Brigitte Bardot and Florian Philippot, then vice president of the Front National (FN, France’s far-right party), at the actress’s home in Saint-Tropez, July 18, 2015.
Brigitte Bardot, the actress, was known for Le Mépris (Contempt); Bardot, the political figure, embodied racial hatred. Convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, Bardot remained, for three decades, an exception in French culture – the only celebrity to openly defend the far right. In the 1990s, after withdrawing from film sets, the star adopted those views and married Bernard d’Ormale, adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right Front National (FN), the precursor to today’s Rassemblement National. He remained her husband until the end of her life.
Read more Subscribers only Brigitte Bardot, global film icon and champion of animal rights, has died
In her hostility toward immigration and her nostalgia for a France she believed lost, she shared common ground with Alain Delon, another icon of the golden age of French cinema. But unlike Delon, Bardot multiplied Islamophobic remarks. Once an embodiment of women’s freedom, her rejection of social conventions drove her, after her acting career, to push the boundaries of what could be said, wavering between a taste for provocation and outright racism.
“Next to her, Marilyn Monroe looked like a barmaid,” wrote Le Pen in his memoirs, Tribun du peuple (“People’s Tribune”), recalling his first encounter with Bardot at the end of the 1950s. Returning from the Algerian War, Le Pen was also serving as rapporteur for the war budget at the Assemblée Nationale. He suggested that Bardot visit wounded soldiers in their hospital beds. Bardot agreed – “Yet she was anything but militaristic,” Le Pen commented. “We have more in common than it seems. She loves animals, she’s nostalgic for a clean France; I admire her courage and her frankness,” he wrote.
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