Today is Brigitte Bardot’s 90th birthday. Iconic comedienne and actress, who became a myth throughout the world, then an activist committed to the animal cause, franceinfo today questions with the sociologist Jean Viard, the importance in our society of such figures, starified, inaccessible beings, become almost untouchable in the collective imagination.
franceinfo: We wonder today who the new idols are, as Bardot may have been in the 60s. First of all, why do we need idols, stars, icons?
Jean Viard: We have always had images, whether it is the statues in the Greek islands, whether it is the Virgin, the saints, moreover, look at the Protestants who made images, etc. Why do we need images? But basically, because it’s a way of identifying yourself. When you are young, you educate yourself, you know your parents, you open your circle in the world, and you perhaps identify with a singer, with a politician, etc. Then it changes, depending on the times. It’s a way of asserting one’s values, of discovering them, of asserting an aesthetic.
So it’s a contact that we have with the world and that is built. So obviously, before, they were stone statues, that has changed a lot. So, what is extraordinary about Brigitte Bardot is that with And God… created woman, in 1956, she launched a wave of women’s liberation, because she showed that women have as much desire as men to make love, to have positions, etc. And it affirms an extraordinary liberation, two years before de Gaulle regained power, while the Fifth Republic, from a cultural point of view, was not at the forefront, 12 years before 1968.
Afterwards, we change, because post-war cinema was an extraordinary revolution, color cinema which was moving. So it was the actresses, the actors, the icons. Today, it is less true, the icons correspond to our times. There are certainly influencers, there is a terrible place for athletes…
Influencers precisely, people who can launch trends today. Have idols had a greater impact on society than the influencers, movie stars, or athletes of our time?
No, I don’t think so. We always need images. It is also a way of galvanizing yourself, of mobilizing for values. If you look at the characters we put in the Pantheon for example; Afterwards, each society is a little different: look at the Americans, their great icons are the Founding Fathers, those who are sculpted in a mountain. We have figures like Louis XIV, Napoleon, de Gaulle, Joan of Arc, who are timeless figures.
And then we add more depending on the era, indeed, Brigitte Bardot, today the influencers, certain great singers, groups, take the Beatles, it has had an absolutely immense cultural influence. So it’s also a way of defending values and also of changing life. Everyone, deep down, also builds themselves against the generation before, your mother adored Brigitte Bardot, you will perhaps adore an influencer instead.
After all, haven’t the mass media both desecrated idols and allowed anyone to become famous?
If, that is to say what they have done, it is because they have multiplied the channels. Before. Bernard Pivot was the man who sold books. You went to Pivot, you could go up to a million pounds. Today if you appear on a literary show, you will sell much less: 200 or 300,000, if it really is a huge success.
Does this also work with TikTok today?
Yes, that means we are a much more diverse society and I find that extremely positive. There are very different people, different religions, people from the city, from the countryside, etc. And this company is much more diverse, which is a good thing. The question is how a national French society feels, and how it comes together.
It is this diversity which gives the charm of all modern countries, but then, from time to time, we have to bring all of this together in major events, and we have just done it with the Olympic Games; suddenly, a great breath of unity which will perhaps not last 50 years, but which brings all this diversity, at one moment, together. And this is what is called “making a nation”.
