The connection she was drawing — between the racial ideology of the Third Reich and the racial ideology of American segregation — was one she had been drawing explicitly for years. At the March on Washington she made the connection visible in its most direct form: the uniform of the army that had defeated one was worn by the person speaking against the other.
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## Why France Remembered
The decision by Emmanuel Macron’s government in 2021 to honor Josephine Baker with a place in the Panthéon was both a recognition of her historical significance and a statement about what France wanted to claim as its own.
The Panthéon’s list of honorees reflects specific ideas about French national identity and national contribution. The building was originally constructed as a church, became a secular mausoleum during the Revolution, and has served since then as the site where France buries or symbolically commemorates the people it regards as representing its highest values. The list includes philosophers, writers, scientists, Resistance leaders, and politicians; it has been criticized for its limited inclusion of women and of people from France’s colonial territories; and each induction is a statement about what France regards as belonging to its national story.
The case for Baker was straightforward in its biographical facts: she was a person who had genuinely served France, had been genuinely recognized for that service by the French state, had spent most of her adult life as a French citizen, and had contributed to French cultural life in ways that were both specific and substantial. The case was also, in the political context of 2021, a statement about a France that could honor an American-born Black woman who had experienced racism and had chosen France as the country where she could live and work with full standing.