The Misunderstood Compassion of Brigitte Bardot

© Fondation Brigitte Bardot

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Version française ici

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Who was Brigitte Bardot?

To appreciate who she was, we must first reckon with the authoritarian, anthropocentric world we inhabit.

To the animals of the world, we humans are Nazis.

We may not all knowingly participate in cruelty, but we are all collaborators unless we choose to become resisters.

Brigitte Bardot understood this. Her contempt for our species’ indifference was not something she kept to herself. She did not quietly mutter her disgust at a world oblivious to abject cruelty; she raised her voice against a hypocritical culture that cherry picks its causes, a world that often exploits figures like her merely to rationalize its own bigotry, discrimination, and violence.

Like Captain Nemo, she decided at 39 to be done with society for reasons that seemed good to her. She turned her back on adoration and stardom and walked away to begin a more meaningful life of resistance—practicing compassion for the innocent.

At the same time, she understood the power of her celebrity and chose to aim it at making a difference for the suffering multitudes of non humans enslaved to our species for food, sport, and labor. For her part in ending the brutal slaughter of white coated baby seals, I am forever in her debt.

When a group of fishermen on Réunion Island brutally pierced live puppies’ noses to use them as shark bait, she called them savages. For that, she was fined for a “racist” remark. But was it racist to describe a savage act as savage?

When she was young, she was exploited for her beauty, and she acknowledged that she had taken part in that exploitation—until she chose not to.

Brigitte was my friend. In all our years, I never heard her make a racist remark, nor did I hear her denounce Islam any more than your average Jew, Muslim or Catholic might denounce a rival creed. Her voice, however, carried farther than most.

Why did she support Marine Le Pen? The answer is simple: she appealed to politicians across the spectrum, and Le Pen was the one who told her she understood the need for animal rights. The Left could have had her support had they shown compassion beyond their fixation on prioritizing exclusively human demands.

The truth is that Brigitte had little use for Left or Right. Her concern was singular: what was good for animals. She also had little patience for the opinions or criticisms of hypocritical humans.

Some critics say you can’t love animals unless you love humanity. Of course, you can—and precisely because of humanity’s inhumanity, she loved animals so fiercely.

Every day, millions of newborn male chicks drop onto a conveyor belt and into a grinder mere minutes after hatching. Every day, thousands of male calves are torn from their mothers, isolated in dark crates to produce veal. Every day, thousands of geese are force fed until their livers become diseased to make foie gras. Racehorses shatter their legs; dolphins languish in captivity—both for human entertainment. Calling ritual slaughter barbaric and cruel is not racist; it is descriptive.

She believed, as I do, that there can never be any cultural justification for inflicting pain and death on a sentient being.

When Brigitte Bardot condemned the dolphin killers of Japan, the pilot whale slayers of the Faroe Islands, the bullfighters of Spain, and the baby seal clubbers of Canada as barbarians, she was not being racist—she was naming immoral, egregious behavior. She was honest in a world where cruelty is ignored and animals are treated as objects to be owned, exploited, brutalized, and terrorized—in a contradictory world that dotes on puppies and kittens while slitting the throats of pigs and lambs.

Brigitte did more to defend, protect, and care for animals than all the saints, and I have no hesitation in speaking of her in saintly terms. She leaves a legacy with the Brigitte Bardot Foundation and in the hundreds of thousands of animal lives saved.

In our conversations, it was clear her worldview was biocentric. She saw the connections among all species, not just the social bonds among people. To be sane in a world of mass cruelty and senseless slaughter is to be judged crazy by those who lack compassion and kindness.

The truth is that it takes great courage to face and confront the trauma we witness each day in a world starved of empathy.

We live amid a collective psychosis—anthropocentrism—that grants us a seemingly infinite capacity to rationalize and justify cruelty and killing.

Brigitte inspired and educated tens of thousands. She was outspoken, blunt, passionate, courageous, and unafraid to hold strong opinions. She leaves the world kinder for animals than the one she was born into, and she compelled many to confront the contradictions and hypocrisies that shape how we view life beyond our narrow human self-interest.

At 39, Brigitte Bardot radically changed the course of her life—a decision that brought her personal happiness even as she gave happiness and compassion to countless living, sentient beings.

At 91 she has left us and many of us are sad for the loss of a wonderful woman, a legend and an angel of mercy.

«Je ne suis pas ce qu’on appelle un homme civilisé, Professeur. J’en ai fini avec la société pour des raisons qui me semblent bonnes. Par conséquent, je n’obéis pas à ses lois.»

— Capitaine Nemo (Jules Verne)