Essays in Idleness

Six times convicted of “racial hatred,” of making “Islamophobic statements” on numerous occasions, and once of describing the inhabitants of Reunion Island as “degenerate savages” — I did not realize that Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot, Ordre impérial de la Légion d’honneur, had such advanced opinions. Her animal rights advocacy — generally as the playground alternative to “human rights” — might also be celebrated, and added to her list of distinctions; and I’m sure there were many others, though I have yet to search diligently through her X files.

Her death, yesterday, at the tender age of ninety-one, is greatly to be regretted. She was just getting started.

We should seize the opportunity to think of her, at a time when France has, like England and most other European nations, become so contemptible. Once the Franks led us in the Crusades. Now we have to depend on the Americans, which means enduring the Somalification even of Minnesota. (Its Democratization was bad enough.)

Fortunately the Yanquis have a Secretary of War who wears the Jerusalem Cross on his skin, though alas, no other armour.

Bardot was once elected to the office of French “Marianne,” to appear on the nation’s tin and aluminum coins, postage stamps, &c. This was the lady wearing the Phrygian “liberty cap” in the allegory of fakery and betrayal, that rolled in with the decapitations during the Revolution. She was the “new” symbol of the Republique, but later, in an age of glib fashion, she “evolved” into a representation of French sensuousness and whoredom. She was the secular, bureaucratic alternative to Joan of Arc, who had represented genuine liberty, creative and frightening.

Whereas, Bardot was simply a reminder that “God created woman.”