Why was convicted racist Brigitte Bardot mourned as a Marianne?

When French cultural icon Brigitte Bardot died at the age of 91 in December 2025, official tributes poured in. President Emmanuel Macron described her as “a legend of the century” and a woman who "embodied a life of freedom”, while political figures like Marine Le Pen said she would be “greatly missed.” Yet such comments have largely glossed over a darker dimension of Bardot’s public life: her longstanding Islamophobia, alignment with far-right politics and repeated legal judgments against her for hate speech.

In focusing solely on her films and later animal activism, many fans have separated the artist from the person, but doing so elides the very real harm her rhetoric and political endorsements have caused.

Bardot was convicted five times by French courts for incitement to racial or religious hatred based on her comments about Islam, Muslim immigration and ritual animal slaughter practices associated with Eid al-Adha. One of the most well-known cases resulted in a €15,000 fine in 2008 after she wrote a letter denouncing Muslim ritual slaughter, stating she was fed up with the “population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts”.

Her opposition to the Islamic practice of ritual slaughter of sheep during Eid al-Adha frequently manifested at the intersection of her animal activism and her prejudice against Muslims. Bardot framed her objections in cultural and civilisational terms rather than solely on animal-welfare grounds, linking the practice to her anxieties about the “rise” of Islam in France.

Bardot called the ritual slaughter a barbaric practice that “stains the soil of France.” However, this stance was consistently presented not merely as an ethical objection to a method of killing animals, but as part of a broader denunciation of Islam’s presence in French society.

By entangling her concern for animal welfare with overtly Islamophobic language, Bardot gave legitimacy to narratives that cast Muslim minorities not just as different, but as threatening and alien. This conflation undermines genuine animal welfare advocacy by associating it with cultural hostility rather than universal ethical concern.

One could even argue that her foundation’s campaigns against ritual slaughter obscured legitimate animal welfare concerns and instead served as a vehicle for targeting Muslims.

Additionally, Bardot’s animosity was not just limited to Muslims. Her public output included belittling remarks about immigrants, racial mixing and even the #MeToo movement, which she called “hypocritical, ridiculous and uninteresting.”

Bardot’s political affiliations further reinforced this dynamic. Her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, served as an adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France’s far-right National Front (now National Rally). Jean-Marie Le Pen is a figure synonymous with French far-right politics: he led the National Front from 1972 to 2011 and built its platform around anti-immigration, nationalist and often xenophobic positions.

During the Algerian War, Le Pen was repeatedly accused by victims and witnesses of participating in the torture of Algerian detainees while serving as a French army officer, allegations he long denied but which were supported by multiple testimonies and historical investigations. His rhetoric consistently stoked fears of “Islamisation” and the loss of French identity, themes that Bardot would echo years later.

Limits of separating “the person from the art”

Bardot also openly endorsed Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter and successor as leader of the National Rally. She notably described Marine as the “Joan of Arc of the 21st century” and promoted her presidential campaigns, aligning herself with an explicitly anti-immigration, anti-Arab and anti-Islam agenda.

Marine Le Pen herself has campaigned on curbing immigration, limiting Muslim visibility in public life and reinforcing French secularism in ways that disproportionately target Muslim practices. Like her father, the continuity of nationalist rhetoric and scrutiny of Muslim communities remains.

Despite this record, much of France’s public discussion around Bardot’s death has focused on her films and animal advocacy, with little attention to her harmful rhetoric and political stances. This tendency to séparer l’homme de l’artiste (to separate the artist from the person) is common in celebrity culture, yet it sends a damaging message. When hateful or exclusionary views are sidelined in public memory, it normalises the idea that cultural contribution excuses or obscures harmful beliefs.

Celebrities already operate with disproportionate influence; an uncritical celebration of Bardot’s legacy without acknowledgement of her Islamophobia and far-right alignment suggests that public figures can evade accountability for bigotry if their earlier work is beloved.

Furthermore, the contradiction between Bardot’s animal rights activism and her political alliances is particularly striking. Many far-right movements in France and elsewhere actively oppose ecological or animal welfare measures when these conflict with nationalist or economic agendas, for example, criticising meat alternatives in schools or resisting environmental regulation they frame as cosmopolitan or alien to national tradition.

This dissonance suggests that Bardot’s commitment to animal rights was not rooted in a consistent ethic of compassion, but was entangled with an exclusionary vision of French identity that rejected multiculturalism.

In commemorating Bardot, it is essential to recognise both her achievements and her failings. Her work in cinema and animal welfare might have had a positive impact on French and European society; but these cannot be disentangled from a legacy of Islamophobia and far-right sympathy that contributed to the marginalisation of minority communities in public discourse.

To remember Bardot as only a legend risks sanitising history and overlooking the real social harm of hate speech. A more responsible remembrance should acknowledge the full complexity of her life, celebrating progress while critically confronting prejudice.

Oman Alyahyai is a writer and journalist based in Paris.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.