On the eve of the pantheonization of Joséphine Baker, her son Brian Bouillon-Baker has revealed that the Parisian metro station Gaîté will be renamed with the name of Joséphine Baker this Monday evening.
The descendant of this figure of the French music hall and resistance made this announcement on the set of TV5 Monde.
According to him, the Elysian staff, the Ministry of Transport and the RATP have given their agreement to this operation.
Last August Brian Bouillon-Baker already mentioned this possibility.
“We will see with the management of the RATP whether the Gaîté metro station can bear his name as a subtitle, like Félix Eboué for the Daumesnil station.
Because the word gaîté and the name of Joséphine Baker are totally linked.
And also because it was in Bobino that she had her last show, rue de la Gaîté.
And finally because at the end of the rue de la Gaîté… There is the Joséphine-Baker square ”he explained to the Parisian.
“Emmanuel Macron“ dared Joséphine ”, to paraphrase the famous song by Bashung.
She loved France and France loved her very much in return.
With this entry into the Pantheon, we can say that this love story is now eternal ”added his son a few months ago.
Tribute to Monaco too
In addition, on the eve of his entry into the Pantheon, Albert of Monaco paid tribute on Monday to Joséphine Baker, buried in 1975 in the principality. “There are people who never go out,” Prince Albert said. The Monegasque sovereign thus took up the words of his mother, Princess Grace, of American nationality, such as Joséphine Baker to whom "she offered her last home, a tomb in black granite from Africa", in which the artist rests in the cemetery. of Monaco.
After her expulsion from the Château des Milandes, in the Dordogne, it was on the Rock that Joséphine Baker and her children settled in 1969, with the help of the princely couple.
Evoking "the courage of the granddaughter of slaves" as resistant during the Second World War, the sovereign underlined "the ideal of universal brotherhood and its corollary, the fight against racial segregation, of which Josephine is a symbol" .
Become a close friend of Princess Grace of Monaco, who had given up her acting career to marry Prince Rainier, Joséphine Baker then often performed in the principality as "June 22, 1974 where she had replaced at short notice" , singer and actor Samy Davis Jr, for the inauguration of the new Summer Sporting, recalled Prince Albert again.
Joséphine Baker, born in the United States but who had adopted France as a second homeland, will enter the Pantheon on Tuesday during a ceremony chaired by Emmanuel Macron. Her many children have decided not to move their mother's coffin from the Monaco marine cemetery, where she lies with her last husband and one of her children. Even if a coffin will be carried for the celebration, it is therefore a cenotaph (tomb not containing the body) which will be installed in vault 13 of the crypt where the writer Maurice Genevoix, the last to enter the Pantheon, is already located.
Prince Albert explained that he would symbolically take a little Monegasque land: land "which will enter the Pantheon tomorrow, mixed with that of Saint-Louis, his birthplace, with that of Paris, the land of his audience, and to that of the Milandes, the land of his “rainbow” tribe.
