On a weekend back in June, a group of black American writers and activists met in Paris for a conference celebrating the legacy of James Baldwin. They were following in the footsteps of a role model and, for many, it would be their first time outside the US.
The trip took an unexpected turn when, as they arrived, the French capital was gripped by protest, following the fatal shooting by police of a 17-year-old boy of north African descent, Nahel Merzouk. Yet these circumstances allowed conference-goers to be engulfed in Baldwin’s spirit — to reflect on issues of race and identity, and how these differ between France and the US, as Baldwin had frequently done.
France was Baldwin’s second home for much of his life. He spent 17 years, until his death in 1987, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the south-east between Nice and Cannes. Many who knew Baldwin claim the house “saved” him, allowing him to write some of his best work on US society.
After its Paris conference, La Maison Baldwin, a non-profit celebrating Baldwin’s international legacy, organised a pilgrimage to his former home. Attendees were taken aback at what they found. At the bottom of a street lined with oleanders, the huge stone house where Baldwin hosted Nina Simone, Ray Charles and Maya Angelou had been redeveloped into a luxury apartment complex.
“It reminded me of the whole process of gentrification, and how things are just bulldozed and renovated, with no real consideration for what was there beforehand,” says Leroy D Bean, a poet on the trip.
While many former homes of artists are preserved and attract a huge number of visitors, Baldwin’s home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence did not receive the same treatment. Nonetheless, tours continue to happen.
And it wasn’t just any house Baldwin lived in, but a prime property on the Côte d’Azur with lush gardens and views of the Mediterranean.
To understand the cultural significance of this house means understanding Baldwin’s huge impact. Born in Harlem in 1924, Baldwin was the grandson of a slave and the oldest of nine children who grew up in poverty. He first moved to Paris in 1948 with only $40 in his pocket. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France — it was a matter of getting out of America,” he told the Paris Review in 1984. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody, or be killed.”
In the late 1950s, as his status in the US grew, Baldwin became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. A magnetic orator, his speeches are still shared widely on social media. A new biopic, starring Billy Porter as Baldwin, was announced this year.
Baldwin’s popularity in recent years has been spurred on partly by social media, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Oscar-nominated 2016 documentary by Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro. The film is based on an unfinished manuscript called Remember This House, a memoir of Baldwin’s personal recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, which he wrote in his Saint-Paul home. The successive assassinations of his three friends were part of the reason he settled in Saint-Paul in 1970, after a stint in Turkey.
This small town near Nice and Cannes had a long history of attracting artists: Picasso, Chagall, Fitzgerald. It was thanks to the French actress Simone Signoret, who lived and befriended Baldwin in Saint-Paul, that he found the house on Chemin du Pilon.
Baldwin formed the unlikeliest of bonds with its owner, Jeanne Fauré, puzzling many in the village. Fauré’s political views diverged significantly from Baldwin’s progressiveness. She came from a well-off pied-noir family and, according to reports in Jules B Farber’s book on Baldwin’s time in Provence, voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s far-right party and had a picture of Vichy leader Philippe Pétain in her home.
Nevertheless, Baldwin’s personality charmed her. As Hélène Roux, whose family has managed the local hotel La Colombe d’Or for generations, put it to Farber: “[Fauré] totally adored him. She discarded all her rigid, opinionated bigotry to protect this black, gay guy.”
During its heyday, Baldwin’s Saint-Paul home was a sanctuary for artists — especially black Americans in the twilight of their lives, from Miles Davis to Josephine Baker. There were big parties and long talks until sunrise on what became known as the Welcome Table. In his biography of Baldwin, David Leeming wrote that the “Welcome Table was a place of witness, where exiles could come and lay down their souls”.
Baldwin died in December 1987, in his Saint-Paul home, from stomach cancer. His funeral in New York gathered thousands of mourners. But the years that followed would offer more anguish than solace for Baldwin’s family, who were embroiled in a dispute to save his house in France.
Like many artists before him, Baldwin lived and died in financial peril, and he never had enough money to buy the large house outright.
His family’s claim to the property was that, accompanied by Signoret and Yvonne Roux (Hélène’s mother), Baldwin oversaw Fauré sign a viager agreement — a French legal arrangement that meant Fauré would cede the house to him after her death, and that he would buy the house in instalments until then. But, after Fauré died in December 1986, the document could not be found.
After Baldwin’s death, his brother David lived in the house until 1996. He died in the US a year later. Hélène Roux, who knew him well, told the FT: “When David passed away, the last thing he said to me was: ‘Save the house.’”
Around this time, a distant cousin and former housekeeper of Fauré, called Josette Bazzini, claimed Fauré had bequeathed her the house. The expensive legal battle would last almost 20 years but, after four separate trials, a court ruled in favour of Bazzini in 2007.
Bazzini sold the house shortly after to a Dutch property developer who planned to build a boutique hotel. In turn, he sold the property to Groupe Elancia, formerly known as Socri, a real estate investment company that owns commercial property and luxury hotels across the Côte d’Azur.
Elancia knocked down much of the old house to transform it into what it is today: a residence of 18 flats in three buildings across 2,300 sq m, with a pool facing where the old Welcome Table used to stand.
Elancia met resistance in summer 2016, when the founder of La Maison Baldwin, Shannon Cain, a white American writer and activist, squatted in Baldwin’s old house in protest. Although Cain’s aim was to “save” the house, her actions upset some who were close to Baldwin because she acted without the family’s consent. Critics saw her as a “white saviour” who centred herself rather than Baldwin in her actions.
In March 2017, Aisha Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s niece, wrote in a blog post: “I can tell you without doubt that he [James Baldwin] would never approve of the drive to save his former home without his family’s acknowledgment, blessing, and input. He would have considered these unauthorised campaigns a slap in the face to everything for which he stood. He understood that, in his own words, he was ‘worth more dead than alive’.” Cain declined to comment on the record for this story.
A wider debate ensued around Baldwin’s legacy: was anyone allowed to campaign for a cultural figure that so many adored, or was the approval of those who knew him personally necessary? And how important were issues of race and representation in these discussions?
For many black Americans, this experience reignited intergenerational trauma of owning and losing property and cultural heritage. The loss of the house was, for them, not because of missing paperwork but a symptom of racial inequality — especially considering many former homes of famous artists are preserved.
David Linx, a Belgian jazz singer who lived for a couple of years with Baldwin in Saint-Paul, is still angry three decades later. “James Baldwin is a legendary writer. So how come this house was destroyed? Taken away, and destroyed? I try not to get impassioned, but every time I do, because there is something that is not resolved. This should not have happened. This place should have been a sanctuary.”
For Hélène Roux, race may have been a part of the problem but the main issues were ignorance and greed.
“You have to understand the real property value of this place. It’s gigantic, there’s a protected forest, there were century-old trees . . . murals, frescoes . . . I cried to think what could have been done there.”
Little surprise then, that the dispute to win the house was so long and costly. But many still hold the local mayor’s office and Elancia responsible for their insufficient regard for the house’s cultural legacy. Both declined to comment for this story.
“My hunch is that the people in the village, the mayor etc, did not know who Baldwin was,” Roux says. “It was during Jimmy’s revival six years ago that they opened their eyes and they realised [how big he was], because there were lots of people coming to town and asking: ‘Where is James Baldwin’s house?’”
Among these recent visitors were Stan West and Prince Shakur in June 2022, two black American writers of different generations (in their seventies and twenties respectively). But both harbour a love for literature and consider Baldwin a role model.
West once met Baldwin at a conference in Oakland, California, in 1986, where they discussed Black Panther activity. He considered Baldwin “the 20th century’s best essayist”. Shakur, a New-York based writer and activist, was on a writing residency in Saint-Paul organised by La Maison Baldwin. In his acclaimed memoir When They Tell You to Be Good, Shakur wrote: “I had stolen something from his iteration of freedom. Baldwin had crafted a blueprint and now I was crafting my own.”
A feeling shared by Lester Sloan, a black American veteran photojournalist, who revisited Saint-Paul in 2022 after first photographing Baldwin’s house in 1990. He said: “What I learnt from Baldwin is that you have to leave home in order to find out who you are.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Tara Phillips, the new executive director of La Maison Baldwin. “We are often treated as guests in our own country,” she says. “[Baldwin] modelled a life in Saint-Paul that many black Americans don’t believe we can access and paved the way to imagine a different life — a different possibility beyond the US borders.”
Phillips, who is also from Harlem, is already planning events in Paris for the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth next August. Under her leadership, La Maison Baldwin is working with the Baldwin family ahead of the centenary.
Despite the fact Baldwin’s old home is much changed, visitors haven’t been deterred from finding meaning there. At the pilgrimage last June, a groundskeeper unexpectedly opened the gates as visitors were staring from outside and they were allowed in briefly to view where the old Welcome Table once was.
For Syrine Amia Reese-Gaines, a writer and educator from North Carolina, this moment made the experience “surreal”. “It just felt like we were supposed to be there, like his spirit was alive and well with us,” she says. “You recognise that a person’s work and their legacy is not an inanimate object. While the home is important, absolutely, because he spent 17 years there, the words that he left behind and continue to live with us every day, that’s his embodiment.”
As Baldwin fans gathered around the local Café de la Place, brainstorming on how to keep his legacy alive, it became clear that the house may be gone but the feeling of home Baldwin instilled endures. The loss of Baldwin’s house does not mean the loss of memory but an invitation to find new ways to honour his legacy.
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