Brigitte Bardot, ROT IN HELL!

We end the year the same way we began it: the death of a French fascist! It was Jean-Marie Le Pen in January, and now it is the actress- turned animal rights activist- always fash Bardot!

Many are remembering French actress and singer Brigitte Bardot, who died Sunday at the age of 91, as the legendary beauty who was the prototype of liberated female sexuality in movies during the 1950s. She walked away from that fame in the 1970s to dedicate her life to animal rights activism and ultimately smeared her legacy and work in the 1990s as she was outspoken about her racism, xenophobic and fascist position, which resulted in convictions and fines for inciting racial/religious hatred, and the adoration of figures like Jared Taylor, publisher of the American Renaissance website, a white supremacist publication.

According to the BBC, Bruno Jacquelin of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals confirmed Bardot died at her home in southern France. While he gave no cause of death, she had dealt with bad health in recent years, including hospitalization for a breathing issue in July 2023 and additional hospital stays in 2025. “The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation,” the statement reads.

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in Paris on September 28, 1934, She began as a model, and appeared on the cover of Elle in 1950 at the age of 15. She met director Roger Vadim who became Bardot’s first husband when she was 18 years old in 1952. In 1956, he directed her in the controversial film And God Created Woman in a role that gave her international acclaim. Bardot divorced Vadim the following year after he had an affair with her And God Created Woman co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant. She acted in 20 more movies. She cemented her reputation for being a “sex kitten” but mental health and issues that she had all her life took its toll and in 1973 she walked away from the movie industry. It was then she began focusing on animal rights, starting the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals in 1986.

Bardot went on to marry three other men. Bardot and actor Jacques Charrier were wed in 1959 but divorced three years later. Charrier and their son Nicholas successfully sued Bardot for violation of privacy. They originally tried to censor in vain the passages in her memoir that mentioned them, such as when Bardot claimed Charrier was abusive and likened her pregnancy with Nicolas to having “a tumor growing inside of me.” A year later Charrier, who died in Sept. 3, published a book titled Ma réponse à Brigitte Bardot (My Reply to Brigitte Bardot) in which he revealed that she once had given him her father’s library, including a signed copy of Mein Kampf. Bardot countersued and lost. Swiss socialite and art collector Gunter Sachs, whose father was a member of the Nazi Party and named Wehrwirtschaftsführer (“War Industry Leader”) in 1933, became Bardot’s third husband in 1966, the marriage ending three years later. 

In 1992, Bardot married her fourth and final husband, Bernard d’Ormale, adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the fascist group Front National (FN). Bardot met Le Pen, who died on Jan. 7, in the 1950s when he was coming back from the Algerian War wherewhen France fought in vain to prevent Algeria from becoming independent. She supported Le Pen’s  and the Front National’s fascism. When his daughter, Marine Le Pen took over as the leader of the party and renamed the party National Rally (RN), Bardot supported her as well. She wrote a series of autobiographical books where she spewedwrote her most venomous attacks on migrants, the LGBTQ+, community feminists, and especially Muslims. In her 1999 book Le Carré de Pluton (Pluto’s Square), she declared that “my country, France, my homeland, my land” was “again invaded by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Jews and Muslims”. A section of her 2003 book Un cri dans le silence (A Scream in the Silence) included a diatribe against race mixing and immigration and praised previous generations who, she said, had given their lives to push out invaders. In her most recent and last book, Mon BBcédaire (My BB Alphabet), which was published just a few weeks ago, Bardot said that she thought the RN was the “only urgent remedy to the agony of France which she saw as “dull, sad, submissive, ill, ruined, ravaged, ordinary and vulgar”. She was been criticized for her description of kosher and halal traditions as “ritual sacrifice.”

Anti-racists railed against Bardot and she was fined five times under France’s laws against incitement to racial or religious hatred. Those actions Jared Taylor once called a “celebrity-turned-thought criminal” and he invited her to the 2006 American Renaissance conference when they were still being held in  Washington, DC but she declined.  

Despite being a pariah for the last decades of her life, Bardot’s fascism was seldom mentioned when articles and other reports about the actress, media outlets choosing to focus on her animal rights activism instead. Even when she died, major media outlooks gave it scant coverage, prompting many who were fans of Bardot to say that they did not know she had such a damning side to her. The New York Times article reporting her death was titled “Brigitte Bardot, Movie Idol Who Renounced Stardom, Dies at 91” and dedicated two paragraphs to the controversy of her political leanings. 

Singer Chappell Roan has seen blowback after a Instagram post death of Brigitte Bardot that read, “She was my inspiration for red wine supernova. Rest in peace Ms. Bardot ♡,” referring her song “Red Wine Supernova” in where she namechecked Bardot in the lyrics. Among those who criticized Roan was a woman who tweeted, “chappell roan sending her condolences to a woman who literally showed hatred towards every single minority and said that the actresses who were speaking up about being sexually harassed during the #MeToo movement were ‘hypocrites’ and ‘ridiculous’” (sic). Roan deleted her tribute to Badort and replaced it with another post saying, “Holy shit I did not know all that insane shit Ms. Bardot stood for obvs I do not condone this.  very disappointing to learn.” (sic)

Bardot’s funeral will be on Jan 7 2026 at Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption church in Saint-Tropez, France. Plans are to bury her in a cemetery by the sea, despite her telling the French weekly Paris Match in 2024 that she wanted to be buried in her garden. The Var Prefecture, which is the administration center in the city, told Reuters they had not received any request for a private burial, which would have been needed to bury her in her garden.

The risk in not recognizing Brigitte Bardot’s political evolution into racism is that her immense cultural celebrity can act as a shield, allowing extremist ideologies to be mainstreamed under the guise of “iconic” status. As we close 2025 with a deepened normalization of hate speech from the top down, Bardot will not be the last who rendered invisible the racism she actively spread.