It is apparently acceptable for Brigitte Bardot to spend decades whipping up racial hatred and still be celebrated as a national icon, perhaps helped by glamour, distance, and nostalgia. But it is unacceptable for Gary Lineker to voice contemporary moral objections to cruelty and injustice.
The anti-woke commentariat seized on the death of Brigitte Bardot to score some culture war brownie points.
“Bardot proved that, in France, you can be anti-woke and still be a national treasure,” declared the Telegraph.
Britain, it argued, demands ideological conformity and ritual apology. France, by contrast, respects “unrepentant individuals.”
In Britain and America, the paper insists, public life now operates by a crude moral equation – say the wrong thing often enough and you will be erased. France, it claimed, has never fully accepted this logic, and Bardot is the proof. Criticised, fined, even prosecuted, yes, but never exiled from the national story. Her work and legend, we are told, are too deeply woven into French culture to be undone by “cancel culture.”
But this framing collapses the moment one looks seriously at what Bardot actually said and did.
The Telegraph does list her controversies but treats them more as footnotes than the substance of the issue. Bardot was repeatedly fined for inciting racial hatred over her denunciations of Muslim ritual slaughter during Eid, once declaring in court that Muslims were “obsessed with throat-cutting.” In 2006, she warned then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy that France was being “destroyed” by its Muslim population.
In 2018, she dismissed the #MeToo movement, suggesting women who spoke out about harassment were merely seeking attention. In 2022, she was fined yet again, this time for describing the people of Réunion as “degenerates” with “savage genes.” In total, she accumulated five convictions for hate speech, along with thousands of euros in fines.
Yet the Telegraph’s response to this record is to shrug it off, arguing her views “resonate with a large proportion of the French public — the far-right is doing better than ever in the polls.”
Bardot may indeed remain a cultural icon in France and beyond. But to launder decades of racial incitement as evidence of healthy resistance to “wokeness” is surely irresponsible journalism, not cultural analysis.
And the claim that only France continues to venerate ‘anti-woke’ right-wing figures doesn’t hold up either.
Britain, too, has long produced right-wing or reactionary “national treasures.” Rudyard Kipling is celebrated for the Jungle Book and Kim and was the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet his staunch advocacy of empire, militarism and racial hierarchy has rightly attracted criticism, including from George Orwell. His work is taught, debated and contextualised, not weaponised as proof that Britain once “knew how to handle dissent.”
More recently, John Cleese is routinely described as a British national treasure, thanks to Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, despite his outspoken hostility to “wokeness,” his complaints about cancel culture, and his appearances on GB News. Yet his status, far from being revoked, remains largely intact.
And talking of ‘national treasures,’ Gary Lineker, who is, for many, a genuine national treasure, is castigated in right-wing circles for expressing concern about the scapegoating of migrants by senior politicians, or for offering what he himself described as “a little opinion” on the mass murder of children in Gaza.
So, let’s be clear about what’s really going on. It is apparently acceptable for Brigitte Bardot to spend decades whipping up racial hatred and still be celebrated as a national icon, perhaps helped by glamour, distance, and nostalgia. But it is unacceptable for Gary Lineker to voice contemporary moral objections to cruelty and injustice.
Sigh. The culture warriors have begun 2026 exactly where they left off in 2025, repackaging a crusade against “wokeness” as a defence of free expression.
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