A new exhibition in Nice celebrates the French movie stars who scandalised the bourgeoisie and liberated its women
Had it not been for a particularly zealous priest who in the early 1960s issued a stark warning to his congregation not to watch any movies with Brigitte Bardot in them, Nice might not be hosting the current exhibition “Brigitte, Mylène et Michèle : Les petites chéries de la Côte d’Azur” , currently underway at Espace Lympia.
But in the flock was young Henry-Jean Servat, and then as now, a teenage boy gets only all the more curious about a forbidden fruit. Henry-Jean would grow up to become a renowned culture journalist and author, extensively documenting mid-20th century movie stars. Among his subjects were three women who changed France, French film, and even society forever: Brigitte Bardot, Mylène Demongeot and Michèle Mercier. The new exhibition he mounted and curated in their honour traces their stories and the impact they left on the French Riviera.
Running until 12 April 2026, Les petites chéries de la Côte d’Azur explores a pivotal moment in French cinema. Throughout the 1940s and early 50s, the screen was dominated by stars like Danielle Darrieux and Michèle Morgan – elegant, refined women in tailored suits and carefully coiffed hair who embodied bourgeois respectability and glamour. Then Brigitte, Mylène and Michèle exploded onto the big screen, dancing barefoot with loose hair, breaking every taboo. Through photographs, film extracts, contemporaneous costumes, and memorabilia, Servat shows how these three relegated the fur-coated, marcel-waved generation to the past, embodying instead a freedom and uninhibited sensuality that rang in a new era of women’s liberation.
The exhibition’s title carries a knowing wink. Les Petites Chéries was the French name for “Little Darlings”, the 1980 American comedy about teenage girls discovering their independence at summer camp. Servat borrows the phrase for three women who discovered their own independence two decades earlier, in front of cameras, under Mediterranean light – and in doing so gave permission to millions of others.
Video via @Departement06Fr on YouTube
There is something bittersweet about this exhibition. It captures a period when glamour still mattered, when cinema felt genuinely transgressive. The photographs, film extracts and archival documents reveal women who were both liberated and trapped by their images – revolutionary in their moment, but also confined by the very freedom they represented. The exhibition includes artefacts from the era that show the duality of their stardom: sumptuous gowns that made them icons alongside evidence of how they broke every convention about how women should move, speak, behave on screen.
An unexpected detail unites them beyond their impact: all three began as dancers in Paris, dreaming of ballet rather than cinema. And yet, life had other plans… Between them, these three transformed the Côte d’Azur from scenic backdrop into cinema’s capital of glamour. Brigitte Bardot and Roger Vadim shot at the Studios de la Victorine before heading to Saint-Tropez. Mylène Demongeot and Michèle Mercier, both Nice-born, worked repeatedly on the Victorine soundstages alongside projects at Rome’s Cinecittà. Through their films, the Riviera became inseparable from a particular vision of French sensuality and freedom.
Brigitte Bardot, 1957 © Studio Harcourt, Paris
This exhibition rescues these three from the realm of nostalgia and places them where they belong: as revolutionaries who fundamentally changed what women could be on screen. Whilst Nouvelle Vague directors like Truffaut and Godard earned critical acclaim for their handheld cameras and jump cuts, Bardot, Demongeot and Mercier were conducting their own revolution in commercial films that reached far more people. They made it acceptable for women to be sexual, complicated, and free. They suggested that a woman could make terrible choices and survive them, could look directly at the camera without apology, and could inhabit her body without shame. Six decades later, their impact remains visible in how we imagine French femininity.
Brigitte Bardot’s trajectory tells the story in miniature. When shooting Et Dieu… créa la femme on the French Riviera in 1956, her husband-director Roger Vadim gave her a simple instruction: be yourself. She played Juliette as pure instinct. Her sensuality pushed boundaries for nearly two decades when during filming of L’Histoire très bonne et très joyeuse de Colinot trousse-chemise, the actress nicknamed The Undirectable One passed a mirror in her medieval costume, decided she looked ridiculous, and quit cinema on the spot at age 39 to devote herself to animal welfare. Now 91 years old, she remains a leading, active, and outspoken campaigner for their cause.
Paul Louis, Mylène Demongeot, Villefranche-sur-Mer, 1977, Arch. dép. des Alpes-Maritimes, 109 FI 156 06 ©Département des Alpes-Maritimes
Mylène Demongeot was born in Nice in September 1935, growing up on Rue Frédéric-Passy before moving to Paris. After a stunning turn as the seductive villain in Les Sorcières de Salem opposite Yves Montand, she seemed destined for dangerous women. Instead, Sois belle et tais-toi – a comedy originally meant for Brigitte Bardot – typecast her as a blonde bombshell, much to her chagrin. She later found her métier in the Fantômas trilogy, playing journalist Hélène with perfect comic timing opposite Louis de Funès, though her favourite role remained the calculating Milady de Winter in Les Trois Mousquetaires. She died in December 2022, having worked constantly through 100 films. Throughout her life she was close friends with BB, united by a shared passion for animals.
Jean Gabin et Michèle Mercier dans Le Tonnerre de Dieu (Denys de La Patellière, 1965) Collection Christophel, © Marcel Dole / Les Films Copernic / Gloria Film / Fida Cinematografica
Michèle Mercier, who would be nicknamed “the brunette Bardot”, is also Niçoise and was training as a ballet dancer at the opera house before cinema found her by chance when she accompanied her pharmacist father on a professional call to the Victorine Studios. Director Denys de La Patellière immediately cast the seventeen-year-old opposite Michèle Morgan, launching a career that would peak with Angélique, marquise des anges. Again, Brigitte Bardot had refused the role. Michèle Mercier’s five films as Angélique became a global phenomenon, and the exhibition includes her sumptuous costume from the series. Despite fifty other films, she remained forever Angélique – a character she has described as “a little sister” she learned to live alongside. Now in her high 80s, she lives in Cannes, where the city has named a garden after her. She, too, enjoys a close friendship with Bardot to this day.
Among the exhibition’s treasures is a work created especially for the occasion by Italian artist Guido Palmero. His painting depicts all three stars together for the first time, a playful composition that finally unites these icons who shaped an era but never appeared on screen together.
Guido Palmero, Brigitte Bardot, Mylène Demongeot et Michèle Mercier en 4L, 2025 © Guido Palmero/ Galerie Ferrero, Nice
Looking at their images today feels like peering into another universe. Brigitte Bardot, Mylène Demongeot and Michèle Mercier became icons through a shared cultural experience that no longer exists – everyone saw the same films and recognized the same faces. Their fame accumulated slowly and lasted decades – for their beauty and talent, but even more so for their impact. While today’s reality stars and social media influencers, optimized for engagement rather than endurance, burn bright for months and then vanish, these three timeless stars endured because they embodied something larger: transformation at a moment when France was reinventing itself and freedom felt newly possible. And Henry-Jean Servat’s zealous priest who warned his flock against Brigitte Bardot’s sensuality, could not have imagined that instead of seducing teenage boys, this forbidden fruit would help liberate an entire generation of French women instead.
Affiche italienne de Manina, la fille sans voiles (Willy Rozier, 1952), illustration de © Rodolfo Gasparri, © DR.
Complementary film screenings at Cinéma Paul Belmondo, place Garibaldi, Nice:
- 3 April 2026: Michèle Mercier in Angélique, marquise des anges.
- 4 April 2026: Mylène Demongeot in Fantômas.
- 5 April 2026: Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris
VISITOR INFORMATION
Brigitte, Mylène & Michèle – Les petites chéries de la Côte d’Azur
Espace Culturel Lympia, Nice | Through 12 April 2026 | Free admission
VENUE DETAILS
Espace Culturel Départemental Lympia
2, Quai Entrecasteaux
06300 Nice
Tel: +33 (0)4 89 04 53 10
Web: https://espacelympia.departement06.fr/
All photographs courtesy Département des Alpes-Maritimes, as credited
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