The uniform she was buried in was her Free French Air Force uniform.
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## The Panthéon, 2021
In August 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Josephine Baker would be honored with an entry in the Panthéon — the former church in Paris’s Latin Quarter that serves as France’s secular mausoleum and hall of fame, housing the remains and the symbolic legacy of figures France regards as its greatest citizens.
Previous Panthéon inductees include Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, and Jean Moulin, the leader of the French Resistance who was captured and tortured to death by the Gestapo. Baker would become the first Black woman to be honored there.
The ceremony was held on November 30, 2021. Baker’s family did not wish her actual remains moved from Monaco, where she had been buried for forty-six years. The solution was characteristically French in its attention to symbolic form: a coffin was processed into the Panthéon with full honors, draped in the French tricolor flag, but instead of Baker’s remains, the coffin contained soil from the places that had been most important to her life — soil from St. Louis, Missouri, where she was born; soil from Paris, the city she had made her home; soil from Monaco, where she spent her final years; and soil from the Dordogne, where the Château des Milandes stood.
The cenotaph that now exists in the Panthéon is a memorial, not a grave. Baker’s remains are in Monaco. What Paris holds is the symbolic weight of a life that France has claimed as its own — the American-born performer who chose France, served France in its darkest moment, and was given in return the highest recognition the French state can bestow.