Alain Delon holds Brigitte Bardot’s chin in Extraordinary Stories (1968)
Not behind, but right next to the big screen, the iconic actress and model never hid her anti-immigration opinions and connection to the far right, considered racial hatred five times in court.
The French Brigitte Bardotwho this Sunday at the age of 91, was without a doubt an unavoidable figure in cinema. It was, therefore, adored by millions of people. Many of them only learned about the less popular side of the iconic actress and model with the news of her death.
One of the surprised fans was the American singer Chappell Roan, who after sharing a tribute to the eternal “BB” on social media, deleted it.
“F*** you”, the artist begins by venting, “I didn’t know that Mrs. Bardot defended all that s***”, she exclaimed. “Obviously, I don’t agree with this. It’s very disappointing to hear this,” he wrote later in an Instagram story.
It’s true: in parallel with the unquestionable enormous artistic career she led as an actress, from 1952 to 1974, Bardot followed more controversial paths, marked by extreme right-wing political positions and statements that led her to be convicted five times for incitement to racial hatred.
Links to the far right and court convictions
This trajectory lasted around three decades and was seen as a peculiar case in the French cultural space, because Brigitte Bardot not only did not hide her sympathies for the extreme right, but also repeatedly assumed them in public interventions and texts.
According to the newspaper, Bardot’s departure from the studios and sets from the 1990s onwards had a lot to do with her positions considered nationalist, homophobic and racist, in a France she considered lost.
After three marriages and divorces, Bardot married and stayed until the end of his life with Bernard d’Ormale, advisor to Jean-Marie Le Penhistoric leader of the French far right, founder of the Front National (FN) and predecessor of the current Rassemblement National, also this year.
Le Pen recalls, in her memoirs, a first meeting with Bardot in the late 1950s, when she was returning from the Algerian War and carrying out parliamentary duties linked to the military budget.
“Beside her, Marilyn Monroe looked like a waitress.”wrote the far-right leader, father of the former RN leader, Marine Le Pen. Jean-Marie wrote that Bardot and he “had more in common than it seems. She is nostalgic for a clean France.”
Over the years, ties between the Le Pen and Bardot universe have deepened. Jean-Louis Bouguereau, leader of the RN in Var, in the south of France, became a lawyer for Bardot and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation, dedicated to defending animal rights. It was at a dinner in Saint-Tropez, in 1992, organized by Jany Le Pen and Bouguereau, that Bardot met Bernard d’Ormale. From then on, alongside a militant with party responsibilities, the actress began to assert her convictions in a more structured way and followed the rise of the extreme right.
Its central cause — the animal welfare — was articulated with a discourse directed mainly against Muslims, using references to religious practices linked to ritual slaughter. A letter published in the far-right newspaper Présent became emblematic: Bardot warned about Eid al-Kebir and described, in alarmist terms, the possibility of French territory being “soaked” with blood from slaughtered sheep. In that same text, he associated religious practice with an image of widespread threat and identity transformation in the country. It was in this context that his first conviction, in 1997, and a second, in 1998.
The most recent conviction was in 2021after referring to the inhabitants of the island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, as “aboriginals who kept the genes of savages” when denouncing the “barbaric treatment of animals by a degenerate population”.
Hostility to the left and opposition to the European Union characterized this facet of the actress. It is also mentioned by Le Monde its admiration for Vladimir Putin. But there were separate cases: Bardot supported the voluntary termination of pregnancy and considered Jean-Marie Le Pen to be excessive at times, particularly due to his revisionist statements. Over time, his preference now fell to his daughter, Marine Le Penwho she even described as “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century”.
In more recent years, Bardot sought to assert that animal welfare was her main political criterion, going so far as to say, in an interview with the same French newspaper, in 2018, that she had also contacted Jean-Luc Mélenchon because of vegetarianism and proposals against slaughterhouses. On that occasion, he assured that he no longer supported anyone. Even so, three years later, in an interview with Valeurs actuelles magazine, he once again praised Marine Le Pen and presidential candidate Éric Zemmour.
