She immediately applied her energy and resources to the relief of Parisians who were suffering. The city had been occupied for four years; food, fuel, and basic goods were scarce. Baker sold personal luxuries — jewelry, clothing, objects accumulated over years of success — and used the proceeds to buy food and fuel for the city’s residents. The celebrity that had been her cover during her intelligence work now functioned as a resource for direct humanitarian support.
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## The Honors
In 1945, General Charles de Gaulle — now leading the provisional government of France — presented Josephine Baker with the honors her wartime service had earned.
The Croix de Guerre, awarded for acts of bravery in the face of the enemy, recognized the specific courage of her intelligence work and her service in conditions of genuine personal risk. The Rosette de la Résistance — the Medal of the French Resistance with Rosette — recognized her participation in the organized resistance against German occupation. The Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit, acknowledged the totality of her contribution to France.
These were not honorary awards given to a celebrity as a gesture of goodwill. They were the formal recognition, by the French state, of documented military and intelligence service. Baker was credited as having served in conditions where her life was at genuine risk, without compensation, and with results that the French military and intelligence establishment regarded as substantive.
The ceremony made public, for the first time in the formal record, the nature of Baker’s wartime activities. The audiences who had known her only as a performer — who might have known, in a general way, that she had done something in the war — now had an official account of what she had actually done. The woman in the banana skirt from the Folies Bergère had been, for six years, a French intelligence asset.