Brigitte Bardot inspired many fantasies, from the wanton, panting reveries of assorted French auteurs in the 1950s and 60s, to the perky-nippled bust created in 1969 as a model for Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic itself.
With her death on 28 December, another more contemporary Bardot illusion was shattered. The singer Chappell Roan, responding to Bardot’s passing at 91, posted a photo of the actor in her beehived prime on Instagram, saying she had inspired her song Red Wine Supernova and writing": “Rest in peace Ms Bardot.”
The following day, the post was hastily deleted. “Holy shit,” Roan wrote on her Instagram Stories, “I did not know all that insane shit Ms. Bardot stood for obvs I do not condone this. very disappointing to learn.”
Which insane shit, Roan didn’t specify, but in truth there is plenty to choose from. The iconic mid-century image of the actor may have remained frozen in time for some, but in the real world, the persona of Bardot had long since curdled into something much uglier.
Later-life Bardot was a passionate defender of animal rights, true, but she was also a committed, enthusiastic racist, who wrote of Muslims: “They slaughter women and children, our monks, our civil servants, our tourists and our sheep, one day they’ll slaughter us, and we’ll have deserved it.” Elsewhere, she wrote: “Illegal immigrants … desecrate and storm our churches, transforming them into human pigsties, defecating behind the altar, urinating against the columns, spreading their nauseating stench beneath the sacred vaults of the choir.”
These views didn’t just get Bardot “cancelled”, in the modern parlance – they saw her convicted of incitement to racial hatred, five times. She also referred to gay people as “fairground freaks” and denounced #MeToo victims as “hypocritical, ridiculous, and pointless”. And yet, after her death, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, called her the “legend of the century”, writing that “Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom”. It’s one way of looking at it.
In a censorious climate in which even the manner of Roan’s deletion and retraction won her vitriol from some fans, contemporary cancel culture seems ill-equipped to respond to a woman who described the Tamil community on the island of Réunion as “natives” with “savage genes” who carried “reminiscences of cannibalism”. How can history square the contradiction of Bardot, who in her long life was both a symbol of sexual emancipation and a mouthpiece for toxicity and hate?
Certainly, in France, no one can claim to have been shocked by Bardot’s politics, and many of her obituaries there have been clear-eyed about what she represented. Bardot “embodied racial hatred”, wrote Clément Guillou in Le Monde, and was “an exception in French culture – the only celebrity to openly defend the far right”. For more than three decades until her death, Bardot was married to Bernard d’Ormale, a senior adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party. (Le Pen would write approvingly that Bardot was “nostalgic for a clean France”.)
The French daily Libération, too, noted that the actor’s love for animals – which won her for a time, in the anglophone world at least, an enduring image as a dotty cat lady – had “gradually shifted towards an identity-based discourse where animal rights became intertwined with a racist view of France”. As a mouthpiece for the radical right in recent decades, “Brigitte Bardot no longer bothered with nuance” but lived as a recluse in her Saint-Tropez estate, “surrounded by animals and her temper”.
“It is true that in France, because she was very vocal about a number of issues, she’s been much more present in her contemporary [political] incarnation than she was in the UK, where she was still mostly seen as a film star and global celebrity,” says Ginette Vincendeau, a professor emeritus of film studies at King’s College London, who has written widely on Bardot and French cinema.
Vincendeau experienced the tension over the actor’s image this week, when she was asked to revisit her appreciation of Bardot’s contribution to French cinema and culture, published by the British Film Institute, to add more detail of her race-hate convictions. She had not intended to minimise Bardot’s views, says Vincendeau, “but for me, we would not be talking about Brigitte Bardot’s [politics], if she hadn’t been the film star and, to me, a very interesting pioneer figure in the representation of women – and I think that still needs to be celebrated”.
Bardot never considered herself a feminist – “she came from a very privileged background and there’s a kind of entitlement to her attitude” – but she was nonetheless a hugely significant figure in the history of female sexual liberation in France, says Vincendeau. French women did not get the right to vote until 1944, she points out, and it remained a deeply conservative country even after Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published five years later.
In this context, the impact in 1956 of And God Created Woman, starring a 22-year-old Bardot as a voluptuous orphan who initiates and enjoys sex, was explosive, says Vincendeau. “The originality and the modernity of her figure was that she was not just a sex bomb. As a feminist, of course I’m absolutely aware that [this film] and all her subsequent films portrayed her body as an erotic fantasy for the male gaze. But the unique aspect of Bardot, and why she’s such an interesting figure for feminists, is that she was also a woman who expressed her own desire. She was not just reacting.”
The character of Juliette was created by a man – Bardot’s husband and the film’s writer-director, Roger Vadim – but when she left him for her co-star in the film, Jean-Louis Trintignant, she became associated with the same sexual wantonness, just as she was becoming a huge star. A figure of lust for men, she was also a fantasy for women, argues Vincendeau, “because there was no legal contraception or abortion so she represented a dream of emancipation for women, and a very powerful one”.
“Brigitte Bardot was a prodigious catalyst: with her, we went from a withered society, riddled with moralism … to [the student revolutions of] May ’68,” Émilie Giaime, a lecturer in contemporary history and media studies at the Catholic Institute of Paris, said this week. “She was the fuel for this metamorphosis of French society and the new aspirations of young people.” The unconventionality that Bardot represented in the 1950s may be a long way from the inclusive sex positivity of a contemporary queer artist such as Roan, but there’s an argument that one helped create the conditions for the other.
Bardot may have embraced the outspoken liberty that her stardom offered, but the crazed “Bardomania” that resulted also came at an enormous cost. She was the first target of the emerging paparazzi culture, and endured constant, wild harassment, including being forced to give birth at home in 1960 (after a pregnancy she had been clear she did not want but was unable to terminate) while her house was besieged by photographers.
France’s strict, present-day privacy laws emerged in part in response to Bardot’s awful experience; Giaime argues that the trauma of this period may have helped drive her to a reclusive misanthropy after she quit acting altogether in 1973.
Bardot enjoyed pushing people’s buttons, says Dr Sarah Leahy, a reader in French and film at Newcastle University – “She was a provocateur, and she enjoyed controversy” – nonetheless, her Islamophobia was unquestionably sincere. “She didn’t censor herself; she said what she thought, whether we agree with it or not, whether we consider it to be abhorrent.”
Leahy has taught courses on the impact of And God Created Woman for years; recently, she says, “I’d say that there’s been a real change in students’ responses to that film. It’s really interesting. I guess it’s more difficult for them to access what that image would have been in the 50s, knowing what they know now about her.”
Bardot, she adds, was “a figure from a different time”. Her contemporaries included actors like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, women who died young and are frozen in another lifetime. Unlike them, she lived long and grew angrier.
“When you start to interrogate a myth, you expose the fact that it’s impossible to have a single coherent meaning from somebody’s life, especially somebody like her, who’s done so many different things,” says Leahy. The sex object, the role model, the compassionate campaigner, the racist. Bardot was all of them.
