A guide to Western cigarette-smoking bansFrom next month, the expression will feature more despair and fewer cigarettes.
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Brigitte Bardot avec cigarette
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The day of reckoning has arrived for Europe's most incorrigible smokers. On January 1, it will become illegal to light up in bars, restaurants or nightclubs, and as the deadline nears, a palpable sense of panic is taking hold.
Cafe owners warn of mass insurrection, businessmen say productivity could plunge, and psychologists fear the country may not stand the shock. Even the national heritage lobby is upset, arguing that smoke is an emblem of Gallic identity.
The new law bans smoking in all "places of conviviality". If it succeeds, the nation's notoriously smoke-fogged and treacle-ceilinged bars will be transformed into clean air zones. Yet the omens are not good.
Ever since Jean Nicot, King Charles IX's roving ambassador, introduced the weed to his country in 1561, the French have resisted all attempts to wean them off it.
Health warnings and tax increases have had little impact, and a 1991 law ordering cafes and restaurants to provide non-smoking areas has been largely ignored.
Despite an annual smoking-related death toll of 65,000, many French continue to see smoking as chic, sophisticated and romantic.
They point out that most of the icons of modern French culture, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Brigitte Bardot, have been smokers, and portray the politicians who want to make them give up as hypocrites.
The law was drafted under former president Jacques Chirac, who, according to a recent unauthorised biography, slept with a packet of Marlboros on his bedside table.
The taste for nicotine remains particularly strong among the young. To French adolescents, particularly those raised amid the bourgeoisie, starting to smoke is as much a rite of passage as declaring yourself to be a Trotskyist or buying a moped.
It is calculated that more than half of 15- to 25-year-olds smoke, the highest proportion in the European Union. Efforts to dissuade them have persistently backfired.
An expensive campaign featuring the football hero Zinedine Zidane collapsed ignominiously a few years ago when "Zizou" was photographed behind his team's dug-out, drawing on a Gauloise.
"Basically, the government has dumped the whole problem on us," says René la Pape, the Paris-based president of the 19,000-strong café-owners' union.
"They want to look as though they are being socially responsible, but they don't understand how a cafe works, or why customers come here. Smoking is a part of French life. We have already lost thousands of traditional cafes. Do we want to kill off the rest?"
This sort of appeal has a strong public resonance. Although polls originally showed a large majority for the ban, support appears to be weakening.
Writers and intellectuals, mindful of what Jean-Claude Blondel, manager of the venerable Left Bank philosophers' hang-out Cafe de Flore, calls "the shared history of smoking and ideas", are also voicing concern.
"A world is collapsing," mourned the novelist Philippe Delerm in Le Monde. "Once it was as though intellectual life, invective and seduction could only exist in a cloud of smoke. Those were the days. Smoking may kill, but life kills, too, in just as insidious a way."
"Look at the old photographs," adds Blondel. "Sartre, de Beauvoir, Colette, Camus, they all smoked." So they did, although at a recent exhibition dedicated to Sartre, the philosopher's trademark cigarette was airbrushed out as a condition of state funding.
To diehard smokers, such underhand tactics are typical of the government's desperation. They point out that the strength and size of France's favourite cigarettes have been steadily but surreptitiously weakened over the years, and that the ones now sold are but hollow echoes of their former selves.
In the 1950s, full-strength Gauloises as manufactured by the state monopoly SEITA, mostly from Paraguayan, Syrian and Turkish tobacco, packed 35mg of tar in each cigarette.
Not surprisingly, there are few people left alive to say what they tasted like, although the blackened of old Paris bars offer some idea of what they might have done to the lungs. The modern versions of the cigarettes have as little as 1mg of tar.
The battle lines are now drawn. The government insists the ban will be enforced, and has an army of civil and police inspectors to make random checks and issue fines.
The health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, has declared: "It is the right time to implement this measure. Britain has done it, Italy has done it. It is happening everywhere in the US. We can't go on being out of step."
Yet many see signs that the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy - a closet Cuban cigar aficionado - may already be backtracking.
Mrs Bachelot recently softened the proposed rules to allow smoking beneath enclosed awnings on cafe and restaurant terraces. The result has been a rush to buy gas and paraffin heaters, amid confident forecasts of legal paralysis over the definitions of "enclosed" and "awning".
Another loophole is expected to allow owners of larger brasseries to build "sealed rooms" within their main premises. "We're developing a kind of deluxe VIP, club-like concept with sofas and air conditioning," says Thierry Chevrin, spokesman for Eichenglaud, one of the companies pioneering the idea. "It's going to be really popular and a fantastic opportunity for us."
Shortly before he inhaled for the last time, Serge Gainsbourg, the celebrated Parisian bohemian and human health warning, claimed that God was a smoker.
The theory is about to be put to the test. In the meantime, the ban's backers may consider it a triumph if the smog clears enough for them to see who is smoking and who isn't.