Sexual object, animal rights activist, racist: the paradox that was Brigitte Bardot | Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Bardot has inspired many fantasies, from the absurd daydreams of various French authors in the 1950s and 1960s, to the bust with perky nipples created in 1969 as a model for Marianne, the personification of the French Republic itself.

With her death on December 28, another, more contemporary illusion for Bardot was shattered. Singer Chappelle Rowan, in response to Bardot’s death at the age of 91, posted a photo of the actress at her peak on Instagram, saying it had inspired her song Red Wine Supernova and writing: “Rest in peace, Ms. Bardot.”

The next day, the post was hastily deleted. “Oh my god, I didn’t know all this crazy bullshit, Ms. Bardot was representing the people I don’t condone this for. It’s so disappointing to learn,” Rawan wrote on her Instagram Stories.

Rowan didn’t specify anything crazy, but there really are a lot to choose from. The actor’s iconic mid-century image may have remained frozen in time for some, but out in the real world, Bardot’s persona has long since transformed into something much more hideous.

Bardot in later life was an ardent advocate of animal rights, it is true, but she was also a committed and ardent racist, writing of Muslims: “They slaughter women and children, our monks, our civil servants, our tourists and our sheep. One day they will slaughter us, and we will deserve it.” “Illegal immigrants… desecrate and break into our churches, turn them into human pigs, defecate behind the altar, urinate on the pillars, and spread their stench under the sacred vaults of the choir,” she wrote elsewhere.

These views not only led to Bardot being “canceled,” in modern parlance, but led to her being convicted five times of inciting racial hatred. She also referred to gay people as “fairground freaks” and denounced #MeToo victims as “hypocritical, ridiculous, and senseless.” However, after her death, French President Emmanuel Macron described her as the “myth of the century” and wrote that “Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom.” That’s one way of looking at it.

In a censorship climate where even the manner of Ruan’s deletion and retraction drew harsh criticism from some fans, contemporary cancel culture seems ill-equipped to respond to a woman who described the Tamil community on Reunion Island as “indigenous” with “brutal genes” who carry “memories of cannibalism.” How can history reconcile the contradiction between Bardot, who throughout her long life was a symbol of sexual liberation and a spokesman for hate and hatred?

Certainly no one in France could claim to have been shocked by Bardot’s politics, and many of her obituaries there were clear about what she stood for. Clément Guillot wrote in Le Monde that Bardot “embodied racial hatred” and was “an exception in French culture – the only famous figure to openly defend the far right.” For more than three decades until her death, Bardot was married to Bernard Dormal, a senior adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party. (Le Pen would write approvingly that Bardot was “nostalgic for clean France.”)

French daily Liberation also noted that the actress’s love of animals — which for a time, in the English-speaking world at least, earned her a lasting image as a polka-dotted cat lady — “gradually shifted toward an identity-based discourse as animal rights became entangled with a racist view of France.” As a mouthpiece for the far right in recent decades, Brigitte Bardot “no longer cared about nuance,” but rather lived isolated in her home in Saint-Tropez, “surrounded by animals and their nerves.”

“It is true that in France, because she has been so outspoken on a number of issues, she has been more present in her contemporary life. [political] “She was more embodied than in the UK, where she was still mostly seen as a movie star and an international celebrity,” says Ginette Vincendo, emeritus professor of film studies at King’s College London, who has written extensively about Bardot and French cinema.

Vincendo witnessed tension over the actress’s image this week, when she was asked to reconsider her assessment of Bardot’s contribution to French cinema and culture, published by the British Film Institute, to add more detail about her convictions of racial hatred. Vincendo says she didn’t intend to belittle Bardot’s opinions, “but for me, we’re not going to talk about Brigitte Bardot’s opinions.” [politics]”If she wasn’t a movie star, and to me, a very interesting pioneering figure in female representation – I think she should still be celebrated.”

Bardot never considered herself a feminist – “she came from a very privileged background and there is a kind of entitlement to her position” – but she was nevertheless a very important figure in the history of female sexual liberation in France, Vincendo says. She points out that French women did not gain the right to vote until 1944, and remained a very conservative country even after Simone de Beauvoir’s book “The Second Sex” was published five years later.

In this context, the impact of the 1956 film “And God Made Woman,” starring the 22-year-old Bardot as a voluptuous orphan who initiates and enjoys sex, was explosive, Vincendo says. “The originality and freshness of her character is that she was not just a sex bomb. As a feminist, I am of course very aware of that.” [this film] All of her subsequent films depicted her body as an erotic fantasy for the male gaze. But the unique aspect of Bardot, and the reason she was such an interesting figure for feminists, is that she was also a woman expressing her own desire. It wasn’t just a reaction.

The character of Juliette was created by a man – Bardot’s husband and the film’s writer and director, Roger Vadim – but when she left him for her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, she became associated with the same sexual immorality, just as she became a big star. She was a lustful figure for men, and was also a fantasy for women, Vincendo says, “because there was no legal contraception or abortion, so she represented a dream of women’s liberation, and a very powerful dream.”

“Brigitte Bardot was an amazing catalyst: with her, we moved from a withered society, full of morals… [the student revolutions of] “May 68. It was the fuel for this transformation in French society and the new aspirations of young people,” Emilie Giami, a lecturer in contemporary history and media studies at the Institut Catholique in Paris, said this week. The nontraditionalism that Bardot represented in the 1950s may be a far cry from the inclusive sex positivity of contemporary gay artists like Rowan, but there is an argument that one helped create the conditions for the other.

Bardot may have embraced the frank freedom that stardom offered her, but the crazy “bardomania” that resulted came at an enormous cost. She was the first target of the emerging paparazzi culture, and was subjected to relentless and relentless harassment, including being forced to give birth at home in 1960 (after a pregnancy she was clear she did not want to but was unable to terminate) while her home was besieged by paparazzi.

France’s current strict privacy laws emerged partly in response to Bardot’s terrible experience; Giamie argues that the trauma of this period may have helped drive her into isolated misanthropy after she stopped acting altogether in 1973.

Dr Sarah Leahy, reader in French and film at Newcastle University, says Bardot enjoyed impressing people – “she was an agitator, she enjoyed controversy” – and yet her fear of Islam was undoubtedly sincere. “She did not censor herself. Rather, she said what she thought, whether we agreed with it or not, and whether we considered it objectionable.”

Leahy has taught courses on the influence of “And God Created Woman” for years. “I would say there’s a real change in student responses to this film,” she says recently. “It’s really interesting. I think it’s hard for them to access what that picture was like in the 1950s, knowing what they know about it now.”

She adds that Bardot was “a character from a different time.” Her contemporaries included actors such as Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, two women who died young and were frozen in another life. Unlike them, she lived a long time and became increasingly angry.

“When you start interrogating a myth, you uncover the fact that it’s impossible to have one coherent meaning of someone’s life, especially someone like her, who has done so many different things,” Leahy says. The sexual being, the role model, the compassionate fighter, the racist. Bardot was all of them.