Bikinis and Breastplates: Richard Vinen Ponders the Political Significance of Two of France's Most Potent Female Icons and Finds There Is More to Them Than Meets the Eye

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JOAN OF ARC, THE SAINT, WAS BORN TO A PEASANT FAMILY in Lorraine, eastern France, in 1412. At the age of fifteen she heard the voices of St Michael, St Catherine and St Margaret urging her to free France from the English and to see that the dauphin, the future Charles VII, was crowned king. She put on armour, cut her hair and led an army to relieve the siege of Orleans, before attending Charles's coronation in Reims. In 1430 she was captured by the English, convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Brigitte Bardot, the film star, was born into the Parisian bourgeoisie in 1934. Her public career also began at the age of fifteen, when she appeared on the front cover of Elle magazine and met the film director Roger Vadim, who was to make her famous seven years later in God Created Woman (1956).

Apart from attaining fame early, the two women do not seem to have much in common. Joan was poor and died young; Bardot is rich and has reached her seventies. Joan is the second most famous virgin in Christian history, noted tot the androgyny of her appearance; Bardot, famous for exaggerated femininity, railed in 2003 against women who wore military uniform or held positions of command, she was writing shortly after Chirac appointed a woman a Minister of Defence. Bardot, received by the Pope in 1995, has been accepted by the Catholic hierarchy in a way that Joan never was during her lifetime, and Joan (whose life has inspired films by Cecil B. de Mille, Robert Bresson and Luc Besson) is a major figure in the history of cinema in a way that Bardot is not.

Joan of Arc and Bardot do, however, have one important thing in common. Both are associated with French political icons. Joan fought under the cross of Lorraine, which five hundred years later became associated with the French struggle against the Germans during the Second World War and especially with General Charles de Gaulle--of whom Winston Churchill famously remarked: 'he thinks he is Joan of Arc but I cannot get my bloody bishops to burn him'. The cross of Lorraine remains the symbol of Gaullism--and the huge cross of Lorraine on a hillside outside the general's home town of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises remains the most important sacred site of Gaullism. Incidentally, …