On September 28, 1960, on a farm in Mandon, near Nice, in southern France, a young woman lies unconscious. She has attempted suicide by cutting the veins in her wrists and ingesting barbiturates. That day, she turned 26. She has the world at her feet. It is adored by millions of people. But she decides to leave the world, and her son, just nine months old. She is rushed to the hospital in Nice. And if they want, the doctors cannot hide her identity: she is the most famous French woman and a world star. She is a beauty, a film actress and the most important export product of her country. Her films brought in more money in France than car companies like Peugeot.
Terrestrial and aerial
Bardot was at the height of her fame. In which she had launched four years earlier, in 1956, playing Juliette Ardi, an orphaned girl in an unknown fishing village on the Côte d’Azur, Saint Tropez. The earthy and airy Juliet, walked around the village barefoot, wearing a fitted cotton dress with buttons, a “chitti”, charming everyone in her path, young and old, dancing furiously mambo, hanging out with black musicians. She scandalized her in-laws when, instead of eating with them after the wedding of their youngest son, and wearing only the groom’s pajama jacket, she takes a tray of food and a bottle of wine and walks, with the grace of a ballerina, up the stairs to offer them to him, a wedding present, along with herself, to their bedroom.
She was living her life
A girl who lived her life: that was Juliet Ardi. This is exactly what Brigitte Bardot was. Before the sexual liberation of women in the 1960s and before contraception, which, it should be noted, did not concern many women for many years, Bardot, in and out of the movie studios, dared to be herself. To declare that the best day of her life was night: night meant fun, dancing, songs, wine, food, cigarettes and sex, in other words, “life of a thousand”, as desired by millions of young women leaving a world war behind but who could not live it.
To hell with social conventions
Bardot earned her living by working, making non-stop films and living as she pleased. And if that meant disregarding strict social conventions, so much the worse for conventions. Having received a strict upbringing from the aristocratic Parisian family in which she grew up, Bardot married at 18 the director Roger Vadim – whose first film was “God Made Woman” – because she fell passionately in love with him. And to live with him, marriage was the only way, in 1952 France. When she stopped being in love with him, they broke up.
This is what Bardot did throughout her life: when something ended, whether it was a love affair or her film career, which abandoned her at the age of 39, she let it go and moved on. And bearing the price. At 25, when she had her son, she had no desire to become a mother. She did, and she paid for it with severe depression and – a suicide attempt – and bad relations with her son for the rest of her life.
1968, a changing world
When in 1968 France and the world were changing dramatically, Bardot did not seem to understand – or did not want to understand – the magnitude of the changes. The cinema had already tired her, the frenetic pace of her personal life, too. The “bardolatria” seemed to be struggling. For a decade, however, it was impossible for Bardot to move around in Paris, St. Tropez, New York and even Rio de Janeiro without hordes of paparazzi constantly besieging her.
The revolutionary spirit of the events of 1968, – May 1968 in France, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in America, the war in Vietnam, the invasion of Russian tanks in Prague – overcame Bardot, who, for some, had “become established” at the age of just 34. Proof that in 1967, De Gaulle had already invited her to the Elysée Palace and she, – the first invitee to the presidential palace, who appeared before a French president, wearing trousers and a velvet jacket with pinstripes – had addressed him “My general!”, not hiding her admiration for the man who saved France from the Nazis.
Leave it before it leaves you
Bardot never went back on her decision to leave the cinema. Better to leave something before it leaves you, he had said. Many argued that he left cinema because he did not want to age on screen. Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she did again, what she wanted: she wanted to dedicate the second half of her life to the protection of animals. She did it with passion and efficiency – laws were passed thanks to her tireless efforts against animal abuse.
For the last many years, Bardot gave the impression of a person cut off from the world. She was frustrated by the world she did not understand, a world she considered vulgar. She herself did not believe that she will live to be 91 and that she will see so many changes. Her friendship also with the Le Pen family and her admission that she agrees with some of her far-right views cost her – and she accepted that price.
It is unfair, however, on the occasion of her death, not to credit her for how much she contributed to women’s emancipation, even if she herself did not like the term. Brilliant French writers-symbols of feminism, such as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Françoise Sagan, did not deal with her by chance: with her existence, Bardot opened paths for women, for all women, which no star of her stature had ever dared.
