The disappearance of Brigitte Bardot, who died this Sunday at the age of 91 in Saint-Tropez, has sparked a wave of emotion in France, where her status as a paradoxical cultural icon has been remembered for having been, at the same time, a symbol of sexual emancipation and a critic of the feminist movement.
The death of Bardot, who had been hospitalized last October and had been away from public life for some time, has shocked a country that just over a year ago lost another of its most revered and internationally known myths, the actor Alain Delon, at the age of 88.
The causes of the charismatic French artist’s death have not yet been revealed, nor when and where her funeral will be held.
The death of what came to be considered a sexual myth on a par with Marilyn Monroe occurred in her refuge at La Madrague, one of the two properties she had in the exclusive spa town of Saint-Tropez, with which she had fallen in love during the filming of ‘And God Created Woman’ (1956).
While the police cordoned off the residence before the expected arrival of Bardot’s admirers and while some neighbors placed flowers at the statue erected in her honor in Saint-Tropez, the French political class, with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, at the head, highlighted the legacy of the actress, but also a successful singer.
“Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face turned into Marianne; Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom. French existence, universal brilliance. She moved us. We mourn a legend of the century,” Macron said in ‘X’.
The far-right leader Marine Le Pen considered that Bardot – known by the acronym ‘BB’ – was an “extraordinarily French” personality and praised the fight for the protection of animals that she undertook after retiring from cinema in 1973 and that she continued to this day with the foundation that bears her name.
The interpreter of ‘The Truth’ (1960) and ‘Contempt’ (1963) showed, on several occasions and publicly, her ideological affinities with Le Pen.
It is precisely this affinity with ultranationalism that has censured him on many occasions. Between 1997 and 2008, Bardot was judicially sentenced with financial fines for certain comments and statements of incitement to hatred, especially against Muslims.
Her positions regarding the resurgence of the feminist movement after the “#MeToo” phenomenon starting in 2018 were also especially controversial.
‘BB’ then considered that some of the accusations against men were “hypocritical”, arguing that many artists “warm up producers to get a role.”
Praise from Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir
In statements to EFE made in 2024, Antoine de Baecque, a film historian who published ‘Bardot’ (Pérégrines editions) earlier this year, highlighted that, decades before those controversial statements, the performer had emerged as a symbol of female emancipation.
“Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir wrote about her. Beauvoir, in an article in the American magazine ‘Esquire’ in 1958, praised Bardot for considering that she represents a sexual freedom that challenges patriarchy,” said the cinephile.
The emergence of ‘BB’ in the 50s and 60s of the last century represented a kind of revolution in that conservative France that was beginning to emerge after the Second World War.
Not only for his roles on the big screen, in which he exuded an irrepressible sexuality with dazzling blonde (dyed) hair, but for appearing as a figure who could today be considered ‘anti-system’.
She publicly acknowledged having had an abortion on two occasions – the first at the age of 17 – due to unwanted pregnancies with the director Roger Vadim (whom she married), assumed that she never wanted to be a mother (she did so to the displeasure of Nicolas-Jacques Charrier) and became a heroine of the intellectuality of the time.
Other great figures who came to the rescue of BB, seen by part of the traditional and conservative press in France as “a great sinner and even a prostitute”, were the filmmakers Jean-Luc Gordard and François Truffaut, two leading figures of the ‘Nouvelle Vague’.
Along with her short but dizzying career on the big screen, Brigitte Bardot, known by the initials BB, also had a successful and longer career in music.
The single ‘J’ai t’aime… moi, non plus’, originally recorded in 1967 with her former lover and ‘enfant terrible’ of ‘la chanson française’ Serge Gainsbourg, remained for the annals. On that topic, Bardot’s more than sensual moans still make many blush.
After cinema, the famous actress began a second life in her activism in favor of the protection of animals. His photos in Canada denouncing the seal hunt in the 1970s are still famous. Their fight lasted until the last months of their lives.
In his most recent appearance in the media, in an interview with the ‘BFMTV’ channel in May 2025, he made a plea to prohibit bush hunting in France, which he considered extremely cruel to animals.
With information from EFE.
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