She loved furs, and I loved my family: How France's first beauty traded an unwanted child for freedom (14 photos)

The image of this delightful woman was synonymous with freedom, passion, and carefreeness.





But behind the dazzling smile of France's sex symbol hid one of the darkest and most painful chapters of her life—the story of motherhood, which she perceived as a death sentence.



Brigitte Bardot didn't want this child. Upon learning she was pregnant by her husband, Jacques Charrier, she attempted an abortion, which was illegal in France at the time. Fearing her determination, her husband literally locked her within four walls.





"I was Jacques's prisoner, my body's prisoner, and my child's prisoner," she later wrote.



With her husband Jacques Charrier

She compared her condition to cancer, and the growing life within her to a tumor that was "consuming her from the inside."



A seemingly happy family

When Nicolas-Jacques was born in 1960, Bardot refused to look at him. "I don't care!" she screamed at the doctors. Her maternal instinct never quite kicked in.



Breastfeeding, nights by the crib—she deliberately deprived her son of all these things, immediately handing him over to his father's care. The public was presented with an idyllic image. But the staged photos of a supposedly happy family were merely cynical PR, concealing despair.



Her key to freedom was an affair. When Charrier demanded a divorce and renunciation of parental rights, Bardot signed the papers without even thinking. She traded her son for the freedom she longed for.



Attempts to reconnect were rare and tragicomic. At 12, Nicolas came to visit, but Bardot sent him back that same night because a party was in the way. This resentment became the point of no return.



Over the years, the star began to feel the grave consequences of her choice. "I love him more than anything in the world," 47-year-old Bardot wrote of her 22-year-old son. But it was too late. He had built his life—his studies, his career first as a model, then as a programmer, his family—without her. She was not invited to his wedding.



Nicolas with his fiancée, Anne-Lyn Bjerkan

Visits to his granddaughters (Nicolas's first daughter, Anne-Camille Charrier, was born in 1985, his second, Théa-Joséphine, five years later) ended in a frosty reconciliation, and a lawsuit from his son after the publication of her candid memoirs put a final end to their relationship.



Nicolas-Jacques Charrier

When asked why he doesn't communicate with his mother, 65-year-old Nicolas-Jacques, now a grandfather himself, answers simply and exhaustively:



Anna-Camille

She loves her furs, and I love my family.



Thea-Joséphine

Brigitte Bardot turned 10 this year alone, while her son lives the quiet, yet full and fulfilling life she once so fiercely rejected.



Brigitte today