French actress Brigitte Bardot was a sex symbol from the moment she stepped onto the big screen. Her first role in her first husband's 1957 film "And God Created Woman," painted her as an 18-year-old seductress. After she died this week, at the age of 91, progressive media pundits wasted no time in telling readers what they really thought of her.
They took her to task for her nationalist comments on Islam—she opposed the diminishment of French culture and customs as more and more Muslim migrants came in. They opposed her views on Me Too—she thought it was absurd that a man should lose his entire career for putting his "hands on a girl’s bottom."
Vogue writer Emma Specter said that while it was okay to mourn Bardot, she should not be "absolved." She complained about her "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."
Specter complained that "Bardot’s embodiment of prototypically 'perfect' white womanhood relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism (problems that persist in France to this day)."
NPR noted that she was praised by iconic French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, partner to Jean Paul Sartre, and that she was a symbol of female sexual freedom. They like this about her. After all, she popularized the bikini.
But they disapprove of her "supporting right-wing political candidates" and calling "Muslims invaders." So did her government. Bardot was convicted under French hate speech laws six times.
Labor migration brought Muslims from North Africa to work in France beginning in the 1950s. The number of Muslims in the country hit 1 million around 1967. France, once the seat of Catholicism, now has the largest Muslim population in Europe at 6 million people. There are some 2,600 mosques in France—in 1957, there was only one.
It is not wrong to want to see your own heritage and culture preserved, nor is it racist, xenophobic, or Islamophobic to keep France French. France welcomed more Muslim migrants than any country in Europe but doing so without failsafes to preserve the culture from anti-assimilationists risks French sovereignty.
There have been dozens of Islamic terror attacks in France, from Charlie Hebdo to Bataclan. While moderate measures have encouraged assimilation, such as banning all religious symbols in schools, the attacks have continued. Teachers were beheaded. Women were attacked. Revelers were massacred. And through it all, Brigitte Bardot was fined and prosecuted for noting that "while our church bells fall silent" mosques are being built across France.
In 1996, she said "And so it is that my country, France, my homeland, has once again been invaded, with the blessings of successive governments, by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims, to whom we are supposed to swear allegiance. To this Islamic flood we are supposed to submit, against our will, all of our traditions."
Bardot wrote an "Open Letter to My Lost France" in 2001 and she did not stop despite the fines. "Over the last twenty years, we have given in to a subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own," she said in 2003.
That same year, she wrote that "We no longer have the right to be outraged when illegal immigrants or thugs profane and conquer our churches, in order to transform them into human pigsties, defecating behind the altar, pissing against the columns, spreading their nauseating smells beneath the sacred vaults of our choirs."
She was fined €15,000 in 2008 for saying the Muslim migrant population was "destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts." Much of her concern was over animal rights abuses. She said "I'm only looking to assuage my soul and protect the animals."
She slammed the Me Too movement, saying it was a travesty that "Those who have talent and put their hands on a girl’s bottom are thrown in the gutter."
Bardot was fined €20,000 in 2020 for saying that the residents of a French-controlled Reunion island off the coast of Madagascar were "savages."
"Among Muslims," she said, "I think there are some who are very good and some hoodlums, like everywhere." And she was right. The issue is not with individuals but with the wholesale deprivation of native culture from a nation. France has been French for centuries, there is no question that it should remain so.
