PARIS: Brigitte Bardot lounged barefoot on a Saint-Tropez seaside, drawing languorous puffs from her cigarette. One other actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, swaggered down the Champs-Elysees with smoke curling from his defiant lips, capturing a era’s stressed insurrection.In France, cigarettes had been by no means simply cigarettes – they had been cinematic statements, flirtations and rebellions wrapped in rolling paper.But starting July 1, if Bardot and Belmondo’s iconic movie scenes had been repeated in actual life, they’d be topic to as much as 135 euros (USD 153) in fines.After glamorising tobacco for many years, France is making ready for its most sweeping smoking ban but. The brand new restrictions, introduced by Well being Minister Catherine Vautrin, will outlaw smoking in nearly all outside public areas the place kids might collect, together with seashores, parks, gardens, playgrounds, sports activities venues, college entrances and bus stops.“Tobacco should disappear the place there are kids,” Vautrin instructed French media. The liberty to smoke “stops the place kids’s proper to breathe clear air begins”.If Vautrin’s regulation displays public well being priorities, it additionally indicators a deeper cultural shift. Smoking has outlined identification, style and cinema right here for thus lengthy that the brand new measure appears like a quiet French revolution in a rustic whose relationship with tobacco is famously complicated.In keeping with France’s League In opposition to Most cancers, over 90 per cent of French movies from 2015 to 2019 featured smoking scenes – greater than double the speed in Hollywood productions. Every French film averaged practically three minutes of on-screen smoking, successfully the identical publicity as six 30-second tv adverts.Cinema has been significantly influential. Belmondo’s rebellious smoker in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” grew to become shorthand for youthful defiance worldwide. Bardot’s cigarette smoke wafted by way of “And God Created Lady”, symbolising unbridled sensuality.But this glamorisation has penalties. In keeping with France’s public well being authorities, round 75,000 individuals die from tobacco-related sicknesses annually. Though smoking charges have dipped lately – fewer than 25 per cent of French adults now smoke day by day, a historic low – the behavior stays stubbornly embedded, particularly amongst younger individuals 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 US carriers started phasing it out within the late Eighties and early ’90s. The delay mirrored a rustic slower to sever its cultural romance with cigarettes, even at 35,000 toes.Strolling by way of the fashionable streets of Le Marais, the trendiest neighbourhood in Paris, reactions to the smoking ban ranged from pragmatic acceptance to nostalgic defiance.“It is about time. I do not need my children rising up pondering smoke is romantic,” mentioned Clemence Laurent, a 34-year-old style purchaser, sipping espresso at a crowded cafe terrace. “Certain, Bardot made cigarettes appear glamorous. However Bardot did not fear about at the moment’s warnings on lung most cancers.” At a close-by boutique, classic supplier Luc Baudry, 53, noticed the ban as an assault on one thing primarily French. “Smoking has at all times been a part of our tradition. Take away cigarettes and what do we now have left? Kale smoothies?” he scoffed.Throughout from him, 72-year-old Jeanne Levy chuckled throatily, her voice deeply etched – she mentioned – by many years of Gauloises. “I smoked my first cigarette watching Jeanne Moreau,” she confessed, eyes twinkling behind classic sun shades. “It was her voice-smoky, attractive, lived-in. Who did not need that voice?” Certainly, Jeanne Moreau’s gravelly, nicotine-scraped voice reworked tobacco into poetry itself, immortalised in classics similar to Francois Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim”. Smoking acquired an existential glamour that made quitting unimaginable for generations of French people who smoke.France’s new regulation mirrors broader European developments. Britain, Spain, and Sweden have all applied 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 cafe terraces, areas nonetheless exempt in France, no less than for now.Within the Paris park Place des Vosges, literature scholar Thomas Bouchard clutched an digital cigarette that’s nonetheless exempt from the brand new ban and shrugged.“Perhaps vaping’s our compromise,” he mentioned, exhaling gently. “Rather less attractive, maybe. However fewer wrinkles too.”
