{"id":216065,"date":"2026-01-04T08:29:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T08:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/216065\/"},"modified":"2026-01-04T08:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T08:29:07","slug":"sex-object-animal-rights-activist-racist-the-paradox-that-was-brigitte-bardot-brigitte-bardot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/216065\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex object, animal rights activist, racist: the paradox that was Brigitte Bardot | Brigitte Bardot"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brigitte Bardot inspired many fantasies, from the wanton<\/a>, panting<\/a> reveries of assorted French auteurs in the 1950s and 60s, to the perky-nippled bust<\/a> created in 1969 as a model for Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic itself.<\/p>\n

With her death on 28 December, another more contemporary Bardot illusion was shattered. The singer Chappell Roan, responding to Bardot\u2019s passing<\/a> 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”: \u201cRest in peace Ms Bardot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following day, the post was hastily deleted. \u201cHoly shit,\u201d Roan wrote<\/a> on her Instagram Stories, \u201cI did not know all that insane shit Ms. Bardot stood for obvs I do not condone this. very disappointing to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which insane shit, Roan didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Brigitte Bardot in A Very Private Affair, 1962. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Later-life Bardot was a passionate defender of animal rights, true, but she was also a committed, enthusiastic racist, who wrote of Muslims: \u201cThey slaughter women and children, our monks, our civil servants, our tourists and our sheep, one day they\u2019ll slaughter us, and we\u2019ll have deserved it.\u201d Elsewhere, she wrote: \u201cIllegal immigrants \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

These views didn\u2019t just get Bardot \u201ccancelled\u201d, in the modern parlance \u2013 they saw her convicted of incitement to racial hatred, five times. She also referred to gay people as \u201cfairground freaks\u201d and denounced #MeToo victims<\/a> as \u201chypocritical, ridiculous, and pointless\u201d. And yet, after her death, France\u2019s president, Emmanuel Macron, called her the \u201clegend of the century\u201d, writing that \u201cBrigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom\u201d. It\u2019s one way of looking at it.<\/p>\n

In a censorious climate in which even the manner of Roan\u2019s deletion and retraction won her vitriol from some fans<\/a>, contemporary cancel culture seems ill-equipped to respond to a woman who described the Tamil community on the island of R\u00e9union as \u201cnatives\u201d with \u201csavage genes\u201d who carried \u201creminiscences of cannibalism\u201d. 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?<\/p>\n

Brigitte Bardot supporting the French animal protection society in Gennevilliers, Paris, in 1982. Photograph: Duclos\/AP<\/p>\n

Certainly, in France, no one can claim to have been shocked by Bardot\u2019s politics, and many of her obituaries there have been clear-eyed about what she represented. Bardot \u201cembodied racial hatred\u201d, wrote Cl\u00e9ment Guillou in Le Monde<\/a>, and was \u201can exception in French culture \u2013 the only celebrity to openly defend the far right\u201d. For more than three decades until her death, Bardot was married to Bernard d\u2019Ormale, a senior adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen\u2019s National Front party. (Le Pen would write approvingly that Bardot was \u201cnostalgic for a clean France\u201d.)<\/p>\n

The French daily Lib\u00e9ration<\/a>, too, noted that the actor\u2019s love for animals \u2013 which won her for a time, in the anglophone world at least, an enduring image as a dotty cat lady \u2013 had \u201cgradually shifted towards an identity-based discourse where animal rights became intertwined with a racist view of France\u201d. As a mouthpiece for the radical right in recent decades, \u201cBrigitte Bardot no longer bothered with nuance\u201d but lived as a recluse in her Saint-Tropez estate, \u201csurrounded by animals and her temper\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is true that in France, because she was very vocal about a number of issues, she\u2019s 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,\u201d says Ginette Vincendeau<\/a>, a professor emeritus of film studies at King\u2019s College London, who has written widely on Bardot and French cinema.<\/p>\n

Brigitte Bardot with her husband, Bernard d\u2019Ormale, a senior adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, on a carriage tour through Vienna in May 2002. Photograph: Herbert P Oczeret\/EPA<\/p>\n

Vincendeau experienced the tension over the actor\u2019s image this week, when she was asked to revisit her appreciation of Bardot\u2019s contribution to French cinema and culture, published<\/a> by the British Film Institute, to add more detail of her race-hate convictions. She had not intended to minimise Bardot\u2019s views, says Vincendeau, \u201cbut for me, we would not be talking about Brigitte Bardot\u2019s [politics], if she hadn\u2019t been the film star and, to me, a very interesting pioneer figure in the representation of women \u2013 and I think that still needs to be celebrated\u201d.<\/p>\n

Bardot never considered herself a feminist \u2013 \u201cshe came from a very privileged background and there\u2019s a kind of entitlement to her attitude\u201d \u2013 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<\/a>\u2019s The Second Sex was published five years later.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe originality and the modernity of her figure was that she was not just a sex bomb. As a feminist, of course I\u2019m 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\u2019s such an interesting figure for feminists, is that she was also a woman who expressed her own desire. She was not just reacting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bardot, centre, is led into a court in Paris in December 2008 to face accusations of inciting racial hatred. Photograph: Reuters<\/p>\n

The character of Juliette was created by a man \u2013 Bardot\u2019s husband and the film\u2019s writer-director, Roger Vadim \u2013 but when she left him for her co-star in the film<\/a>, 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, \u201cbecause there was no legal contraception or abortion so she represented a dream of emancipation for women, and a very powerful one\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrigitte Bardot was a prodigious catalyst: with her, we went from a withered society, riddled with moralism \u2026 to [the student revolutions of] May \u201968<\/a>,\u201d \u00c9milie Giaime, a lecturer in contemporary history and media studies at the Catholic Institute of Paris, said this week<\/a>. \u201cShe was the fuel for this metamorphosis of French society and the new aspirations of young people.\u201d 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\u2019s an argument that one helped create the conditions for the other.<\/p>\n

Bardot in And God Created Woman, 1956. Photograph: Cinetext\/Allstar Collection\/Vestron<\/p>\n

Bardot may have embraced the outspoken liberty that her stardom offered, but the crazed \u201cBardomania\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

France\u2019s strict, present-day privacy laws emerged in part in response to Bardot\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Bardot enjoyed pushing people\u2019s buttons, says Dr Sarah Leahy, a reader in French and film at Newcastle University \u2013 \u201cShe was a provocateur, and she enjoyed controversy\u201d \u2013 nonetheless, her Islamophobia was unquestionably sincere. \u201cShe didn\u2019t censor herself; she said what she thought, whether we agree with it or not, whether we consider it to be abhorrent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leahy has taught courses on the impact of And God Created Woman for years; recently, she says, \u201cI\u2019d say that there\u2019s been a real change in students\u2019 responses to that film. It\u2019s really interesting. I guess it\u2019s more difficult for them to access what that image would have been in the 50s, knowing what they know now about her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bardot, she adds, was \u201ca figure from a different time\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you start to interrogate a myth, you expose the fact that it\u2019s impossible to have a single coherent meaning from somebody\u2019s life, especially somebody like her, who\u2019s done so many different things,\u201d says Leahy. The sex object, the role model, the compassionate campaigner, the racist. Bardot was all of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brigitte Bardot inspired many fantasies, from the wanton, panting reveries of assorted French auteurs in the 1950s and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-216065","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}