Brigitte Bardot was one of France’s greatest film stars. Yet her film career was relatively short, running from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. By comparison, Catherine Deneuve has been a constant presence on the screen since her debut in the 1960s. The reason for Bardot’s shorter stint is entirely her own doing: she changed her mind about cinema and unilaterally resigned as an actress. In her new career she became an advocate for animal rights. Bardot was more than a film star; she was a cultural icon who appeared at just the right time – as a forerunner and a surprise – to channel, like a conductor, the electric power of French femininity and also, by extension, of Frenchness.

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born in 1934. Her mother chose the name Brigitte because that had been the name of her favourite doll. Bardot’s story was not, like Marilyn Monroe’s, that of a pretty waif being lifted out of poverty and into stardom. Bardot came from middle-class stock and would always retain the supreme self-confidence of a Parisian bourgeoise from the 16^th arrondissement. Her father was an industrialist; her mother, who grew up in Milan, loved opera, music and dance. One of the forces that shaped Bardot was the tension between her family’s cleaving to respectability and her mother’s conflicted feelings about whether an artistic career for her daughter was desirable. Added to this was the practice of austere discipline at home, including corporal punishment, in itself not unusual for the times, but, in Bardot’s case, acting as a sort of surefire recipe for breeding a rebel.

Bardot’s mother designed hats as a ladylike hobby, and it was through a fashion connection of hers that a 15-year-old Brigitte was first thrust into the public eye in 1949 as a model to appear on the cover of the magazines Le Jardin des modes and Elle. Bardot’s modelling led her to the world of filmmaking after the scriptwriter Roger Vadim noticed her photographs and recommended her for a part. Vadim was a bohemian figure of whom her parents disapproved, but they married as soon as Bardot turned 18, and he set about turning his interesting young wife into a famous actress. The first turning point of Bardot’s film career came in 1956 with the release of Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme (And God Created Woman).

French cinema in the immediate postwar era was run along conservative lines, with seasoned filmmakers turning out light comedies, gangster movies and historical dramas about the grandeur of France. It would be a few more years before the advent of the Nouvelle Vague, where critics-turned-directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard would rebel against the French film establishment and pioneer new ways of making movies.

While Vadim was no experimentalist, his film centred around Bardot, playing the part of an amoral waif living according to her instincts in St Tropez (then still undiscovered as a tourist destination). The explosive effect of her entrance into the French film landscape was akin to what might have happened if Marianne Faithfull in her late-1960s incarnation had been parachuted into a 1950s Ealing comedy. Several scenes in Vadim’s film were deliberately calibrated to shock a decorous conservative audience by suggesting unbridled, guilt-free sexuality long before the sexual revolution that would accompany the events of May 68 in France. The film culminates in a memorable mambo dance scene which outraged segregationist America (because it featured Black musicians alongside a maenad-like Bardot), and was also offered as an emblematic example of evil deeds in an exhibit staged by the Vatican at the 1958 Exposition Universelle in Brussels.

As the Bardot phenomenon became cultural currency, French female intellectuals tried to puzzle her out. In 1958, the experimental writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras wrote in France-Observateur an article entitled ‘La reine Bardot’, in which she described the actress as the incarnation of freedom and authenticity, standing ‘in her own space’ beyond the edge of morality. A year later Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex (1949), published an essay entitled ‘Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome’. In the context of de Beauvoir’s critical deconstruction of the cultural trappings of femininity, Bardot appeared to her as a new kind of modern woman who spurned jewels, high heels and girdles and refused to transform herself ‘into a remote idol’, an Existentialist sans le savoir who did as she pleased. It was her very naturalness, her spontaneity, that made her so unsettling. Meanwhile, some other French women detested Bardot. The actress recounted visiting a friend in a hospital in 1959 and finding herself in a lift with a nurse who recognised her, berated her for her immorality and threatened to disfigure her with a fork, an incident which would later find its way into Louis Malle’s film Vie privée (1962), in which Bardot plays a film star cracking under unbearable pressure from her fame.

Bardot may not have been an Existentialist but she did express her sense of personal freedom by not dressing either like a respectable lady or like a glamorous film star. At a time when young women, once out of pinafores, began to dress like their mothers, this was quite new. The young Bardot habitually wore polo necks, slacks and ballet shoes, though she also liked to go barefoot. With her carefully teased mane of hair (which she called her ‘choucroute’) and enthusiastic embrace of sunbathing, she began the invention of youthful French ‘naturalness’, in itself a sophisticated – and enduring – form of artifice.

Bardot would continue to embody nature and artifice throughout her career as a performer. In Godard’s Le mépris (Contempt, 1965), in which Fritz Lang (played by himself) makes a film adaptation of The Odyssey, and Michel Piccoli, who plays a scriptwriter married to Bardot, comes across as a mortal married to a goddess, she achieved the inscrutability of a sphinx. The Bardot myth-making continued with her collaboration with the singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, who in 1968 composed Initials B.B., a swaggering, Edgar Allan Poe-inflected song that celebrates Bardot’s status as an imperious goddess in thigh-high boots, with flowing blond hair, her eyes rimmed with kohl, famous enough to be known the world over by her initials only.

True actresses, Bardot said, feel compelled to keep acting until they die. She, on the other hand, decided to give it up at the age of 38, after an encounter with a goat while on what turned out to be her last film shoot, in Périgord. The goat was being taken to be slaughtered in preparation for a village barbecue, but a horrified Bardot bought the animal and sheltered it in her hotel room. Bardot’s animal rights activism, which she came to see as her true calling, had already begun in 1962, when she had campaigned in favour of introducing stun guns in abattoirs and eventually persuaded the French government to change the law. In 1976 she took up the cause of the baby seals that were being slaughtered for their skins in Canada, a very unusual decision for a sex symbol. In 1980 she turned her attention to France’s many boucheries chevalines, urging people to stop eating horse meat. In 1986, she created her own foundation, dedicated to the protection of animals and fighting against animal testing, bull fighting, cock fighting, the wearing of fur, hunting and the abandonment of pets.

In recent years she also, on a number of occasions, criticised halal slaughter. This, along with her choice of fourth husband, Bernard d’Ormale, a friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, signalled what was perhaps the most contrarian – and controversial – aspect of Bardot’s persona. Though she was a revolutionary cultural figure, she was the opposite of a political progressive. And while she was the incarnation of a design for living which involved sexual confidence, a love of the body and an embrace of femininity as an unproblematic gift to be enjoyed, one many Frenchwomen admired and copied, she was not a feminist, nor was she ever an ally to feminism, which she described in 1973 as ‘comical and idiotic’. Many times she was asked to recant, but she never did. In this she also embodied the fact that France remains a steadily binary culture in terms of the relationship between the sexes. Though Bardot did not sign it, she would have agreed with a collective opinion piece published in Le Monde in 2018 and signed by 100 high-profile French women including Catherine Deneuve, which opposed what the signatories saw as the excesses of the Me Too movement and defended the ‘freedom to pester’ as a guarantee of sexual freedom.

There is certainly a generational divide when it comes to opinions of Bardot in France, and younger voices have been keen to fustigate her as a right-wing and even a far-right figure. Will she be remembered as ‘problematic’ and nothing more? It’s unlikely. Bardot’s aura of fame was such that she became an incarnation of France, both unofficially and officially. An admirer of De Gaulle, she met him in 1967 at an official function at the Elysée Palace to which she wore a playful military-style outfit of black trousers and a black jacket with gold braiding inspired by the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. De Gaulle later commented: ‘Cette jeune personne est dotée d’une simplicité du meilleur aloi.’ (This young woman is pleasantly unpretentious) and in 1969 expressed the wish that Bardot should become the model for a bust of Marianne, the female allegory of the French Republic.

The introduction of a celebrity model for the image of the Republic was perceived by some as a loss of political integrity: up until then, Marianne had been a generic Everywoman, in keeping with the universalist values of the Revolution. Since Bardot, several other famous Frenchwomen have lent their features to the Republic. But Bardot was the first to become an official incarnation of France. She effected a tremendous and permanent change in the way French women think about themselves. It is no surprise that such an arresting public figure should excite both adoration and detestation. It is also difficult to imagine that anyone could take her place in the French pantheon.