Brigitte Bardot's Personal Effects Auctioned for Animal Charity

On a Monday in Paris, nearly three hundred objects that once belonged to Brigitte Bardot went under the hammer at the Drouot auction house. A pair of Repetto ballet flats. Diamond rings. A manual typewriter. A bicycle. Kitchen pans. The proceeds would go to her animal foundation. Most of the lots carried opening bids under one hundred euros, though auctioneers expected the actual sales to climb considerably higher as bidders competed for pieces of the late actress's life.

Bardot died in December at ninety-one. The items on display came from her two homes in Saint-Tropez and her Paris apartment, with sections of the sale rooms reconstructed to evoke the spaces where she had lived. Fans arrived in significant numbers to walk among the nearly three hundred lots, examining the objects that had surrounded her—not the public Brigitte Bardot of cinema and legend, but the woman who had chosen what to keep, what to wear, what to display.

Frank Guillou, who served as her secretary for many years, described the collection as a map of her existence. Each item, he said, carried the weight of an encounter, a commitment, a moment of satisfaction, a chapter of her story. The typewriter on which she had written her correspondence and autobiography. Classical guitars. Jewelry. Portraits of herself—some erotic—that she had received as gifts from artists she knew or whose work had moved her. She had kept them, Guillou explained, even though she disliked looking at her own image and had chosen not to hang them on her walls.

Bardot's reputation in the late twentieth century was built on her work as a model and actress beginning in the nineteen-fifties. She became synonymous with modern femininity and embodied the sexual revolution of her era. But her later life took a different shape. She became an advocate for animal rights, a cause that would define her final decades. That commitment was visible in the auction itself: a large collection of stuffed animals, dog collars, photographs of her pets arranged prominently throughout her homes. When animals died, Guillou said, she grieved profoundly. She buried them in her gardens according to strict protocols, their photographs given places of honor in her living spaces.

Yet Bardot's legacy was not uncomplicated. In her later years she faced criticism for homophobic remarks and was fined multiple times for statements deemed to incite racial hatred. The auction house and those organizing the sale chose not to dwell on these aspects, instead framing the event as an opportunity for people who carried her memory forward and kept her causes alive—people who loved animals and loved Brigitte Bardot in equal measure.

Cecile Dupuis of the auction house Millon, which conducted the sale, anticipated that the room would fill with these devotees. They would bid on her ballet flats, her pans, her typewriter, her bicycle. They would own small pieces of her domestic world. Bardot's estate had been divided between her animal foundation and her only son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, who also benefited from the auction's proceeds. The sale, then, served multiple purposes at once: a dispersal of a life lived, a fundraising mechanism for animal welfare, and a final transaction between a legendary figure and the people who had kept her in their thoughts.