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

Brigitte Bardot has inspired many fantasies. immoral, breathless Dreams of various French auteurs of the 1950s and 60s, cheerful nipples swoop She was created in 1969 as a model for Marianne, the embodiment of the French Republic.

With her death on December 28, the illusion of a more contemporary Bardot was shattered. Singer Chappell Roan responded to Bardot’s death at the age of 91, posting a photo of the actress in her prime in the beehives on Instagram and writing, “Rest in peace, Miss Bardot,” saying it inspired her song Red Wine Supernova.

The post was hastily deleted the next day. “Damn it,” Roan wrote “I didn’t know all these crazy things Ms. Bardot advocated, I don’t condone it. Very disappointing to learn,” he wrote on Instagram Stories.

Roan didn’t specify how crazy this is, but there are actually a lot to choose from. The actor’s iconic mid-century image may have remained frozen in time for some, but in the real world, Bardot’s persona had long since morphed into something much uglier.

In later life, Bardot was a passionate supporter of animal rights, true, but also a determined, enthusiastic racist, writing of Muslims: “They slaughter women and children, our priests, our civil servants, our tourists and our sheep, one day they will slaughter us and we will have deserved it.” Elsewhere he wrote: “Illegal immigrants… desecrate and attack our churches, turning them into human pigstys, defecating behind the altar, urinating on the pillars, spreading their sickening odor under the sacred domes of the choir.”

These views not only led to Bardot being “cancelled” in modern parlance; it also led to his conviction on five counts of inciting racial hatred. He also referred to homosexuals as “fairground freaks” and accused #MeToo victims of being “hypocritical, ridiculous and frivolous.” However, after her death, French President Emmanuel Macron called her “the legend of the century” and wrote that “Brigitte Bardot was the embodiment of a free life.” That’s one way to look at it.

In a censorious environment where even Roan’s deletion and retraction convinced him harsh criticism from some fanscontemporary 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” carrying “memories of cannibalism.” How can history compensate for the contradiction of Bardot, who throughout her long life was both a symbol of sexual liberation and a spokesperson for poison and hatred?

Of course, no one in France can claim to be shocked by Bardot’s politics, and many of the obituaries there are clear-eyed about what she represented. Clément Guillou wrote that Bardot “embodied racial hatred.” Le Mondeand “was an exception in French culture; the only celebrity who openly defended the far right”. Bardot was married to Bernard d’Ormale, a senior adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front party, for more than three decades until her death. (Le Pen would write approvingly that Bardot was “a pure nostalgia for France.”)

french daily LiberationHe noted that the actor’s love of animals (which earned her an enduring image, at least for a time in the English-speaking world, as the dotted cat lady) “slowly drifted into an identity-based discourse in which animal rights became intertwined with racist views of France.” A spokesperson for the radical right in recent years, “Brigitte Bardot was no longer interested in the minutiae” but lived as a recluse in her mansion in Saint-Tropez, “surrounded by animals and anger.”

“It is true that in France he is much more present in contemporary work because he is very vocal about many issues. [political] “He was more than just the UK incarnation, where he was still mostly seen as a movie star and a global celebrity.” Ginette VincendeauDr. is an honorary professor of film studies at King’s College London, who has written extensively on Bardot and French cinema.

Vincendeau was strained this week over the actress’s image when she was asked to reconsider her appreciation of Bardot’s contributions to French cinema and culture. It was published By the British Film Institute to add further detail regarding race hatred beliefs. Vincendeau says he didn’t mean to belittle Bardot’s views: “But from my perspective, we wouldn’t be talking about Brigitte Bardot’s views. [politics]”If she wasn’t a movie star and, in my opinion, a very interesting pioneering 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 is a kind of justification for her attitude” – but she was nevertheless an enormously important figure in the history of women’s sexual liberation in France, says Vincendeau. She notes that French women did not have the right to vote until 1944, and remained a deeply conservative country even after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex five years later.

In this context, Vincendeau says, the impact of 1956’s And God Created Woman, in which the 22-year-old Bardot plays a voluptuous orphan who initiates and enjoys sex, is explosive. “The originality and modernity of her figure was that she was not just a sex bomb. As a feminist, of course, I am fully aware of this. [this film] and all her subsequent films depicted her body as an erotic fantasy for the male gaze. But what was unique about Bardot, and why she was such an interesting figure for feminists, was that she was also a woman expressing her own desire. “He just wasn’t responding.”

The character of Juliette was created by a man (Roger Vadim, Bardot’s husband and the film’s writer-director), but when Bardot left him for a time co-star in the movieJust as he was becoming a huge star, Jean-Louis Trintignant became associated with the same sexual immorality. Vincendeau suggests that she was a figure of lust for men and a fantasy for women, “because there was no legal contraception or abortion, so she represented a dream of liberation for women, and it was a very powerful dream”.

“Brigitte Bardot was an extraordinary catalyst: with her, we emerged from a faded society full of moralism… [the student revolutions of] May ’68Émilie Giaime, lecturer in contemporary history and media studies at the Catholic Institute of Paris. he said this week. “It was the fuel for this metamorphosis of French society and the new aspirations of the youth.” The unconventionality that Bardot represented in the 1950s may be a far cry from the overarching sex positivity of a contemporary queer artist like Roan, but there’s an argument to be made that one helps create the conditions for the other.

Bardot may have embraced the outspoken freedom offered by her stardom, but the frenzied “Bardomania” that emerged also came at a huge cost. She was the first target of the nascent paparazzi culture and was subjected to constant, brutal harassment, including being forced to give birth at home in 1960 while her home was surrounded by photographers (she had declared she did not want the pregnancy but was unable to terminate it).

France’s strict, modern-day privacy laws emerged partly in response to Bardot’s terrifying experience; After quitting acting altogether in 1973, Giaime argues that the trauma of this period may have driven him into a reclusive misanthropy.

Dr. studied French and film at Newcastle University. Sarah Leahy says Bardot enjoyed pushing people’s buttons: “She was a provocateur and enjoyed controversy” – yet her Islamophobia was unquestionably genuine. “He didn’t censor himself; he said what he thought, whether we agreed with it or not, whether we found it disgusting.”

Leahy has been lecturing on the impact of And God Created Woman for years; “I would say there’s been a real change in students’ reactions to that film,” he says recently. “It’s really interesting. I think knowing what they know about it now, it’s harder for them to access the ’50s image.”

He adds that Bardot is “a figure from a different time.” Her contemporaries included women like Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe who died young and were frozen in another life. Unlike them, he lived longer and became more angry.

“When you start to question a myth,” says Leahy, “you uncover the truth that it is impossible to derive one coherent meaning from someone’s life, especially someone like him who did so many different things.” Sex object, role model, compassionate campaigner, racist. Bardot was all of these.