And God Created Brigitte Bardot

AAfter CC (Claudia Cardinale), it is now BB’s (Brigitte Bardot) turn. The year 2025 ends sadly for millions of French people and admirers around the world: the delightfully insolent Brigitte Bardot is no longer with us. She passed away on the morning of December 28th, at the age of 91, following a few weeks, a few months after her illustrious companions of a bygone age, the handsome Alain Delon and the luminous Claudia Cardinale.

In her final weeks, several health alerts had put the press on alert. She had already been left for dead once or twice, but she had greeted these false reports with a hearty laugh and the carefree attitude that had been hers until the end. But in the end, the good Lord called this tireless young lady, half angel, half devil, back to him.

For generations, Brigitte Bardot was the quintessential French woman. Wildly beautiful and indomitable, by turns elegant and sophisticated or bohemian with her hair blowing in the wind, sulky and capricious, quick to complain or laugh out loud, full of life and passion in everything she did, enamoured with freedom, but a freedom that could not be negotiated and would not be repressed by old or new morals.

Born in 1934, Brigitte Bardot initially set her sights on classical dance and took her first steps as a model. On the cover of Elle magazine, she was spotted by director Marc Allégret and fell in love with his assistant, Roger Vadim, which in 1952 opened the doors to cinema for her at the age of 18. She began with very small roles with the greats of her time: Sacha Guitry and René Clair. In 1956, she lit up the screen in front of her husband Vadim’s camera, playing the lead role in Et Dieu… créa la femme (And God Created Woman). Her dazzling beauty attracted everyone’s attention, and she appeared in numerous films. While her physical appearance was universally admired, her acting skills were met with more scepticism. Far from being a brainless bimbo, Bardot was the first to recognise the limitations of her acting and sought to push her boundaries with prestigious directors such as Clouzot (La Vérité, or The Truth), Louis Malle (Vie privée or A Very Private Affair) and Jean-Luc Godard (Le Mépris, or Contempt).

For all the French people who adored her, Bardot became the woman par excellence. Young girls adored her and dreamt of looking like her. Men dreamt about her at night and sighed over her during the day. She naturally lent her features to the statues of Marianne, the allegory of the Republic. Will success take her to Hollywood? A thousand times no. Bardot could not bring herself to leave her beloved country. She turned down all the scripts she received. “I couldn’t leave for the United States. Even for all the gold in the world, it was impossible,” she told Vogue.

At the turn of the 1970s, BB realised that life in front of the cameras was definitely not for her. In 1975, she put an end to her career for good. In an interview with Le Monde in 2021, she reflected on her departure from cinema. “That fame no longer suited me. The futility of it all … I was put on display like in a circus, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t live. It was everything I hated.”

Every time she read a new script, she literally broke out in hives. She deeply understood the emptiness of the world of film sets and spotlights. She sensed very early on that the golden age of cinema was already over and that the legendary figures capable of creating masterpieces, the Viscontis and Clouzots, were already a thing of the past.

When Bardot left the stage, it was not to become more discreet. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the great cause of her life: the defence of animals. One of her most emblematic battles was on behalf of baby seals, savagely hunted for their fur. In 1986, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation was created to house all her campaigns against animal suffering.

Animals, she confided, disappoint her less than human beings.

BB was a born seductress, aware of her charm and the devastation she could wreak in the hearts of her lovesick admirers, which was accompanied by her rather flexible morals. She collected love affairs and husbands. Brigitte Bardot was a free woman, which does not mean that she should be reduced to an icon of sexual liberation. She herself hated that. In the columns of Vogue, she took a very lucid view of her position as a sex symbol: “I don’t give a damn about women’s liberation. I sit on it. As for sexual freedom, women didn’t wait for me to liberate themselves. What a misunderstanding! I was never scandalous. I was simply who I wanted to be,” she explained to a journalist who was undoubtedly stunned by her carelessness.

Today, on the web, the BB paradox is in full swing. On X, unexpected tributes follow one after another. We see RN MP Marine Le Pen celebrating her; essayist Laurent Obertone, a critic of the cowardice of the progressive left, paying tribute to her for her unwavering support; while environmental activist Hugo Clément bows out with the same emotion because of her fight against animal suffering.

The BB paradox can be summed up in one word: this incandescent woman was a pioneer and an inventor. A pioneer of the miniskirt, an inventor of Saint-Tropez, the irresistible fishing village on the Var coast that she made fashionable, turning it into one of the most sought-after seaside resorts on the planet. She was also a pioneer in the cause of animal welfare, drawing media attention to it as early as 1962—at a time when the cause of living creatures and the environment, battered by booming economic growth, was of little interest to most people. Finally, she was a pioneer in denouncing the ravages of immigration and the Islamisation of France, which she quickly understood were disfiguring her beloved France—by veiling women and slaughtering sheep in bathtubs.

Like her old friend Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot had strong political opinions. Somewhat right-wing, even very right-wing. A fervent admirer of De Gaulle, she soon became convinced that only the national right could save the country. Wasn’t her third husband, Bertrand d’Ormale, an advisor to Jean-Marie Le Pen? In 2003, her book Un Cri dans le silence (A Cry in the Silence) earned her some serious enemies. It contains some gems: “The gradual Islamisation of our country is taking place amid general indifference, with the complicity of our leaders.” Or: “We accept everything, we give in to everything, and in the name of respect we are renouncing our civilisation.” Some of her comments led to her being convicted of incitement to racial hatred. Today, they seem quite innocuous—and, above all, terribly topical.

The icon of liberated femininity also took a very critical view of wokeism and LGBT ideology—she who embodied better than anyone else an image of the passionately feminine woman and readily called herself a “masculinist,” in love with virile and assertive men. In the same book, she did not mince her words about gay people, calling them “freaks, sadly encouraged in their decadence by the lifting of prohibitions that used to curb extreme excesses.”

But against her will, she had become the muse of a generation that had so thoroughly shaken up the rules and ‘lifted prohibitions’ that it had brought down the entire traditional society that, deep down, BB cherished with all her heart—a society where women with velvety eyes and long, skilfully revealed legs seduced men who were proud of themselves and inevitably a little macho. 

Like Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot no longer recognised herself in decadent modernity and Macronist France. On the threshold of death, she said she was confident about this new experience: “Life today makes death seem like something extraordinary,” she said a few weeks ago in an interview with BFM at her home. 

May God welcome one of his most beautiful creatures into his fold… and forgive this turbulent daughter of Eve for her few missteps!