Marriage Quote by Brigitte Bardot

Bardot’s line lands like a cigarette flicked onto a polished parquet floor: casual, incendiary, and daring you to complain. Coming from an actress who became a global symbol of erotic modernity in postwar France, it’s less a policy position than a refusal of the bargain society offers women: be desirable, but only on terms it can legalize, supervise, and forgive.

“I am against marriage” is blunt to the point of scandal, but the more revealing clause is “I don’t give a fig for society.” That’s not just rebellion; it’s a preemptive defense against the moral tribunal that follows any woman who opts out. Bardot isn’t arguing marriage’s pros and cons; she’s rejecting the authority of the audience. The phrasing is performative in the best sense: she’s staging autonomy as a public act, turning celebrity into a shield and a weapon. When you’re watched constantly, privacy becomes impossible; contempt becomes a kind of privacy.

The subtext hums with the era’s gender politics. Marriage was still widely treated as a woman’s respectable endpoint, the institution that retroactively “explained” her sexuality. Bardot’s refusal threatens that narrative because it implies desire and selfhood without the alibi of domesticity. The “fig” line adds a wry, almost playful insolence, but it’s calculated: it shrinks “society” to a heckler, and her to someone immune to boos.

It works because it’s not abstract liberation talk. It’s a star saying, plainly, I won’t be managed.