Josephine Baker's Paris

Learn about the crazy Paris of the jazz age and it's ultimate icon, Josephine Baker—dancer, Resistance hero, and Civil Rights activist!

Cost: $12. Please note that this fee helps keep our small business going during the crisis so we can get up and running right away when it is safe to bring people together again in person.

Tickets: josephinebakerparis.eventbrite.com

Josephine Baker’s performance as a dancer at the Follies Bergères in 1927, nude but for a skirt of bananas, enthralled le tout Paris and crystallized an age. Still today, la belle Baker is probably the most potent icon of Jazz Age Paris, of the sexually liberated 1920s, of the American “lost generation” in France—and of the wave of black refugee artists in France from the still racially segregated US. But over her life, Baker did so much more than dance the Charleston! She was (briefly) a trained opera singer; she spied for the French Resistance during the war; and she fought so hard for desegregation in the US that she was offered informal leadership of the Civil Rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.

Paris, and her outsize successes there, were, however, central to Baker’s life. As she sang in her most famous song, “J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris”—I have two loves, my country and Paris. This tour will take you through the main locations of Baker’s life, with a focus in Paris—where we’ll see the theaters she danced in, from the first to the last, the fashion houses that designed clothes and costumes for her, bars she frequented (and owned, in some cases), her favorite restaurant—and in France, where we’ll see the grand mansion outside Paris that she lived in in the 1920s and the castle in the South where she raised her “rainbow tribe” of 12 adopted children from different races and religions—and from which she was famous evicted in a late bankruptcy. And finally, her tomb in Monaco, where she was brought by her friend, fellow performer, and fellow Civil Rights activist Princess Grace.

Come learn about the life of this amazing woman on the Paris of Josephine Baker tour!