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40 Fascinating Facts About the Fabulous Josephine Baker

Khalid Elhassan July 2, 2019 24 min

Josephine Baker - Josephine Baker - Chanter L'amour

20. She Became a French Citizen

Josephine Baker and her third husband, industrialist Jean Lion. Life Buzz

After more than a decade of success and adulation in France and Europe, Josephine Baker was dismayed by the way she was treated, and the racism she endured, upon returning to her country of birth. She had changed, but America had not. In 1937, she returned to France broken hearted, and the experience contributed to her decision to abandon her US citizenship and become a French national, instead. Back in Paris, she married French industrialist Jean Lion, and got naturalized as a citizen of France.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.