Simone de Beauvoir on Brigitte Bardot

“I hope that she will not resign herself to insignificance in order to gain popularity. I hope she will mature but not change.” Those are the last sentences in an essay for Esquire magazine written by Simone de Beauvoir, 1959, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome.

In this essay De Beauvoir celebrated and delighted in the 25 year old Bardot, her youthful, unashamed sexuality, the impression of naturalness, the tousled-haired nymph, the new earthy eroticism. She analysed her agency as the “sex symbol of liberation” within the constraints of the bourgeois patriarchal culture. And she did that taking a sex-positive, feminist-solidarity position at a time when Bardot’s persona provoked division in France.

De Beauvoir deconstructed Bardot’s role as Juliette in And God Created Woman and the male gaze, Bardot’s big break-through movie, a film co-written (with Raoul Levy) and directed by her then husband Roger Vadim. She said he “invented a resolutely modern version of the eternal female and thereby launched a new type of eroticism.” She went on to say “Vadim presented her as a ‘phenomenon of nature’ ‘She doesn’t act’ he said ‘She exists’ ‘That’s right’ confirmed Bardot”. Bardot was not born, but rather became her after her role in this defining film.

De Beauvoir observed “the dream-merchants” moving in a new direction which she called the “erotic hoyden”, with Bardot as epitome. The “nymphet”, a term coined by Nabokov in his book Lolita, where Humbert Humbert, a middle aged man is obsessed with the 12 year old Lolita (first published in France in 1955), and Arthur Miller’s play A View from the Bridge (1955) where “the heroine has just about reached puberty” reflected this trend. De Beauvoir says a “new Eve” has been created “by merging the green fruit with the femme fatale”.

Bardot didn’t have the agency to invent the sexual revolution of the 1960s but she was the Marianne of this revolution from 1956.

Squared

This does not have to be squared with the fact that she was a “crazy cat lady” who turned her back on the film industry and celebrity to care and campaign for animals while caring not a jot for migrants. She was homophobic, against the #Metoo movement, and a supporter of the far-right, indeed was married for 33 years until her death) to Bernard d’Omale, former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front (now the National Rally).

Roland Barthes book Mythologies (1957) described Bardot as a new form of eroticism and labels the intense scrutiny of her life as a “national soap opera”. That was in 1957. She had been acting only since 1952 and only in 1956 had she had her first big role. Seventy years on the national soap opera continues in Bardot’s death, as in life.