Dancer, singer … spy: France’s Panthéon to honour Josephine Baker

The performer will be the first Black woman to enter the mausoleum, in recognition of her wartime work

In November 1940, two passengers boarded a train in Toulouse headed for Madrid, then onward to Lisbon. One was a striking Black woman in expensive furs; the other purportedly her secretary, a blonde Frenchman with moustache and thick glasses.

Josephine Baker, toast of Paris, the world's first Black female superstar, one of its most photographed women and Europe's highest-paid entertainer, was travelling, openly and in her habitual style, as herself - but she was playing a brand new role.