Joséphine Baker in the Panthéon: Her Cenotaph and Where She Is Buried

When war broke out in September 1939, the star of the Folies Bergère was recruited by French military intelligence as an honourable correspondent, working with the counter-intelligence officer Jacques Abtey. She gathered information at embassy receptions and society parties, where her fame opened every door.

After the defeat of 1940 she withdrew to the Château des Milandes, her home in the Dordogne, which sheltered resistance fighters and refugees. With Abtey she travelled through neutral Portugal carrying intelligence on German troops, airfields and harbours, some of it in invisible ink, famously on her sheet music.

She went on to North Africa, entertained Allied troops and in 1944 became an officer in the French air force. Her work with British and American intelligence was not fully publicised until 2020, when French documents were declassified.

In April 1975 Baker opened a revue at Bobino in Paris celebrating fifty years on stage, financed in part by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. Days later she was found in a coma after a cerebral haemorrhage, and she died on 12 April 1975 at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, aged 68.

Her funeral was held on 15 April at the church of La Madeleine, drawing more than 20,000 mourners, and she received French military honours, a rare tribute for an American-born performer.

A second service followed at Saint-Charles church in Monte Carlo, and on 19 April she was buried in the Cimetière de Monaco. Princess Grace, a close friend, had helped her buy a house at nearby Roquebrune when she was almost ruined, and Monaco has kept her grave ever since.

Her family had asked for Joséphine Baker to enter the Panthéon since 2013. The idea gathered pace in 2021 with a petition, Osez Joséphine, launched by the writer Laurent Kupferman, which collected 37,920 signatures, and in August President Emmanuel Macron agreed, with the ceremony set for 30 November, the anniversary of her naturalisation.

Her son Claude Bouillon-Baker made clear that her body would stay in Monaco. Instead, a casket holding soil from the places she had lived was carried through Paris by airmen of the French Air and Space Force and laid in the crypt.

The cenotaph stands in vault XIII, behind a door she shares with Maurice Genevoix, the chronicler of the trenches of the First World War, who entered the Panthéon the year before her.