Paris (AP) – Brigitte Bardot Pre-loving barefoot on a beach in Saint-Tropez, pulling languid puffs from its cigarette. Another actor, Jean-Paul BelmondoSwagger on the champions-Élysées with smoke gaps from his provocative lips, capturing the restless rebellion of a generation.
In France, cigarettes were never only cigarettes – they were film statements, flirtations and rebellions wrapped in rolling paper.
However, from July 1, if the emblematic film scenes from Bardot and Belmondo were repeated in real life, they would be subject to € 135 ($ 153) fines.
After having glamored tobacco for decades, France is preparing for its most swept smoking ban to date. The new restrictions, announced by the Minister of Health, Catherine Vautrin, prohibit smoking in almost all public outdoor spaces where children can meet, including beaches, parks, gardens, playgrounds, sports rooms, school entrances and bus stops.
“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Vautrin told French media. Freedom of smoking “stops where children’s right to breathe starts in their own air”.
If the law of Vautrin reflects Public health prioritiesIt also reports a deeper cultural change. Smoking has defined here identity, fashion and cinema for so long that the new measure is like a quiet French revolution in a country whose relationship with tobacco is famous.
According to France, the Cancer League, more than 90% of French films from 2015 to 2019 presented stages of smoking – more than double the rate in Hollywood productions. Each French film lasted an average of almost three minutes of smoking on the screen, actually the same exhibition as six 30 -second television advertisements.
The cinema has been particularly influential. Belmondo’s rebellious smoker Jean-Luc Godard “Breathless” has become a shorte -haired for the young challenge around the world. Bardot’s cigarette smoke traveled “and to God created a woman”, symbolizing a frantic sensuality.
However, this glamor has consequences. According to the public health authorities in France, around 75,000 people die from tobacco -related diseases each year. Although smoking rates have recently dropped – less than 25% of French adults are now smoking daily, a low history – the habit remains stubbornly integrated, especially among young people and urban chic.
The relationship of France with tobacco has long been long in contradiction. Air France did not prohibit smoking on all its flights before 2000, years after the main American carriers began to appease it in the late 1980s and early 90s. The delay reflected a slower country to break its cultural romance with cigarettes, even at 35,000 feet.
Walking in the elegant streets of the Marais, the most trendy district of Paris, the reactions to the ban on smoking varied from pragmatic acceptance to the nostalgic challenge.
“It’s time. I do not want my children to grow up thinking that smoke is romantic, “said Clémence Laurent, a 34 -year -old fashion buyer, sipping the espresso in a crowded coffee terrace. “Of course, Bardot made glamorous cigarettes appear. But Bardot was not concerned with today’s warnings on lung cancer.”
In a nearby shop, the vintage dealer Luc Baudry, 53, saw the ban as an attack on something essentially French. “Smoking has always been part of our culture. Remove cigarettes and what do we stay? Smoothies of Chou Frize? ” He laughed.
In front of him, Jeanne Lévy, 72, gleaved in the range, her deeply engraved voice – she says – by decades of Gauls. “I smoked my first cigarette while looking at Jeanne Moreau,” she confessed, sparkling eyes behind vintage sunglasses. “It was his voice – smoked, sexy, lived. Who didn’t want this voice? “
Indeed, Jeanne Moreau’s teeming voice, with nicotine, transformed tobacco into poetry itself, immortalized in classics such as “Jules and Jim” by François Truffaut. Smoking has acquired an existential glamor which made unimaginable which was unimaginable for generations of French smokers.
The new law of France reflects larger European trends. Great Britain, Spain and Sweden have all implemented significant smoking prohibitions in public spaces. Sweden has banned smoking in the outdoor restaurant terraces, bus stops and school lessons in 2019. Spain has extended its prohibitions to coffee terraces, spaces still exempt in France – at least for the moment.
In Paris Park Place des Vosges, the student of literature Thomas Bouchard tight an electronic cigarette which is always exempt from the new ban and shrugged.
“Perhaps vaping is our compromise,” he said, exhaling slowly. “A little less sexy, maybe. But fewer wrinkles too.”
