A controversial legacy
By the late 1990s, Bardot was making headlines for reasons that alienated many of her admirers. Between 1997 and 2008, she was convicted and fined on five occasions for inciting racial hatred, following remarks linked to her opposition to Muslim animal slaughter practices.
“It’s true that sometimes I get carried away,” she said at the time. “But when I see how slowly things move forward, and despite all the promises made to me by successive governments, my distress takes over.”
In 1997, several French towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne, the bare-breasted symbol of the French Republic, after she publicly expressed anti-immigration views.
Bardot often framed her activism through a deeply personal lens, drawing parallels between her own experiences and those of the animals she sought to protect. “I can understand hunted animals because of the way I was treated,” she once said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.”
