War heroine and activist Josephine Baker became the first black woman to visit the Pantheon

THE Josephine Baker, the famous French-American singer and dancer, was buried on Tuesday (30/11), in the “folk temple of French Republic“, the Pantheon of Paris, the last residence of her great personalities France, in a ceremony attended by French President Emanuel Macron.

THE Josephine Baker, who acted in French Resistance during World War II and was after the war a prominent civil rights activist, is the first black and only the sixth woman to be buried in Pantheon, a landmark building in the French capital that dominates the district Latin Cartier.

“THE France is my JosephineSaid the French president, who greeted a “war heroine, fighter, dancer, singer”. “She was” a black woman who stood up for the black people, but first and foremost she was a woman who defended the human race, “she said.

The French president delivered his speech after her most spacious song was heard at the ceremony Baker, the “J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris” (“I have two loves, my country and Paris”).

Her son, o Brian Boyon Baker, he said he sees “a sign of hope and a message for the new generations”. “I hope that her messages of tolerance and openness to others will be heard by them French“, Added the Marian Zenze, one of her daughters. “Her Pantheon was: love, understanding and tolerance.”

“Our mother has served the country, she is an example of democratic and humanitarian values,” he said. French Agency her eldest son, o Akio Bouillon.

For the rest of her life after the French resistance she fought against discrimination. With her fourth husband, she became a mother of 12 children, whom she adopted in the four corners of the world and grew up in her tower in Dordogne, in southwestern France.

THE Josephine Baker was born in 1906 in St. Louis of Missouri and became famous after arriving in Paris in the 1920s, as did many blacks Americans remained in the French capital after World War I. and brought with them to the city the American jazz culture.

THE Baker, who became a French citizen in 1937, died in 1975 at the age of 68 and was buried in Monaco.

According to the wishes of her family, her body Baker was not transferred to Pantheon. Her presence there was represented by a symbolic coffin carried inside the mausoleum by six pilots and containing puffed soil from four locations: the St. Louis, the Paris, the Monaco and Milan, in the prefecture Dordogne of France, where the Baker she owned a tower.

Her empty coffin Baker will be placed next to other great French personalities buried in the mausoleum, such as the authors Emil Zola and Victor Hugo, the philosopher Voltaire and the politician Simon Veil.