Brigitte Bardot and Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, the “rejected” son. But in the end she made peace with him (even though she will receive almost nothing from the inheritance)

PARIS The Elysée has proposed to Brigitte Bardot’s family to organize a solemn national tribute, but the relatives of the actress who passed away at the age of 91 have so far given no response. In any case, President Macron will not attend the funeral which will be held privately on January 7 in Saint-Tropez, and which will be followed by a ceremony “open to all the inhabitants of Saint-Tropez and his admirers”, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation announced yesterday in a statement. Instead, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rassemblement who had received public support from BB, will be there. The actress will be buried in the marine cemetery, where her parents rest, in front of the sea and the La Madrague villa where she passed away on Sunday at dawn. Bardot had declared herself extremely disappointed by politicians and in particular by Macron, to whom she had written a letter in 2023 complaining of his “inaction against animal suffering”.

The family members who have abandoned the Elysée’s proposal for the moment are her husband Bernard d’Ormale, former advisor and friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was next to her at the moment of her death; her 87-year-old sister Marie-Jeanne, known as Mijanou, who wrote a greeting on Facebook “to my Brigitte who I adored more than anything else”, and her son Nicolas-Jacques Charrier65, who lives in Norway with his wife, two daughters and grandchildren, and has remained silent for the moment. The figure of Brigitte Bardot’s only child is currently attracting the interest of many who are trying to understand “the BB mystery”. As for the inheritance, according to French law at least half of Brigitte Bardot’s assets should go to her son, which however are now almost non-existent because over the years the actress has transferred everything to the Foundation, so that she can continue the work of protecting animals even after her death.

What remains is the personal aspect, the difficult relationship – at least in the first years of life – between mother and child, which has long fueled the severe judgment on Brigitte Bardot, guilty of loving animals more than human beings, of having spoken of the newborn as a “tumor”, after saying he would rather have a little dog than that unwanted child. The difficulty of being a mother was one of the most dramatic aspects of Brigitte Bardot’s life, between pregnancy losses and suicide attempts. Married to her first husband Roger Vadim, at 18 and 20 Brigitte Bardot she went to Switzerland to have an abortion twice (in France the practice was still illegal) in appalling conditions, including haemorrhages and cardiac arrest. After those traumas, married to her second husband Jacques Charrier, actor and producer, at the age of 26 she gave birth to her only son Nicolas-Jacques, in a not much better situation. Her jealous and abusive husband pressured her to give him a childand she recounted those moments in her memoirs Initials BB: «I became a mother exactly when it would have been better to avoid it. I experienced it as a drama. And this created two unhappy people: my son and me.”

The circumstances of the birth were dramatic, because in 1960 Bardot-mania was at her peak and to avoid the paparazzi the actress chose to give birth at home, in her apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, which was however stormed by the mediaamong journalists disguised as doctors and photographers stationed at the windows. Once the baby was born, Brigitte didn’t know how to hold him, how to breastfeed him, she was scared when he cried and she felt inadequate. Some of the suicide attempts that he will talk about are linked to this depression Paris Match: «I was trying to kill myself every three minutes, I was just doing silly things, but you can’t choose: the moment was terrible and everyone suffered for it». After his parents divorced when he was three years old, the son lived alone with his father, but over the years Nicolas and Brigitte became closer. Married in Norway to a former model, father of two daughters and grandfather, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier he often went to Madrague to visit his mother, who was proud of her “Norwegian grandchildren”.

December 31, 2025

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