Because his friend Brigitte Bardot has just passed the 90th birthday on September 28, Jean-Louis Remilleux recalled some good memories for Paris Match. The television producer notably returned to BB’s meeting with Charles Pasqua at the end of the 1980s. She was then trying to have her foundation recognized for animals as being of public utility, he was the Minister of the Interior.
It was Brigitte Bardot who asked Jean-Louis Remilleux to organize a meeting with “the truculent Charles Pasqua”. “Place Beauvau is bustling. All the secretaries are at the windows when she crosses the paved courtyard,” remembers the producer, thirty years later. “The head of all the police who wants to “terrorize the terrorists” becomes, in the face of our Marianne, a charming lamb like the ones you come across in his Corsican maquis. »
The Minister of the Interior Charles Pasqua receives a bust of Marianne with the likeness of Brigitte Bardot, on November 3, 1986, during the inauguration in Lyon of the “Mairie Expo 86” exhibition.
AFP / © JEAN-MARC COLLIGNON / AFP
Before even mentioning the reason for his visit, Charles Pasqua then suggested to Brigitte Bardot that they come and see “these undocumented intruders who dared to nest in the minister’s garden”. “He opens a French window, walks into a bush and shows us at a respectable distance a nest of blackbirds,” says Jean-Louis Remilleux. “The ice is broken. »
BB ready to sell everything for her foundation
Despite this cordial meeting, Charles Pasqua – who died in 2015 at the age of 88 – was unable to respond positively to BB’s request, which was to “block a financial base of three million francs before the foundation is recognized of public utility”. Because she had already retired from film sets at that time, the ex-actress did not have the means to raise such a sum. So she decided to “sell everything” on the way back from the ministry. “My dresses, my jewelry and other frills. All this is no longer of any use. The Parisian fuss and all the fuss, it’s over! »
A major auction was therefore organized on June 17, 1987. The Brigitte Bardot Foundation was finally recognized as being of public utility five years later. “A little later, it was La Madrague, his legendary house in Saint-Tropez, that Bardot will bequeath to the foundation during his lifetime in order to ensure its sustainability,” adds Jean-Louis Remilleux. A house in which she still lives, surrounded by her beloved animals, but above all, far from prying eyes and Parisian fuss.
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Brigitte Bardot, a regular at the Elysée
Despite everything, it happens, on very rare occasions, that BB returns to Paris, as during his interview with President Emmanuel Macron and his wife at the Elysée Palace, in 2018, to discuss the animal cause of course.
Nicolas Sarkozy talks with Brigitte Bardot and the president of the French League for the Protection of Birds, Allain Bougrain-Dubourg, during a meeting on September 27, 2007 at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
AFP / © ACQUES BRINON / POOL / AFP
Other political figures have been able to observe the limitless commitment of Brigitte Bardot over the decades: François Mitterand in 1984, after an interview at the Elysée, Jacques Chirac when he was mayor of Paris in 1990, at the Animal Festival de Vincennes, Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, still at 55 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré…
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