14 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021
PARISPOSTCARD
MAMANAT THEPANTHÉON
T
hree hours before Josephine Baker
was inducted into the Panthéon last
week, Brian Bouillon-Baker, one of her
ten sons, was on the terrace of a café in
Montparnasse. “We found out in May
that they were likely going to nominate
Maman,” Bouillon-Baker said. He had
been summoned to the Élysée, along with
the initiators of a petition urging President
Emmanuel Macron to honor Baker’s con-
tributions to the performing arts, to the
French Resistance, and to the fight against
racism and anti-Semitism by elevating
her to the Panthéon, France’s hall of “great
men.” “We had been received by Macron’s
counsellors, and, at the end of our ap-
pointment, Mrs. Macron came into the
room,” Bouillon-Baker went on. The Pres-
ident was in Brussels. Bouillon-Baker re-
called, “She said, ‘The Élysée is calmer
when he’s away; let me show you around
myself. And, I can tell you—I know my
husband, and his opinion is favorable.’ ”
The panthéonisation was a go, mak-
ing Baker the sixth woman, and the first
woman of color, to be so recognized.
Born in St. Louis in 1906, she is also the
first American-born person (she became
a French citizen in 1937) to be honored
alongside the likes of Voltaire and Hugo.
Baker and her husband, the band-
leader Jo Bouillon, adopted twelve chil-
dren from multiple countries. Having
survived poverty and segregation in
America, Baker wanted to assemble a
“rainbow tribe” to serve as a living demon-
stration of unity. The children’s upbring-
ing, at Château des Milandes, a rambling
castle in the Périgord, was unusual both
in its eccentricity and in its strictness. In
“Joséphine Baker, l’Universelle,” a new
memoir, Bouillon-Baker compares Mi-
landes to “a perpetual summer camp”:
peacocks, baboons, and tourists roaming
the property; a regimen of cod-liver oil,
Sunday flannels, evening prayers (“Ga-
blaiss mummy”); an injunction against
musical training. “Maman was a Dem-
ocrat in American politics, but she was
conservative as a mother,” Bouillon-Baker
said. (He was born Brahim, in Algeria,
but Baker called him Brian.) An actor,
he is the only member of the tribe to have
gone into showbiz. “Never big roles,” he
said. “I work regularly, dubbing voices.”
Bouillon-Baker’s fiancée, Sabine Des-
forges, stopped by the café on her way
back from getting her hair blown out.“It’s a little too beehive,” Desforges
said. “But it’ll come down.”
“A mix of Lauren Bacall and Cath-
erine Deneuve,” Bouillon-Baker said.
At three-thirty, they got into a car
heading for the Panthéon. Both wore
masks imprinted with a 1945 photograph
of Baker as an officer in the women’s
auxiliary of the Free French Air Force.
(“Negro DANCER Reported Dead Is
Living in Morocco,” a 1942 article that
appeared in the Times proclaimed, re-
porting, “She lives in the splendor of anBrian Bouillon-Bakerof pregnancy. S.B. 8 specifically does not
allow state officials to enforce the law,
authorizing only private citizens to do
so, by suing an abortion provider for
damages of ten thousand dollars for each
procedure performed—what several Jus-
tices referred to, during oral arguments
on November 1st, as a “bounty.” The law
was designed to circumvent its being
challenged in federal court. The argu-
ments were about whether a state may
indeed insulate unconstitutional laws
from federal-court review simply by del-
egating their enforcement to the gen-
eral public. An amicus brief filed by civil-
rights organizations linked S.B. 8 to “the
violent history of citizen’s arrests and
racist vigilantism in the South.”
For the most part, even the conser-
vative Justices seemed offended by Tex-
as’s gambit, not least because Texas had
to admit that liberal states could use the
same enforcement scheme to insulate
unconstitutional restrictions on gun rights
from challenge. The Court will likely
push back and allow abortion providers
to pursue a constitutional challenge to
S.B. 8 in federal court. But the ground
on which such a challenge could ulti-
mately have been expected to succeed
will have radically shifted. Unconstitu-
tional when it went into effect, S.B. 8’s
six-week ban may well be constitutional
in several months’ time, even if its en-
forcement mechanism is not, if the Court
issues a decision in Dobbs that overturns
Roe. Yet, notwithstanding what publicly
transpired during the Dobbs oral argu-
ments, a compromise might still be ham-
mered out behind the scenes, in which
Chief Justice John Roberts enables a
basic right to abortion to remain, while
allowing Mississippi and other states to
ban abortion as early as fifteen weeks,
and leaving it for another day to decide
how much before that is too early.
During last week’s arguments, Jus-
tice Sonia Sotomayor lamented, “Willthis institution survive the stench that
this creates in the public perception that
the Constitution and its reading are just
political acts?” The stench, so to speak,
is a by-product of the unresolved am-
bivalence within the legal system about
who has the authority to decide what
the law should be. The conservative Jus-
tices seemed eager to “return” the ques-
tion of abortion to the people. But the
point of a fundamental constitutional
right is that it shouldn’t be at the peo-
ple’s mercy, particularly when the com-
position of the Court itself has been
shifted through political means for this
purpose. The spectacle of states bra-
zenly flying in the face of the Court’s
constitutional precedents, shortly fol-
lowed by the Court’s discarding those
precedents to make illegal actions legal
after all, would effectively communi-
cate that the Supreme Court is not, in
fact, supreme.
—Jeannie Suk Gersen