RIP Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025)

RIP Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025)

Brigitte Bardot, the pouty blond bombshell who defined the mid-20th-century French spirit, has passed away at her French Riviera home at ninety-one.

Bardot is remembered first of all as the leading lady who lit up the screen of the 1950s and ’60s blockbusters like Roger Vadim’s “And God Created A Woman” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt”. In 1959, the feminist writer Simone De Beauvoir found that she became a worldwide phenomenon by channeling youthful sexuality, as opposed to more mature earlier stars like Marilyn Monroe. In both her oozing film appearances and her troubled personal life, Bardot prefigured the youthquake and sexual revolution of the coming decade. Her decadent indulgences and resentment of motherhood—the latter perhaps the product of postpartum depression—were a sign of the population collapse to come.

In her heyday, the tabloid darling defined the French style and beauty. So much so that in the late 60s, she paused as a model for the bust of Marianne, the personification of France. And since France has for centuries been one of the flag bearers of Western Civilization, Bardot, the most beautiful woman in the world, came to represent the West itself—complex, coveted, and liberated, a thing to behold.

But Jews like me—well, not only Jews, but especially Jews—have other reasons to remember BB. First, there is her work with Serge Gainsbourg, the jazz composer and Holocaust survivor widely recognized as the architect of modern French pop. Bardot and the English singer-actress Jane Birkin were his two most important collaborators and muses.

Both women became his lovers, and the scandalous affairs delighted gossip columnists. Gainsbourg and Bardot are good candidates for the coolest celebrity couple of the Swinging Sixties— flaunting cutting-edge elegance, bohemian mystique, and, in Bardot’s case, good looks.

Bardot’s musical career was built out of the same sensuous sensationalism as her acting. Gainsbourg had her sing about modern subjects—American subjects—comic strips, Harley-Davidsons, outlaws, and so forth. The lyrics were sexual and provocative; her dance moves, captured in pre-MTV videos, were often suggestive.

With Bardot, Gainsbourg reached his more sophisticated stage, writing complex orchestrations, full of jazz and classical references, and dipping into contemporary psychedelia. He continued probing in this increasingly lavish direction after their brief affair came to an end.

Bardot wasn’t the biggest voice, but she had the stage presence. In the video for the 1968 duet Bonnie and Clyde, she mimics Faye Dunaway’s starring part in the eponymous Hollywood feature. The track about the notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow was based on a poem Bonnie herself penned days before the two met their violent deaths. The music displays Gainsbourg’s characteristic blend of surprises—minimalism, subdued percussion, and an opulent string section. Another surprise is the alternation between spoken vocals and singing.

Bardot owes her stardom to acting—and she remains mostly known for that. But even after she quit the cinema shortly before reaching forty, she continued musical recordings. Her work with Gainsbourg will ultimately prove to be a more lasting legacy than her film appearances, the bulk of which were no more than vehicles for her persona.

Once retired, the blonde icon dedicated herself to animal rights activism, but in the final decades of her life, she found herself drawn into an entirely different, though occasionally related issues—mass migration and Islamization. She opposed the Islamic ritual sheep slaughter on animal rights grounds—she was also against the kosher slaughter and hunting—but, more importantly, she missed the midcentury European France. It’s healthy and natural for the former sex kitten to resent the veil, so she spoke out against the very people who blow up Jewish restaurants and concert halls in France.

Bardot moved in far-right circles since at least the 1990s, when she married Jean Marie Le Pen’s advisor Bernard d’Ormale. She supported both Jean Marie and his daughter, the opposition politician Marine Le Pen.

The retired actress opposed the “savage” “invasion” of her country by Muslims, becoming increasingly critical of the European establishment and militant in her attitude. In her recently released book Mon BBcédaire, she argued that “only urgent remedy to the agony of France”, decrying her homeland as “dull, sad, submissive, ill, ruined, ravaged, ordinary and vulgar”. Moreover, she faulted the Holy Sea for Europe’s intractable migration woes. In her 2017 letter to Pope Francis, she accused him of “stress[ing] human misery” and “oddly favoring Muslim migration to the detriment of Christians from the Middle East.”

Between 1997 and 2008, French courts fined Bardot for “igniting racial hatred” on five different occasions. Her offending texts used language like “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts” and “Islamists have a mania for throat-cutting,” meaning that the terrorists were “cutting the throats of women and children” and suggesting that “they’ll cut our throats one day and it will serve us right.” The dues she paid were trivial for a woman of means like herself, but the humiliation shook her up.

More unexpected was Bardot’s wading into Eurovision’s anti-Zionism—after all, it wasn’t her issue at all. But when in 2024 Israeli singer Eden Golan was faced with a sustained campaign of threats and bullying, Bardot posted a handwritten note to cheer the performer:

I want to congratulate the amazing Eden Golan. Wonderful! Talented! Brave! What a beautiful example she gave to the world. What an honor! Good job!

I don’t know what moved her—Eden’s persona, a sense of fairness, or the IDF march Le Sable Et Le Soldat written by her former lover. Either way, she obviously understood the situation.

Multiple publications posted nasty obituaries of Bardot, citing her right-wing views. Well, I happen to think her politics were important—not in the least because they were important to her. The pinnacle of the supremacy of Western culture, she rightfully belongs in history books as an uncanny beauty, a talented actress, and, above all, a part of the groundbreaking musical duo with Serge.

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