More than a hundred years after her birth in Saint-Louis, Missouri, United States, in 1906, and nearly half a century after her death in Paris on April 12, 1975, Joséphine Baker entered the Pantheon. The consecration of an icon of music and of the Resistance who loved France so much and the result of a petition paraphrasing Alain Bashung’s song, “Dare Josephine“. Initiated by the essayist Laurent Kupferman, she takes up the idea of the writer Régis Debray, by supporting an artist, resistant, feminist and anti-racist activist. Just that. The President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron announced during the summer 2021 that the legendary star of the music hall would enter the Parisian monument on the anniversary of her naturalization, November 30 – she will nevertheless remain buried in Monaco. Behind her, she therefore leaves a musical work and historical acts but also a big family, since the interpreter of I have two loves had twelve toddlers, all adopted. She would also have wanted biological children, but nature had decided otherwise.
A fascinating character, Josephine Baker has written a life worthy of a film. His family is unlike any other with his “rainbow tribe“ as she called it herself: Akio, Janot, Jarry, Luis, Marianne, Brian (born Brahim), Moïse, Jean-Claude, Noël, Koffi, Mara and Stellina formed the extraordinary siblings of Joséphine Baker, settled in her haven of peace, a castle of Milandes, in Périgord. Riddled with debt, Josephine Baker will have to sell it but the myth will remain.
A stillborn child followed by a hysteroctomy
One can wonder about the motherhood of Josephine Baker, she who loved children so much and who wanted to offer them the childhood that she had not had because she had had to work very young to help her family. In the biography Josephine Baker in Art and Life of Bennetta Jules-Rosette, the reason is explained: After a pregnancy at the end of which Joséphine Baker gives birth toa stillborn child, she has a serious postpartum infection and is scheduled to undergo hysterectomy in Casablanca in 1941. This infection was caused by “serious illness contracted while on duty“, writing Le Figaro in its November 15 edition, “she will be the cause of the artist’s infertility“. A painful period during which she continues peritonitis and septicemia until the end of 1942, while serving the French Resistance. Thus, the visitors who come to his bedside are often intelligence agents, specifies Le Figaro. At worst, Josephine Baker keeps her courage intact.
Removing her uterus therefore removes Josephine Baker’s hope of having a biological child. With her husband, the conductor Jo Bouillon, they decide to compose this swarm of children from all over the world, making their ideal of universal brotherhood a reality. On the airwaves of France Inter this November 29, his son Brian Bouillon-Baker broached this subject: “But she would have had biological children, she would still have adopted many, many children. This is the Italian mamma side. “
A family of twelve children in a castle in the south of France, the idea fascinates and questions. Which mother was Josephine Baker? An idealist but not so utopian. Because she had an almost political dream: to bring together twelve children from the four corners of the planet, to raise them together and finally, to show, as she said at the time, to the face of the world that when raising children, there is solidarity that will be created. Brian Bouillon Baker confirms that this was not just a beautiful theory: “She lived it, because when we do stupid things, we never denounce ourselves, even if it means being punished collectively.“Something to give hope in humanity, if it vibrates in the supercharged footsteps of Josephine Baker.