Brigitte Bardot lounged barefoot on a Saint-Tropez beach, drawing languorous puffs from her cigarette. Another actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, swaggered down the Champs-Elysees with smoke curling from his defiant lips, capturing a generation’s restless rebellion.
In France, cigarettes were never just cigarettes — they were cinematic statements, flirtations and rebellions wrapped in rolling paper.
Yet beginning July 1, if Bardot and Belmondo’s iconic film scenes were repeated in real life, they would be subject to up to 135 euros (US$153) in fines.
Photo: AP
After glamorizing tobacco for decades, France is preparing for its most sweeping smoking ban yet. The new restrictions, announced by French Minister of Labor, Health, Solidarity and Families Catherine Vautrin, would outlaw smoking in virtually all outdoor public areas where children may gather, including beaches, parks, gardens, playgrounds, sports venues, school entrances and bus stops.
“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Vautrin told 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, more than 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 became shorthand for youthful defiance worldwide. Bardot’s cigarette smoke wafted through And God Created Woman, symbolizing unbridled sensuality.
Yet this glamorization has consequences. According to France’s public health authorities, about 75,000 people die from tobacco-related illnesses each year. Although smoking rates have dipped recently — fewer than 25 percent of French adults now smoke daily, a historic low — the habit remains stubbornly embedded, especially among young people and the urban chic.
France’s relationship with tobacco has long been fraught with contradiction. Air France did not ban smoking on all its flights until 2000, years after major US carriers began phasing it out in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The delay reflected a country slower to sever its cultural romance with cigarettes, even at 35,000 feet.
Strolling through the stylish 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,” said Clemence Laurent, a 34-year-old fashion buyer, sipping espresso at a crowded cafe terrace. “Sure, Bardot made cigarettes seem glamorous, but Bardot didn’t worry about today’s warnings on lung cancer.”
At a nearby boutique, vintage dealer Luc Baudry, 53, saw the ban as an attack on something essentially 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 Levy chuckled throatily, her voice deeply etched — she said — by decades of Gauloises.
“I smoked my first cigarette watching Jeanne Moreau,” she said, eyes twinkling behind vintage sunglasses. “It was her voice — smoky, sexy, lived-in. Who didn’t want that voice?”
Jeanne Moreau’s gravelly, nicotine-scraped voice transformed tobacco into poetry itself, immortalized in classics such as Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Smoking acquired an existential glamour that made quitting unimaginable for generations of French smokers.
France’s new law mirrors broader European trends. The UK, Spain and Sweden have all implemented significant smoking bans in public spaces.
In the Paris park Place des Vosges, literature student Thomas Bouchard clutched an electronic cigarette that is still exempt from the new ban and shrugged.
“Maybe vaping’s our compromise,” he said, exhaling gently. “A little less sexy, perhaps. But fewer wrinkles too.”
UNCERTAINTY: Investors remain worried that trade negotiations with Washington could go poorly, given Trump’s inconsistency on tariffs in his second term, experts said The consumer confidence index this month fell for a ninth consecutive month to its lowest level in 13 months, as global trade uncertainties and tariff risks cloud Taiwan’s economic outlook, a survey released yesterday by National Central University found. The biggest decline came from the timing for stock investments, which plunged 11.82 points to 26.82, underscoring bleak investor confidence, it said. “Although the TAIEX reclaimed the 21,000-point mark after the US and China agreed to bury the hatchet for 90 days, investors remain worried that the situation would turn sour later,” said Dachrahn Wu (吳大任), director of the university’s Research Center for
Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designer specializing in artificial-intelligence (AI) chips, yesterday said that small-volume production of 3-nanometer (nm) chips for a key customer is on track to start by the end of this year, dismissing speculation about delays in producing advanced chips. As Alchip is transitioning from 7-nanometer and 5-nanometer process technology to 3 nanometers, investors and shareholders have been closely monitoring whether the company is navigating through such transition smoothly. “We are proceeding well in [building] this generation [of chips]. It appears to me that no revision will be required. We have achieved success in designing
PROJECTION: KGI Financial said that based on its foreign exchange exposure, a NT$0.1 increase in the New Taiwan dollar would negatively impact it by about NT$1.7 billion KGI Financial Holding Co (凱基金控) yesterday said its life insurance arm has increased hedging and adopted other moves to curb the impact of the local currency’s appreciation on its profitability. “It is difficult to accurately depict the hedging costs, which might vary from 7 percent to 40 percent in a single day,” KGI Life Insurance Co (凱基人壽) told an investors’ conference in Taipei. KGI Life, which underpinned 66 percent of the group’s total net income last year, has elevated hedging to 55 to 60 percent, while using a basket of currencies to manage currency volatility, the insurer said. As different
Taiwanese insurers are facing difficult questions about the damage of recent swings in the New Taiwan dollar. Regulators might have a partial solution: letting firms change how they calculate the value of foreign currency assets. The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) is considering allowing insurers to use six-month average exchange rates when they calculate risk-based capital in their semiannual reports, a shift from the current system where insurers use exchange rates on the final day of reporting. The change could ease pressure on the US$1.2 trillion insurance sector, whose huge exposure to foreign assets came into the spotlight earlier this month after a
RSS