My teenage self was right. Brigitte Bardot, who died this weekend, symbolised sex and freedom. It’s why I had a poster of her on my study wall at school in which she was topless in a white cowboy hat and faded blue denims with the zip undone to reveal that she had no knickers. Needless to say it was not long before someone burnt a hole in her crotch with an aerosol can and lighter. But I still kept the poster up.

Such was the impact of Bardot on teenage boys like me that at a certain point I hitch-hiked off to Saint-Tropez where she lived. Once there, I moved about barefoot in faded denims and Breton fisherman’s shirt, just like she used to do. Dreaming.

Bardot personified the sexual revolution of the 1960s which above all meant the unleashing of female sexual desire and all its potentially terrifying consequences

It was in Saint-Tropez in the summer of 1968 – the year that Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and France toyed with revolution – that Bardot had a fling with a famous Italian playboy Gigi Rizzi. ‘While French students burned flags and occupied universities in ’68,’ he would recall, ‘we engaged in our own battle against conformity.’

So huge was the reaction in the Italian press to Rizzi’s ‘capture’ of Bardot – then married to her third husband, Gunter Sachs, an Opel heir – that it was as if Italy had defeated France and Germany combined in a World Cup final. As one Italian journalist wrote: Rizzi had ‘planted the Italian flag on the most delicate and sensitive part of French pride… It was something so stupefying as to obscure for a moment [the revolutionary unrest of] Sixty-Eight.’

But of course it was Bardot who was calling the shots, not Rizzi. For Bardot symbolised not just sex, or freedom in general, but the sexual freedom of women.

Naturally, no one in their right mind would want such a woman as their girlfriend, let alone wife (she was married four times). For a start, the obsessive attention paid to her by other men would have been hard enough to cope with. But worse, she was incapable of fidelity as she herself confessed in her memoir Larmes de Combat (Tears of Battle): ‘I’ve always........

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