Can we take pleasure in the art of someone we know has committed deeds we now regard as despicable? And even if that artist once enchanted us, can we ignore the bigotry that may have been festering for decades? For over 20 years, Brigitte Bardot was unquestionably the most celebrated object of heterosexual male desire, not just in cinema but anywhere. Yet for much longer, Bardot, who has died at 91, embodied both sweetness and cruelty in roughly equal proportions.

At the height of her global adoration, Bardot was revered in France. President Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that her contribution to French exports rivaled that of French automobile manufacturer Renault. From 1969 to 1972, she served as the model for Marianne, the symbol of French liberty and the Republic. And in 1985, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. As her looks faded and film roles dried up, however, she morphed into a very different kind of figure — one some continued to adore, but others found deeply repugnant.

And God Created Woman

Parisian Bardot grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Her father was an industrialist; her mother, a dance enthusiast, enrolled Brigitte in classes. She performed well enough to gain admission to the National Superior Conservatory for Music and Dance in 1947. As a teenager, she began modeling for fashion magazines. She married film director Roger Vadim in 1952 and made her screen debut in Jean Boyer’s Le Trou Normand that same year. Among her early appearances was a small role in the British comedy Doctor at Sea (1955).

The following year came And God Created Woman (Et Dieu… créa la femme), Bardot’s breakthrough. A decade before Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Bardot played an uninhibited 18-year-old, widely labelled a “nymphet” at the time. She soon acquired the epithet “sex kitten.” This was the mid-1950s, when the term “objectification” was used almost entirely in literary criticism rather than feminist discourse. (As in “the author objectifies the character’s emotions perfectly.”)

Nothing succeeds like scandal, and the 1950s were no exception. Religious and censorship groups, especially in the United States, were outraged by Bardot’s on-screen sexuality — outrage amplified when it emerged she was having an affair with her married costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. Parallels with her contemporary Elizabeth Taylor, whose affair with Richard Burton made her tabloid prey, are obvious. Both women were vilified.

Bardot herself acknowledged that her fame rested more on image than craft: “I started out as a lousy actress and have remained one,” she once remarked. Perhaps this is why she turned briefly to singing. In 1967, she recorded Je t’aime… moi non plus with her then lover Serge Gainsbourg — a provocative song that seemed to eavesdrop on lovers in flagrante. Bardot asked for the track to be withdrawn; the version released — and made notorious — was recorded later by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in 1969.

Bigotry

In the 1970s, Bardot devoted herself to animal welfare. A committed vegetarian, she fulminated against what she regarded as needless cruelty in practices ranging from seal-culling to the horsemeat trade. Halal slaughter, which does not require stunning, became one of her particular targets.

She campaigned vigorously, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals in 1986 and raising substantial funds, including half a million dollars from auctioning her jewelry. She wrote protest letters to world leaders, including China’s Jiang Zemin and Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II. Today, celebrities regularly wander into ethical and political terrain; at the time, Bardot’s activism felt more startling. And she didn’t stop there. In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right Front National, and began publishing her views.

Bardot repeatedly attacked France’s immigration policy, with particular hostility toward Muslims. She was convicted five times of inciting racial and religious hatred. Like Taylor, Bardot was an independent, self-willed woman who cared little whether she was loved or hated. Unlike Taylor, Bardot veered into far-right politics and unapologetic Islamophobia. As the only French celebrity openly to defend the far right, she must have realized how much this damaged her reputation. Perhaps this motivated her decision to live her final years reclusively in St Tropez, where she died.

Arts and artists

So how do we parse La Bardot? In the 1960s, she had few, if any, rivals as a symbol of female sexual liberation, and at the time, this felt revolutionary. Simone de Beauvoir called her “the locomotive of women’s history.” Today, many would say she also played too willingly into male fantasy. Her animal-welfare campaigning achieved real legislative impact; her bigotry caused real harm. Both statements are true.

Can anyone who lived through the 1960s remember Bardot simply as the cinematic siren without wondering whether the bigotry was always there, merely lacking expression? And even if it was, would it have provoked the same response then as now? Simply “backtracking,” as Chappell Roan has done, is an easy option. The harder question is whether we can meaningfully separate art (in the broadest sense) from the artist. Bardot emerged at a time before women were widely encouraged to free themselves from domestic subservience. The Feminine Mystique appeared only in 1963, yet the values she later embraced leave her firmly on the wrong side of history.

Perhaps the more unsettling truth is that Bardot forces us to confront our own complicity. We didn’t merely consume her image; we helped manufacture it. The erotic fantasy she embodied was fed by studios, journalists, politicians and audiences who thrilled in her transgression while quietly accepting the cultural status quo that made such fantasies necessary. Bardot didn’t invent misogyny any more than she did spectacle, but she allowed herself to be a convenient vessel. In reassessing her, we are not only re-evaluating an individual’s life; we are examining the culture that first exalted her, then recoiled in horror when she revealed that the conservatism and cruelty embedded in that culture were hers as well. We arrive at similar conclusions when listening to Michael Jackson, R. Kelly or Sean “Diddy” Combs.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of the book Elizabeth Taylor: A Private Life for Public Consumption.]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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