France is scared of cigarette ban

January 1 is the deadline for all French smokers to put their cigarettes off, as starting with this day the public smoking ban will get legal force.

The entire nation is concerned with the coming restriction: owners are worried about their business and psychologists predict a nationwide shock.

There was an attempt to prohibit smoking in 1991, but it was largely ignored. As regards the new ban, the government attempts to enforce the law, as around 65,000 people die annually from smoking in France.

Special groups and an army of civil and police inspectors were organized to make inspections and issue fines.

Smoking is very spread among the French adolescents. For them cigarette smoking is a norm of life, as buying a bicycle.

A report showed that more than half of 15- to 25-year-old young people smoke. This percentage is the highest across the European Union. All the government attempts to diminish this rate were unsuccessful.

Writers and artists are also far of being very inspired about the ban.

The 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, added Jean-Claude Blondel, manager of the venerable Left Bank philosophers’ hang-out Cafe de Flore.

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.

However, the French government is very convinced of implementing of smoking ban in all public places: bars, restaurants, cafes.

The health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, has declared that it is the right time to implement that 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.