Brigitte Bardot’s Legacy of Racist Rhetoric

For a certain France, Brigitte Bardot incarnated the lost idyll of the country’s supposed golden years after World War II when its president supped as an equal at the table of world leaders, French-made Citroëns rolled down its new superhighways, and white people of French ancestry filled its cities.

For that France, Ms. Bardot — blond and slim, a child of the most privileged neighborhood in Paris — seemed the perfect symbol of this booming era of liberation from postwar gloom. Indeed, at the time, France was happy to export Ms. Bardot — a superstar of 1960s cinema who died on Sunday at 91 — as the quintessence of the country’s seductive charm. She was “incredibly French,” Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally party, with whose family Ms. Bardot had ties dating back over 60 years, said after her death.

But the idyll had shaky underpinnings from the start, both in its conception of France and of Ms. Bardot herself. When reality caught up with the pure white dream — the reality of a France that even in the 1960s depended for its prosperity in substantial part on immigrants from its former empire, many of them Muslim — the blond goddess soured.

Her post-cinema career, after her early retirement in 1973, was punctuated by a series of hair-raising racist and Islamophobic declarations targeting Muslims and immigrants, along with gay people, feminists and anybody else who didn’t fit into her vision of the “France of before” when “everything was less screwed up,” as she put it in one of her last interviews, with the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles (“Today’s Values”) in September 2024.

Six times convicted of uttering racist statements under France’s strict hate-speech laws, Ms. Bardot was a precious ally for the anti-immigrant party the National Front, which was founded by Ms. Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, an old friend of Ms. Bardot. She was a popular icon who expressed, crudely and in charged images, the anti-immigrant ideology at the party’s core.

She was the only major French star who took up squarely for both the National Front and its rebranded offspring, the National Rally party, French media pointed out this weekend.

In one of the first of her anti-immigrant outbursts she wrote, in Le Figaro in 1996: “And so it is that my country, France, my homeland, has once again been invaded, with the blessings of successive governments, by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims, to whom we are supposed to swear allegiance. To this Islamic flood we are supposed to submit, against our will, all of our traditions.”

She was convicted in a Paris court the following year of inciting racial hatred.

“We no longer have the right to be outraged when illegal immigrants or thugs profane and conquer our churches, in order to transform them into human pigsties, defecating behind the altar, pissing against the columns, spreading their nauseating smells beneath the sacred vaults of our choirs,” she wrote in her book “Un cri dans le Silence” (“A Cry Amid Silence”) in 2003. She was convicted, again of inciting racial hatred, the following year. The court ruled that some comments in Ms. Bardot’s book would lead her readers “to reject members of the Muslim community through hatred and violence,” according to a report in Le Monde.

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Ms. Bardot was also a passionate animal rights activist whose Brigitte Bardot Foundation worked on behalf of that cause. In 2021 she was fined thousands of euros for writing in an open letter that inhabitants of the French territory of La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, were a “degenerate population” that had kept its “savage genes” and was nostalgic for “cannibalism.” {snip}

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