The nation that made smoking horny is breaking apart with cigarettes | EUROtoday

Brigitte Bardot lounged barefoot on a Saint-Tropez seaside, drawing languorous puffs from her cigarette. Another actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, swaggered down the Champs-Élysées with smoke curling from his defiant lips, capturing a era’s stressed revolt.

In France, cigarettes have been by no means simply cigarettes — they have been cinematic statements, flirtations and rebellions wrapped in rolling paper.

Yet starting July 1, if Bardot and Belmondo’s iconic movie scenes have been repeated in actual life, they’d be topic to as much as €135 ($153) in fines.

After glamorizing tobacco for many years, France is getting ready for its most sweeping smoking ban but. The new restrictions, introduced by Health Minister Catherine Vautrin, will outlaw smoking in nearly all outside public areas the place youngsters might collect, together with seashores, parks, gardens, playgrounds, sports activities venues, faculty entrances and bus stops.

“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Vautrin advised French media. The freedom to smoke “stops where children’s right to breathe clean air starts.”

If Vautrin’s law reflects public health priorities, it also signals a deeper cultural shift. Smoking has defined identity, fashion and cinema here for so long that the new measure feels like a quiet French revolution in a country whose relationship with tobacco is famously complex.

According to France’s League Against Cancer, over 90 percent of French films from 2015 to 2019 featured smoking scenes — more than double the rate in Hollywood productions. Each French movie averaged nearly three minutes of on-screen smoking, effectively the same exposure as six 30-second television ads.

Cinema has been particularly influential. Belmondo’s rebellious smoker in Jean-Luc Godard ’s “Breathless” grew to become shorthand for youthful defiance worldwide. Bardot’s cigarette smoke wafted via “And God Created Woman,” symbolizing unbridled sensuality.

Yet this glamorization has penalties. According to France’s public well being authorities, round 75,000 folks die from tobacco-related sicknesses every year. Although smoking charges have dipped not too long ago — fewer than 25% of French adults now smoke each day, a historic low — the behavior stays stubbornly embedded, particularly amongst younger folks and the city stylish.

France’s relationship with tobacco has lengthy been fraught with contradiction. Air France didn’t ban smoking on all its flights till 2000, years after main U.S. carriers started phasing it out within the late Nineteen Eighties and early ’90s. The delay mirrored a rustic slower to sever its cultural romance with cigarettes, even at 35,000 ft.

Strolling via the fashionable streets of Le Marais, the trendiest neighborhood in Paris, reactions to the smoking ban ranged from pragmatic acceptance to nostalgic defiance.

“It’s about time. I don’t want my kids growing up thinking smoke is romantic,” stated Clémence Laurent, a 34-year-old trend purchaser, sipping espresso at a crowded café terrace. “Sure, Bardot made cigarettes seem glamorous. But Bardot didn’t worry about today’s warnings on lung cancer.”

At a close-by boutique, classic vendor Luc Baudry, 53, noticed the ban as an assault on one thing basically French. “Smoking has always been part of our culture. Take away cigarettes and what do we have left? Kale smoothies?” he scoffed.

Across from him, 72-year-old Jeanne Lévy chuckled throatily, her voice deeply etched — she stated — by a long time of Gauloises. “I smoked my first cigarette watching Jeanne Moreau,” she confessed, eyes twinkling behind classic sun shades. “It was her voice — smoky, sexy, lived-in. Who didn’t want that voice?”

Indeed, Jeanne Moreau’s gravelly, nicotine-scraped voice reworked tobacco into poetry itself, immortalized in classics equivalent to François Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim.” Smoking acquired an existential glamour that made quitting unimaginable for generations of French people who smoke.

France’s new legislation mirrors broader European developments. Britain, Spain and Sweden have all carried out vital smoking bans in public areas. Sweden outlawed smoking in outside restaurant terraces, bus stops and schoolyards again in 2019. Spain prolonged its bans to café terraces, areas nonetheless exempt in France—at the very least for now.

In the Paris park Place des Vosges, literature pupil Thomas Bouchard clutched an digital cigarette that’s nonetheless exempt from the brand new ban and shrugged.

“Maybe vaping’s our compromise,” he stated, exhaling gently. “A little less sexy, perhaps. But fewer wrinkles too.”