In the 1960s, France formalised a national fantasy by stamping it onto its currency. The government selected Brigitte Bardot — its cinema’s most notorious symbol of untamed sexuality — as the new model for Marianne, the allegorical face that had embodied “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” in town halls and on stamps since the French revolution. And so the actor, who was an international sex symbol, became synonymous with the French Republic herself.When she entered the film industry in the early 1950s, Bardot — her voluminous blonde hair and bold winged eyeliner already unmistakable — crystallised a postwar fantasy of liberation. After years of wartime austerity, her image offered unapologetic hedonism. Her global stardom arrived overnight in 1956 with …And God Created Woman. Directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim and set in Saint-Tropez, the film presented Bardot as a young woman who danced barefoot, pursued desire openly, and shrugged off social punishment. To a world still bound by rigid propriety, her audacity felt more revolutionary than her scandalously skimpy costumes.AdvertisementWithin a few years, Bardot was among the most photographed women alive. She made nearly 50 films, recorded sly, insouciant hits with Serge Gainsbourg, and defined an aesthetic — the tousled hair, the heavy eyeliner, the bikini worn as a second skin — that became internationally known as “the Bardot look.” From the start, however, her liberation was aesthetic rather than political.In 1959, Simone de Beauvoir published an essay in Esquire, “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome,” one of the earliest attempts to diagnose the star’s cultural meaning. De Beauvoir argued that Bardot unsettled the public through a startling naturalness, rejecting the costuming of traditional femininity, which included corsets. In fact, she appeared indifferent to judgement itself. This indifference, de Beauvoir suggested, threatened the myths that governed women’s lives. “As soon as one myth is touched, all myths are in danger,” she wrote, recognising Bardot as an agent of subversion.Bardot, however, never identified as a feminist and framed her stardom as a personal triumph. In 1973, at just 38 and still at her peak, she quit acting entirely. The move was widely read as a final assertion of control. She retreated to her compound in Saint-Tropez and redirected her formidable energy toward animal rights activism, founding the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986.AdvertisementShe lobbied presidents, campaigned against the clubbing of seal pups and the fur trade, and donated much of her fortune to the cause. Over time, however, her moral fervour hardened into a hierarchy of compassion. Bardot began to suggest that animals were more deserving of care than certain people.Also Read | Sreenivasan taught Malayalam cinema how to laugh at itself — and gave audiences the courage to be ordinaryFrom the 1990s onward, she aligned herself openly with France’s far right — first Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and later Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. French courts have convicted her six times for inciting racial hatred. In 2019, she sent an open letter describing the people of Réunion as a “degenerate” population who had “kept their savage genes”, for which she was fined €20,000 by a French court in 2021. Muslims and immigrants were frequent targets of her scorn.Her hostility toward feminism became equally explicit. She dismissed the #MeToo movement as a witch hunt, defended the convicted actor Gérard Depardieu, and declared in a televised interview, “Feminism isn’t my thing. I like men.” When the interviewer suggested one could be both, she cut him off sharply: “No.”This late-life bigotry is often framed as a betrayal of her youthful image. That reading is misleading. Bardot’s trajectory reveals not rupture but continuity. She always championed autonomy over equality and personal freedom over collective justice. Her revolution was always a revolution of the self.This consistency explains the apparent paradox of how an icon of sexual liberation could become a pillar of reactionary politics. Bardot helped dismantle one set of constraints — those governing female sexuality — while fiercely defending others, particularly the hierarchies of race, nation, and power.De Beauvoir’s closing hope for the young star now resonates with tragic irony. “I hope she will mature, but not change,” she wrote. Bardot did not change.most readIn her passing on Sunday at the age of 91 on Sunday, she leaves behind a corpus of contradictions. Her story also illuminates a longer and more uncomfortable history within women’s struggles themselves. Across generations, moments of female empowerment have often been accompanied by new exclusions, as those who secure visibility, autonomy, or protection do so by distancing themselves from other women deemed excessive, improper, or undeserving. Respectable women against “fallen” women, liberated women against traditional ones, Western women against immigrant women — the pattern recurs. Power, once gained, has repeatedly been used not to dismantle hierarchies but to reposition oneself more safely within them. Bardot made women’s desire visible and casual in an era of repression, and for that she remains a cultural landmark. But autonomy without solidarity is a dead end. She taught a generation to wear its freedom lightly, yet never learned that freedom, to be meaningful, must be shared. That was her limit — and, in the end, it defined her.aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com