Josephine Baker, icon of the 1920s, becomes the sixth woman and the first black woman to join the Pantheon on Tuesday. An honor for this civil rights activist, but also an intelligence officer during World War II. When she was a music hall star, she lived in Le Vésinet (Yvelines).
A decade of celebrations
The villa is less well known than its home in Les Milandes in the Dordogne, but it has all the same lived 18 years in this building built for a baroness in 1880, the Beau Chêne villa. What makes Alain Marie Foy, former mayor of the city and president of the history society of the town, say that “Joséphine Baker did not have two loves but three. And the third was Le Vésinet”.
It stayed there from 1929 to 1947 and housed a whole menagerie: chickens, sheep, monkeys and even his cheetah Chiquita. In the park, there is still the cage, which was used to punish her when she devoured the hens in the barnyard. And on weekends the park was the scene of big parties to which the whole of Paris invited itself, provoking the “the only corks that Le Vésinet knew at the time”, explains Philippe Baudry, the purchaser of the place.
– Caroline Felix
Josephine Baker keeps the reputation of having been a star “simple”, who loved children, offering them sweets when they waited outside the bakery. Alain-Marie Foy also proudly points out that it was at Le Vésinet that Captain Jacques Abtey contacted her in 1940, so that she could join the Resistance as an intelligence agent.
A site under renovation for years
Philippe Baudry bought the dilapidated property about seven years ago, at the request of Joséphine Baker’s notary. “He said to me ‘it would be good if you took it back, as you are an architect, you could do some work'”, he explains, adding that “nobody wanted to buy it, the supporting structure was eaten away, everything was damaged, neither the heating nor the electricity worked”.
– Caroline Felix
What finally convinced him, after two years of reflection, was to discover the life of the artist: “I did not know of her exploits during the war and all the just causes that she had nobly defended. I found it extraordinary.”. He sees this renovation, which will have lasted 10 years, as “a responsability”, so he opened the park to the public during Heritage Days, which had never happened since the artist left Le Vésinet in 1947.