Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Josephine Baker, the American-born artist, naturalized French, entered the French Pantheon in 2021 in recognition for the services she rendered to the French Republic as an entertainer, resistance agent and civil rights activist. The “great” people who enter the Pantheon are selected based on a conception of France and its values that provides a base for the construction of French identity at the domestic level but also for its projection worldwide. The recent “Pantheonization” of Simone Veil in 2018, immediately after her death and not years later, constitutes a turning point and illustrates Emmanuel Macron’s own political agenda. By granting the highest honor in the French Republic to a holocaust survivor who is responsible for making abortion legal in France, the French President is also shaping his own historical posterity, a “mission” that he pursues with Josephine Baker. Through a close analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the ceremony at the Pantheon, I demonstrate how the “claiming” of Baker by Macron is exemplary of a domestic political strategy but also of the continuing battle between France and the USA’s imperialisms of the universal.