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## The Weight of Recognition
The formal honors that the French government gave Josephine Baker after the war — the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, the Légion d’honneur — were not simply decorations. They were legal certifications of a specific history, documents that placed Baker’s wartime service in the official record of a country that had spent the subsequent decades constructing and contesting that record.
The Légion d’honneur, France’s highest order of merit, was established by Napoleon in 1802 and has been awarded more than three million times across its history. It is not an insignificant honor to have received it; it is not trivial when it is received for military or Resistance service rather than for cultural achievement. Baker’s Légion d’honneur was for her wartime service, as were the Croix de Guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance. The combination of all three represented a formal assessment by the French military and intelligence establishments that her service had been real, had been consequential, and had involved personal risk.
The complexity of the postwar French accounting — who had resisted, who had collaborated, who had done which under what circumstances and to what degree — was not resolved cleanly by the formal recognition of Resistance veterans. The Vichy government had been a French government; the people who had collaborated with German occupation had largely been French people; the specific history of what happened in France between 1940 and 1944 was not easily summarized in terms of national heroism. The Resistance had been real and important; it had also been a minority of the French population through most of the occupation.