite her foreignness, over time Baker came to embody everything that France valued and hoped to teach its colonial populations: hard work, creativity, and assimilation to national values. Baker learned to speak French and became a French citizen. She styled herself as a Parisian music hall performer crooning in her signature song about her two loves, “my country” (which she never names in the lyrics) and Paris. She adopted a “rainbow tribe” of children from around the world hoping to live out a real-life vision of a trans-racial utopia overwriting individual differences with a common humanity.
Many have come to see Baker as a model immigrant who risked her life for the nation, and the movement to honor her in the Panthéon rests heavily on her wartime work. Moved by a sense of duty to the country that made her a star, she joined the anti-Nazi resistance from her chateau in southern France hiding those fleeing advancing German forces. Baker passed secrets, hid soldiers, and provided visas to those trying to escape. She sometimes wrote information on her own body, which she then covered with her dress. Occasionally, she stashed intelligence in her undergarments.
In doing so, she supposedly put her racial identity behind her in favor of her love of France. That’s something many other immigrants have a hard time doing because of structural racism. As much as they want to become part of mainstream culture, their exclusion from power reminds them that France is not the racial paradise it has long claimed to be. Josephine Baker is the exception, not the rule, a fact that now makes her perfect for the Panthéon.
The timing of Baker’s elevation echoes the recent NPR story by Amanda Marie Martinez noting a similar phenomenon about love for Dolly Parton in the US. Many Americans need Parton to be “a saint,” Martinez argues, because she distracts us from our deep political and racial polarization. Love for Parton cuts across political lines and binds us together with feel-good songs, genuine acts of philanthropy, and a winning smile. Few figures in the American cultural landscape unify like Dolly Parton.
Josephine Baker is, at this moment, the French Dolly Parton, and honoring her in the Panthéon is the French equivalent of turning her into a saint. Baker -- despite her complicated story -- is the only black French person those in power can agree on precisely because recent debates in France about race highlight a different and much more uncomfortable narrative. Baker has become a safe way to talk about race in France, but only if we leave out large parts of her life story.
Jeffrey H. Jackson is Professor of History at Rhodes College. He is the author of Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis and Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris.