When I heard that French actor and animal activist Brigitte Bardot had died at 91 on Sunday, my first thought was of blasting her song “Les Cheveux dans le vent” non-stop with my mom when I was a kid, and she was introducing me to the Gallic yé-yé pop and its various offshoots that had soundtracked her own childhood. My second thought, though, was somewhat less nostalgic and pleasant. I recalled Bardot’s late-in-life shift to supporting right-wing political candidates, her way of coldly dismissing actresses who came forward about their experiences of sexual harassment during the #MeToo movement, and how she was fined multiple times by the French government for “inciting racial hatred” with her blatantly bigoted comments about Muslims.
It’s perhaps only natural that so many eulogies to Bardot focus on her positive qualities, from her influential style to her devotion to animals. But in this moment of steadily rising Islamophobia, it’s hard to square those celebrations with the opinions of a woman who railed against immigration and publicly stated her opposition to the so-called “Islamisation of France” in her 2003 book A Cry in the Silence. Few would dispute Bardot’s part in embodying and advancing the sexual revolution, but was that role—or any other facet of her legacy—powerful enough to outweigh her history of hate speech?
Death often has a kind of flattening effect on legacy. It’s hard to talk about a celebrity like Bardot—someone who brought entertainment and joy to millions, yet also sowed hatred and bigotry—with the requisite amount of nuance. But it’s our collective responsibility not to let her legendary beauty and talent obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia. No less an authority on complex personal legacy than F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his posthumously published 1945 essay collection The Crack-Up that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”—and Bardot’s death presents a rare cultural opportunity to put that test into action.
Instead of limiting our mourning to looking nostalgically back at old photos of a beehived, bikini-clad Bardot and playing “Bonnie and Clyde” on a loop, let’s ask ourselves the hard questions about how Bardot’s embodiment of prototypically “perfect” white womanhood relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism (problems that persist in France to this day). After all, if we rush to sanitize our onetime icons in death, what message are we sending to those who are still living?
