Hell is other people removing your cigarette (Sartre photo airbrushed to comply with French law)

The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | March 10, 2005 | Henry Samuel

[Stoat]

Hell is other people removing your cigarette
By Henry Samuel in Paris
(Filed: 10/03/2005)

France's National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.

"Smoking," the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world."

And yet in its poster for an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of Sartre's birth the Bibliothèque Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher's Gauloise.

The library's president, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi Evin - a law banning tobacco advertising - but also so as not to frighten away potential sponsors from the exhibition, which opened yesterday.

Sartre's love of tobacco is well documented: he reportedly smoked his way through two packets and several pipes a day.

Indeed, all the best-known photographs of the author of La Nausée, such as his portrait by Henri Cartier-Bresson on the Pont des Arts in Paris, depict him with a cigarette or pipe in hand.

So organisers homed in on a photo taken by the artist Lipnitzki in 1946 during a rehearsal of Sartre's play La Putain Respectueuse, (The Respectful Prostitute), from which Sartre's cigarette could easily be removed.

The doctoring of the photo was first spotted by Libération, fittingly enough the Left-wing newspaper founded by Sartre.

The exhibition, which runs until Aug 21, shows previously unseen letters and manuscripts by the prolific writer and author of the immortal line: "Hell is other people."

[Eepsy]

Sorry about that. The FDR photo fakery you mentioned.

[perfect stranger]

US Postal srvice did that to the (blues guitar player) Robert Johnson stamp.

[Oztrich Boy]

I was told by a film fanatic friend, that in Steven Spielberg's DVD re-release of "E.T.", the guns on the policemens hips were digitally removed.

Just wait until he digitally replaces the guns in "Saving Private Ryan" with walkie-talkies.







FREE HAT!

[numberonepal]

You're very pedantic today

I have not been clear as to the conection between philosophy and physics. Philosophy on the whole is a study of reality. Physics, especially in the last century, has raised some deeply philosophical questions as to the nature of reality. Einstein and Bohr were discussing exactly this. When you separate the math from physics and look at the meaning of what's behind the physics you most certainly venture into philosophical questions and consequences. For instance, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Pauli's Exclusion Principle without the math hold deep philosophical implications.

[Publius6961]

Of course, in the rough and tumble of special-interest politics, some groups will inevitably lose out. All reference to one of FDR’s most memorable talismans, the smoldering cigarette holder, was quietly omitted from Estern’s statue, indeed from all images of the president that adorn his memorial. No Cigarette Smoking Man in evidence here. Halprin’s is an FDR perfectly suited to the politically correct Clinton ’90s.

FDR Memorial

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Actually, I would prefer that they keep the cigarette while airbrushing Sartre out of the picture.

And some panty-waist Sartre fan on this forum considered that remark abuse???