Waiting for Bardot: How the film icon's extreme views have scandalised France

After the Delon tribute, Marc-Olivier Fogiel sent a fax to Bardot. 'Delon did not get my ears and tail,' it said, 'but you can catch them yourself if you come on my show.' She had not been on television for years, and was flattered by the offer of a tribute. She agreed to appear.

Fogiel and his production team visited her at la Madrague, her house by the sea at St Tropez. He and Bardot were photographed together at the water's edge, in perfect harmony. Later, one of the show's contributors asked if the team was going to challenge Bardot about her new book. 'New book?' the team asked. 'What new book?'

Bardot did indeed have a new book coming out, which she had neglected to mention to Fogiel. She had previously written two volumes of autobiography for the leading French publisher Grasset, and had reputedly been paid 5m francs (around £500,000). The first volume, Initiales BB, had sold around half a million copies. The second, Le Carré de Pluton (Pluto's Square), had been less successful. This third and latest book had been turned down by Grasset and by another well-known publishing house, Albin Michel. They had not liked the content. It had been picked up by an independent publisher, Jean-Paul Bertrand.

Bertrand's Paris-based company, Editions du Rocher (Editions of the Rock), had enjoyed great success with a version of Nostradamus that sold more than a million copies in the 1980s. It had been less successful earlier this year with a romantic novel by Saddam Hussein, Zabiba and the King, not long before the dictator was deposed. Bardot's new book was Un Cri dans le Silence (A Cry in the Silence), subheaded Revolte et Nostalgie (Revolt and Nostalgia). She had written it the previous autumn, a lament for a mythical lost France. Her husband, Bernard d'Ormale, had played a small role as editor. Where, for example, she'd written, 'The French are ugly,' he had proposed: 'Some of the French are ugly.'

Bertrand did not feel the book needed much editing. Bardot was not racist or homophobic, he said. She was speaking on behalf of the silent majority. He was only unsure about some of her crude turns of phrase. She used the word 'con' a lot, meaning 'stupid', as in 'stupid people'.

Bardot told Bertrand she wanted the book published quickly and did not want any advance copies sent out. She especially did not want any sent to Fogiel and she did not want to discuss it on the tribute programme. Still, Bertrand - and perhaps Brigitte - knew the show would help sales. He brought the publication date forward to coincide with the tribute in early May.

When Fogiel found out about the book he was furious and set about trying to obtain a copy. Bardot meanwhile submitted herself to a visit from Paris Match. Arnaud Bizot was dispatched to St Tropez by the magazine with these words of warning from Bardot's personal secretary, Frank Guillou: 'If she likes you, it could last two days. If she doesn't, it will be over in 10 minutes.'

Bizot later told me he knew he had endeared himself when, after they had eaten a meal cooked by her, he pointed out that she didn't need to wash the plates because they had been licked perfectly clean by her dogs. Bardot had beamed with pleasure at this (stomach-turning) prospect. Every plate was put on the floor for her pets to finish off. Bizot noted how busy Bardot was, despite her bad hip, cooking and cleaning while her husband sat in front of the TV. He was very impolite, said Bizot.

But then, if d'Ormale caught Bizot alone in the garden, he'd start telling him what a wonderful guy Jean-Marie Le Pen was. Le Pen, of course, was the leader of the Front National, the extreme-right party of France that had won several million votes in the first round of the national elections. Bernard d'Ormale was a personal friend of Le Pen's; he could not help telling Bizot that he was a clever, charming man and a great politician, that France was the last communist state. Bizot knew what Le Pen was like: he had spent a week with him, reporting for Paris Match. Every night he felt he needed a shower, he told me. Bardot complained to Bizot about her husband always going on about politics. 'All day he makes me sick with politics,' she said. Still, Bizot felt d'Ormale had influenced Bardot and pushed her further to the right. He sensed too that Bardot was in some way ashamed of her book. Bardot told him, jokily: 'You can't read it, because you are going to think it's awful.'Bizot did not mention any of this in his article, but told me about it some weeks later when I began trying to persuade Bardot to talk to me. After many calls between Paris and London - she won't talk, she might talk, she will talk, she can't talk, she's too busy - Bardot's press attaché finally told me that Bardot would speak to me by phone. But she would only talk to me in French, and would only answer questions submitted by fax, in advance, in French, about animals and her animal charity, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation.

Bizot told me he had subsequently read Bardot's book and believed it was based on what she had seen on TV, and ideas from d'Ormale. He felt disappointed in her: she had once shown real courage, standing for such causes as the abolition of capital punishment. (She declares in A Cry in the Silence that she has changed her mind and is now in favour of the death penalty.)

Fogiel finally obtained a copy of Bardot's book, and read it a few days before the programme. 'Do you hate me?' Bardot asked him when they next spoke. No, he said, but he hated what he had read, and proposed to challenge her about it on the show. She said she'd get up and leave if he did.

Fogiel waited until the final segment before he mentioned the book. He and his co-presenter began reading out the more extreme sentiments. She had many gay friends, she wrote; the good gays were the subtle, cultured ones not flaunting their homosexuality. She objected to gay exhibitionists. She seemed to make a wordplay between pederasts and paedophiles, as if all gay men wanted to have sex with children too. There were complaints about Muslims and immigrants - 'people without papers', the French call them. (Bardot had made a wordplay to Bizot, comparing people without papers to toilet paper. Even Le Pen, Bizot felt, wouldn't have dared such a remark.)

She said they were 'defecating behind the altar, peeing against columns, spreading their nauseating smell under the sacred vaults of the choir'. You couldn't criticise, she wrote, it was not politically correct. The immigrants got everything; the French, who needed it, got nothing. Too much money was spent building mosques. She resented the Islamisation of France, claimed Islam was a false religion because of the barbaric morals of Eid (the Muslim festival during which, as she saw it, all Muslims cut the throat of sheep without care for their suffering). September 11 was carried out by Islamists, monstrous, satanic men, terrorising the population, raping young girls, training pit bulls to hurt, doing their bosses' bidding as they get ready to attack. As Fogiel read, the studio audience, containing many of her fans and friends from her animal charity, began jeering him. D'Ormale sat in the front row, right behind Bardot. 'It's not you I'm interviewing,' Fogiel told him.

Uneasy and defensive, Bardot stood by every word. She threatened to leave again, but stayed. She repeated that she was only saying what others thought but didn't dare say. The audience cheered. A black couple walked out. Some viewers thought Bardot seemed sad and humiliated, looking over-made-up, like a ripe peach, on the verge of tears.

The programme ended; Fogiel went to the green room. It looked as though d'Ormale wanted to fight him. Bardot told Fogiel he had ruined the most beautiful gift of her career (the tribute programme); and you, said Fogiel, you've ruined the most beautiful gift for me (having Bardot as his special guest). Bardot cried. And, just to make matters worse, said Paris Match, when BB got home to St Tropez she discovered that one of her goats had died of indigestion.

Bardot went into deep seclusion. She refused to answer the phone, stopped sending faxes. I could see why she was no longer talking, but she was hardly showing the courage of her convictions.

I wrote pages of questions and had them translated in Paris. I thought I was being clever, mentioning animals while slipping in references to Le Pen and the National Front, hoping this might lure her into some fresh disclosures of her rabid beliefs. Bardot seemed to like to give the impression she was often hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, trying to persuade them to act for animals. I wanted to ask her if she thought she was good at schmoozing. There is no French word for that, so my translator, Annaliese, suggested 'buttering-up'. I don't think Bardot liked that. 'I do not butter up,' she said in her fax back.

Bernard d'Ormale is Bardot's fourth husband. She met him one night in June 1992 when it was raining 'like a pissing cow' (she wrote). She had been invited to the home of a lawyer friend, Jean-Louis Bouguereau, who secured the release of a woman sent to prison after a dispute with French social services. Bardot had read of the case and appointed him to help. A rare example, perhaps, of her placing the interests of people before animals. Bouguereau was also a regional councillor for the NF in Toulon, and a friend of Jean-Marie and Madame Le Pen. Le Pen had been keen to meet Bardot; he came with an entourage that included Bernard d'Ormale. Bardot thought the Le Pens were charming and cultured. If she was bothered by their politics she never mentioned it.

D'Ormale was introduced to Bardot by Jany Le Pen as a close friend. It seems that d'Ormale has never had a formal role with the NF and only helped briefly on a campaign in the mid-1990s. It has been claimed he is a paid-up member or director or organiser of Le Pen's personal office. So far as I can ascertain, he helped out by setting up audiovisual equipment for a party meeting or meetings in Nice. Maybe there is more. If so, it is very hidden. There is no doubting, however, his friendship with the Le Pens and his support for the NF and (therefore) its racist politics.

Bardot writes in her autobiography of the way she fell for d'Ormale almost straight away. 'I made myself beautiful for him with my gypsy skirt and flowers in my hair.' They saw each other the next evening, and sat together on the sand and nearly - but not quite - forgot all about dining with the Le Pens. After that meal, Jean-Marie stood up and began singing old French songs in the restaurant. They all started singing. It was a bit boy-scout, wrote Bardot, but unexpected and charming.

D'Ormale was Italian in origin, and seven years younger than Bardot. He had lived in South America; travelled in Africa as a film distributor. He moved into la Madrague with Bardot and they fought for a while about the mess of dogs' hairs and animals. They got married, separated briefly, reconciled and have been together since.

Bardot credited d'Ormale with effecting a reunion between her and her only child: her son, Nicholas, from her second marriage to the actor Jacques Charrier. Bardot did not seem to have been a very attentive parent: she had allowed Charrier to take custody of Nicholas, even though Charrier had suffered a nervous breakdown and had, like Bardot herself, attempted suicide.

She and her son had not seen each other for many years before she met him in his home town of Oslo in 1992, with d'Ormale's encouragement. Nicholas had married without telling her. Their lives had been very separate. They became separate again in 1996 when Initiales BB was published. In it, Bardot describes the painful birth of her son with his 'negroid little face' and says she would rather have given birth to a puppy. She readily concedes that she was not prepared to look after a child, having still been a child herself (she was 25) when Nicholas was born in 1960.

Perhaps not having allegedly been shown much affection as a child, she was in no position to be a normal, loving adult herself. She had three quick marriages - to the director Roger Vadim, to Charrier and to Gunter Sachs, often described as a 'playboy' but also a gifted photographer - and many other relationships. As she would later write to me, people who claimed to love her had something else in mind. As a star she had been surrounded by self-interested people who annoyed her. She had done the housework (swept them away) and got rid of them. Love, in its pure state, she had only found in animals. They had never betrayed her, except in death.She would not, she wrote, further analyse what seemed self-evident. The pure love of animals. Still, maybe not to seem too anti-human, people who said she cared more about animals than people were imbeciles, and she didn't care what they thought.

In the late 1970s and 80s she had been involved with a well-known French film maker and animal campaigner, Allain Bourgrain-Dubourg. He had sensed a deep unhappiness in her, he later told me; a constant depression at the failure of others to act on behalf of animals or to recognise the importance of her efforts. He felt this was also the origin of her extreme views. He wanted to believe she was not right-wing, but her views were not acceptable, and were damaging to her and her animal campaigns. He thought she was unhappy to have written such things.

It was true. She wrote like someone who had no faith in people and no love for them. She raged against fat women, sex changes, processed food, too much drinking, sex and vulgarity, pollution, plastic surgery, awful supermarkets, ugly tourists, restaurants that sold live crabs and lobsters - which she would sometimes buy and throw back into the sea. You could say she was a misanthropist - grumpy, arthritic, living like a hermit in St Tropez. But she was probably just unhappy with herself, finding it increasingly difficult to accept the ravages of age. Fearing anaesthetic so much that she would refuse to have an important operation seemed very much like a fear of dying.

She earned no money from her films now, she wrote to me. It was almost another life. Bizot said she got weepy after a glass of champagne and, when he tried to talk to her about the past, she said: 'Don't go too far with that, I'm about to cry.'

If her anti-Islamic opinions had been born of her grievances about the treatment of sheep, now she was more blatantly racist. Intentionally or not, she was standing beside Le Pen. Maybe she was, as her publisher said, speaking for the silent majority - but she was also fermenting racism.

She was first sued in 1996, for provoking hatred against Muslims, after writing an open letter in the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro about Eid and the Islamisation of France. At first cleared of incitement, pending an appeal, she wrote a feature for a National Front journal, Présent. If France didn't act to protect sheep, she wrote, Muslims would end up cutting everyone's throats. She was sued and found guilty of the first offence. When she reprinted the Figaro article in her second volume of memoirs, she was sued a third time.

Now she was being sued again. This time, the Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l'Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP - the Movement against Racism and for Friendship between Peoples) would be seeking damages, perhaps even a prison sentence. As the national secretary, Maloud Anouit, noted, she repeated the same things in disregard of the courts. How long would it be, he asked, before her words became the attacks of others?

Anouit had told Bertrand he should be ashamed of publishing such a book. It was pure fascism. Had I seen the bit about cross-breeding; how in the animal world it was avoided because it produced mongrels? Or how the handicapped were overpromoted in charity telethons (which Bardot in a wordplay renamed 'telcons', as in con, or stupid). That sounded like the Nazis, he said. He believed she was being used by Jean-Marie Le Pen. If she wasn't already a member of the NF, they ought to give her a party card straight away.

The Bardot special was broadcast on May 12 to an audience of 6.3m, the second highest of the year for the channel, France 3. The next day, broadcast unions criticised Fogiel for giving the oxygen of publicity to racist views. And the furore created a bestseller. At the last count, A Cry in the Silence had sold 263,000 copies. It was top of the 'hit parade', as Bardot wrote in her fax. Still, Bertrand was unhappy. He believed that calls for a boycott had cost him 100,000 sales and some bookshop workers were running a guerrilla campaign, pretending the book was unavailable when it wasn't. He wanted to sue somebody as well. Both he and his publishing house were named in MRAP's writ.

Jean-Marie Le Pen weighed in with support for Bardot. His daily newspaper criticised the 'bearded unionists' and the 'hysteria of the thought police' and quoted Le Pen as saying Bardot was only articulating what many thought. Sadly, he seemed to be right. Bardot claimed she received 17,000 letters of support. But she still decided not to be interviewed by me after all, not even on the phone in French. Stephanie Roche, her press attaché, told me she would answer my questions - but only by fax.

The fax came through a few days later. Eight pages of it. It looked as if it had been written in a passionate flurry, in her distinctive longhand. She had not answered all my questions, but picked out the points that interested or irritated her ('I do not butter up!'). She had chosen solitude, she wrote, to devote time to animals. She had loved animals since she was a child and had a hundred or so: horses, ponies, donkeys, geese, chickens, cockerels, ducks, pigs, goats, sheep, dogs, cats and wild boars. There were many current causes. The foundation was setting up a special sanctuary in Bulgaria for dancing bears.

She said she was right-wing, always had been. And at her age she had the right to say what she thought, even if it was not politically correct. She couldn't care less since the age of 40. But she was not extreme right. 'I can assure you I'm neither Nazi nor fascist... But neither am I communist nor socialist... Je vous embrasse,' it concluded.

Once, being embraced by Bardot would have meant something. Quite what was evident on the walls of her Paris foundation. If you followed the ferrets running freely through the offices you saw many images of Bardot, including a huge black-and-white portrait taken just after the release of the film that defined her, Et Dieu Créa la Femme (And God Created Woman) in 1956. How lovely she was, with her flawless skin, pert nose, seductively open smile. What a triumph, to symbolise the 1960s social and sexual revolution. How happy she seemed to be at the heart of it all.

I asked Stephanie Roche if the furore had harmed the foundation. Officially, no. And unofficially? She said she had told Bardot she was in danger of ruining 20 years of good work. Bardot had replied that she was courageous - and Roche was courageous like her too. No, Roche had replied, I am not courageous like that. It was clear that she was embarrassed by Bardot's politics.

And no wonder. For what did Bardot symbolise now, except a rather unpleasant virus of racism that was spreading across France and Europe? Who would want to be embraced by that? No thanks.