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Brigitte Bardot's Legacy of Racist Rhetoric

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/world/europe/brigitte-bardot-racism-
far-right.html

Dec. 31, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
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.

Image
Black-and-white photo of Brigitte Bardot, with long hair, dropping a 
ballot into a box. A photographer behind her takes a picture.
Ms. Bardot voting in a presidential election in 1981. She was the only 
major French star who gave such strong support for France’s main far-right 
party.Credit...Raph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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.

After the fifth such anti-Muslim diatribe, in 2008, the prosecutor Anne de 
Fontette expressed weariness at seeing her so often in court on the same 
charges.

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.” The letter, which was published by her foundation and 
distributed to media on the island, denounced the ritual animal sacrifice 
practiced by the Tamil who lived there.

Her anti-immigrant rhetoric pushed a step beyond the common currency of 
National Rally meetings. After her death, tributes from party leaders 
poured in — Jordan Bardella, the party president, called her an “ardent 
patriot” — and there were calls for President Emmanuel Macron of France to 
organize an elaborate national homage of the sort the country puts on for 
its greatest heroes. He seems unlikely to comply: She had expressed her 
disdain for him more than once.

Though for the National Front’s late patriarch, Mr. Le Pen, who died 
almost a year ago after making a political career of denouncing immigrants 
and their supposed invasion of France, and whose early allies were World 
War II Nazi collaborators, her admiration was mostly unreserved. 
“Everything he predicted has happened,” she told Valeurs Actuelles last 
year. “He was right before everyone else.”

It was Mr. Le Pen who introduced her to her fourth and last husband, 
Bernard d’Ormale, a high National Front functionary, at a dinner party in 
St.-Tropez in 1992.

Image
Jean-Marie Le Pen, in a gray suit and an orange tie, looks upward, 
surrounded by a crowd. Marine Le Pen smiles, with French flags and a large 
domed building behind them.
The French far-right leader Jean Marie Le Pen, with his daughter Marine Le 
Pen, in Paris in 2009. Ms. Bardot’s ties to the Le Pen family date back 
more than 60 years.
Credit...Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
“She rowed with us in the ’90s,” Mr. Le Pen wrote in his 2019 memoir, 
“Tribun du Peuple” (“The People’s Tribune”). She publicly supported the 
National Front’s first mayoral candidates, in the southern towns of 
Vitrolles and Toulon. “We have more in common than it might seem,” Mr. Le 
Pen wrote. “She likes animals, and she’s nostalgic for a France that was 
clean.”

They had met long before, in the late 1950s. As an up-and-coming young 
member of the French Parliament recently returned from France’s bloody war 
to hold onto its colony in Algeria, Mr. Le Pen persuaded the movie star to 
visit some of the war wounded in hospitals. “Next to her, Marilyn Monroe 
seemed like a barmaid,” Mr. Le Pen wrote.

Ms. Bardot’s rightward drift gained momentum in the 1960s, when she was 
“shocked” by the student and worker protests of May 1968 and “understood 
nothing about them,” Le Monde wrote. In 1981, after she had quit the 
screen, she expressed bitterness, in an interview, about the movie 
industry in her country, saying “it had become the reflection of what 
France has become: mediocre, routine.”

Decades later, in the 2010s, she scorned the #MeToo movement, denouncing 
women who accused men in the film industry of sexual harassment, calling 
them “hypocritical, ridiculous, without interest.” And she defended Gérard 
Depardieu, an actor convicted of assaulting women on a film set. “Those 
who have talent and put their hands on a girl’s bottom are thrown in the 
gutter,” she said in one interview.

The sharply divided reactions in France to her death on Sunday symbolized 
an ambiguous legacy.

Rima Hassan, a French lawmaker in the European Parliament, condemned those 
who praised her cinematic career and animal rights activism while 
“trivializing, minimizing or even rendering invisible the racism and 
Islamophobia she helped spread.” By contrast, Mr. Bardella, the far-right 
leader, condemned Ms. Bardot’s critics, accusing them on social media of 
“dehumanizing those who dare to think differently, reducing them to 
caricatures.”

Olivier Faure, the head of the Socialists, a left-wing political party, 
captured the polarized response. “Radiant, she made her mark on French 
cinema,” Mr. Faure wrote on X. “But she also turned her back on republican 
values and was repeatedly convicted for racism.”


-- 
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump.  We look 
forward to America being great again.

We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Every day is an IQ test. Some pass, some, not so much.

Thank you for cleaning up the disasters of the 2008-2017, 2020-2024 Obama 
/ Biden / Harris fiascos, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.

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Brigitte Bardot's Legacy of Racist Rhetoric "Leroy N. Soetoro" <leroysoetoro@americans-first.com> - 2026-01-24 04:18 +0000
  Re: Brigitte Bardot's Legacy of Racist Rhetoric Attila <prochoice@here.now> - 2026-01-23 23:42 -0500
  Re: Brigitte Bardot's Legacy of Racist Rhetoric Mitchell Holman <noemail@aol.com> - 2026-01-24 15:01 +0000

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