Brigitte Bardot: "It was another era, that of General de Gaulle, when France was governed"

The only President of the Republic that Brigitte Bardot has never met is François Hollande. With Le Point magazine, Brigitte Bardot recounted the beginnings of her fight for the animal cause. Combat for which she spoke with almost all the presidents of the Fifth Republic. And on the French heads of state, the actress swings. Which one helped him the most? Giscard. "Chirac, he is the one who promised me the most, but he didn't keep anything at all," she explains. And to add: “He was adorable, he called me “my doe” and sent me charming little words. He may have had an idea in mind.

It is probably Emmanuel Macron that BB supports the least. “It will have been a total fiasco”, asserts the actress about the President of the Republic. "When I met him in 2018, I was surprised by his seriousness and the attention he paid to all the subjects we discussed," she says. At the time, Brigitte Bardot led a fierce fight against horse eating. When she told him about it during their interview, "he seemed surprised and even indignant: 'What? Do we still eat horse in France?” He didn't even know that at home, we kill 5,000 horses to eat them, "says Brigitte Bardot indignantly. The actress calls for the pure and simple prohibition of this practice. "He didn't do anything, of course. [...] The animal cause is the fifth wheel of his presidential carriage. On this level at least, we can regret Giscard, ”she laments.

Under De Gaulle also BB moved mountains for the animal cause. In 1962 after a television show, she got an appointment with Roger Frey, the Minister of the Interior at the time. He “was one of those who were called the “barons” of Gaullism. An important character, of great humanity,” recalls Brigitte Bardot. At this time, the actress is fighting to make the slaughter pistol mandatory in slaughterhouses. The instrument prevents the suffering of the bleeding carried out until then without anesthesia or stunning. For his appointment, BB shows up at Place Beauvau armed with the famous pistols. This caused, according to her, "an incident with the security services of the ministry, who believed that I wanted to assassinate him." The actress succeeded in convincing Roger Frey and in 1972, "the slaughter pistol was made compulsory for large cattle in all approved slaughterhouses."

Of all of them, it was Valéry Giscard d'Estaing who helped Brigitte Bardot the most. “He was trying to sort things out.” In 1976, the actress tried to put an end to the hunt for whitecoats - baby seals. From the ice floe, she calls Giscard. “He totally agreed with us. He banned the import of sealskins. Saving baby seals was ultimately the only big fight I ended up winning, after thirty years of fierce struggle. In 2009, the European Parliament finally voted to ban all products derived from seals, starting with the skins, in the European Union,” says BB. VGE did not stop there, it also “ended the use of macaques in the automotive industry for car crash tests. They have been replaced by mannequins.

Brigitte Bardot regrets that her successive fights for the animal cause are sometimes in vain. In 1972, she failed to eradicate ritual slaughter without anesthesia. “In Jewish and Muslim rites, animals are slaughtered in all conscience, in suffering, by sworn killers,” explains the actress. In 2004, BB met Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Mosque of Paris, and the Grand Mufti. She thinks she has convinced the two men. But it is nothing. “Muslims claimed they would only change slaughter patterns if Jews did too, the two got into a tangle. Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, then declared to me that he would decide. He could not."