A Woman’s Search for Meaning

Brigitte Bardot

I had never heard of Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025) until I stumbled upon her brief obituary in the latest Time which called her an Iconic Provocateur. Since I love provocateurs, I learnt more about Bardot. My curiosity was whetted particularly when I read that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre viewed her not just as movie star but as a living philosophical “proof-of-concept.”

A proof-of-concept is a ‘living example’ that proves a theoretical idea can actually exist in the real world. For Sartre and his partner in life as well as philosophy, Bardot was the living example of their idea that humans aren’t born with a fixed ‘nature’ and can live with freedom, without being straitjacketed by social traditions.

Bardot showed that a woman can be sexually free without being a prostitute. Bardot had many men in her life. In the 1950s and 60s, she was the ultimate symbol of the sexual revolution. “It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be,” she declared. Monogamy is a choice, a restriction, rather than a natural inclination for humans. Bardot chose to break that restriction.

She broke many restrictions so much so that Simone de Beauvoir praised her as a “locomotive of women’s history.” Beauvoir admired the autonomy that Bardot upheld in a man’s world, living life on her own terms. 

As Marianne

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was a French actress, singer, and model before she became an animal rights activist. Even as an actress, she refused to live up to the expectations of the men in the industry as well as outside. She said No to heavy makeup and jewellery. She didn’t even wear corsets. She went barefoot too. Going barefoot was more than a fashion choice for her. It was a symbol of her defiance against the rigid, high-society norms of the 1950s.

Bardot was born into a wealthy, orthodox Parisian family. Her childhood was defined by rigid discipline. Her father once punished her with 20 lashes for breaking a vase. I learnt that her “natural” look – the messy hair and bare feet – wasn’t just a fashion statement; it was a visual rejection of the stiff, “proper” upbringing she detested.

She quit acting at a rather young age of 39. That was another act of rebellion. She was on the sets of her last movie, The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot (1973) when a goat caught her attention. She was horrified to learn that the innocent animal was scheduled to be slaughtered for the dinner of the cast and crew that evening. She immediately bought the goat from the owner and walked off the set with the meek creature and never returned to movies. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she declared. “I’m going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.”

The more I read about Bardot, the ‘curioser’ (like Alice in Wonderland) I got. The woman was the height of paradoxes.

While she represented “natural” beauty and spontaneity, that image was built through extreme artifice. Despite being the global face of “free love,” she frequently expressed a deep, almost desperate yearning for traditional monogamy and protection. She was a rebel who often felt like a victim of the very freedom she embodied. She was a feminist who rejected feminism. In her later years, she dismissed the #MeToo movement as “hypocritical” and often spoke in support of traditional patriarchal structures. This woman who loved animals more than humans was convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, particularly against Muslims and immigrants. She often expressed deeply homophobic and xenophobic views. This woman who modelled for Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic and a mother figure of the French, struggled with her own motherhood. She compared her pregnancy to a “tumour” and her relationship with her son was never quite maternal. 

A 2001 pic

Bardot was quite a paradox. Perhaps many of us are. I am one, I have been told by many honest friends. It is her paradoxical nature that drew me to her. When she died on 28 Dec 2025, the French President Emmanuel Macron described her as an embodiment of freedom whose life “touched us.” That might have been a courteous verdict. I find the Time’s pronouncement more apt: “Decades after her films first provoked scandal and fascination, she remained a study of contrasts.”

She was a star actor who walked out of the stage on to the soil and became invisible to men and visible to animals – and found her soul in that invisibility.