Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture 2025

The Society for the Study of French History

and

The Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France

Present:

The Annual Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture,
Monday 13th January 2025.

Uncovering Josephine Baker’s War: A Historian’s Journey

Professor Hanna Diamond (Cardiff University)

The 2025 Annual Douglas Johnson Memorial Lecture will be the 15th in this series, organised by the Society for the Study of French History and the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France. It will be held at the the Institut français, South Kensington, London.

Registration is essential, though attendance is free. Reservations can be made using Eventbrite at the following link:

[EVENTBRITE TICKET LINK]

We are delighted to welcome Professor Hanna Diamond (Cardiff University) to give a paper entitled ‘Uncovering Josephine Baker’s War: A Historian’s Journey’.

Abstract:

The extraordinary story of Josephine Baker, the African American who came to France in 1925 and rapidly became an international star, is well known. However, her wartime contribution to French intelligence and her work supporting the Allies and the Gaullist cause have received virtually no scholarly attention. This lecture will take us through aspects of my research as I delved into this period of Baker’s life. Following in Josephine Baker’s footsteps, we will travel from Paris to French North Africa, via her chateau in Dordogne, to Spanish Morocco, Spain, Portugal and across the Middle East. As we prepare for the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, we will also learn how Baker came to the UK and participated in the original VE Day celebrations in May 1945.

Baker’s celebrity status and her troop entertainment work proved a remarkably effective cover for her clandestine operations. In unearthing her involvement with French military intelligence, we will endeavour to disentangle the complexities of its allegiances and unravel how Baker navigated her own position in the complex landscape of wartime espionage. Baker’s presence in North Africa and the Middle East also coincided with a growing demand for independence among the Arab peoples and she was a direct witness to the beginnings of decolonisation in the region. Our journey will therefore uncover how her unstinting support for Gaullism paradoxically set her against the push for freedom from colonial rule at that time. We will finish with a brief consideration of how this pivotal wartime period impacted on Baker’s later life.

Bio: Hanna Diamond is professor of French History in the School of Modern Languages at Cardiff University. She has published widely on the social and cultural history of France during the Second World War including two monographs, Women and the Second World War in France (Longman, 1999) and Fleeing Hitler: France 1940 (OUP, 2007). She collaborates with a range of non-academic partners in the creative industries (television, film and theatre) and the curatorial sector in the UK and France (Musée de la Libération de Paris). From 2021-2023, she was holder of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to work on Josephine Baker, and her resulting book Josephine Baker’s Secret War: The African American Star Who Fought For France and Freedom will appear in April 2025 with Yale University Press.