A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!
Is a Smoke-Free France Still French?
Puffing in Paree may cost you more than a lung
By Ed Goldman
Starting July 1, France has banned smoking in all outdoor areas frequented by children — including parks, beaches, public gardens, bus stops, school entrances, and sports venues. The sweeping measure is part of President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to create ‘the first tobacco-free generation’ by 2032.”—CNN
In short, if you’re planning to visit Paris this summer, you’ll no longer need to pack a carry-on oxygen tank.
Is Paris smoking?
The fabled City of Lights—more like the City of Lighting Up—has joined the rest of France, as well as Spain and Italy, to ban smoking in public places.
Mon dieu! For those of us who love Paris, we think of it fondly through a nostalgic, emphysemic haze of Gauloise cigarettes. It’s my favorite city in the known galaxy but the first few times I was there I found myself puffing on cigarettes almost in self-defense: fighting smoke with smoke, one might say.
With the new law in place, if you’re a smoker it won’t exactly be a day at the beach to spend a day at the beach. In my experience, people smoke even more intently, whether lounging by sea or Seine, than they do indoors. On the face of it, that might even sound a tad healthy—not the idea of smoking, mes amis, but that if you must smoke, do it in the fresh air. This is one reason people headed for the great outdoors during COVID without wearing those infernal “empty-your-cash-drawer-and-nobody’ll-get-hurt” masks.
Oh, I’m sure there’ll still be places where, just like in old movies, men and women light up new cigarettes with the still-smoldering ashes of a cigarette they had just smoked down to its final Planck. (For physics fans, that’s something only 10 times the size of a proton). Claude Rains, playing a French police inspector, did this very thing in “Casablanca.” In fact, in that movie—which was set in Morocco, not France, and shot in California, not Morocco—a total of 125 cigarettes were smoked, or roughly 1.21 cigarettes per minute of its 102-minute duration. You can see why Rains would’ve needed to smoke perpetually in order to hit that mark.
When I was recovering at home from double pneumonia in 1989—I’m sure it would have been triple pneumonia had I not run out of lungs—I got a coughing fit from just watching “Casablanca.” Call it the power of congestion.
What’s really ridiculous is that these days, 36 years removed from my convalescence, whenever I watch “Casablanca” I neither wheeze nor bark my chest off. Instead, I find myself getting in the mood for… a cigarette! I liken this phenomenon to what I’ve heard women say: that after having even a very painful time giving birth they then forget all about that part a few moments after their baby debuts. And many go on to have more babies. Memory can play mischievous tricks on us.
I think most Americans have become pretty used to the fact that smoking cigarettes, cigars and pipes have become less ubiquitous (or socially acceptable) than the days when every movie and TV show featured people lighting up—and we, of course, followed suit.
The most ridiculous example I recall was when, at the end of an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” the Clampett clan was seen sitting around their kitchen table firing up Winstons. They even had the beloved character of Granny, memorably played by Irene Ryan, peer over her authentic Granny glasses, stare straight into the camera and rephrase the manufacturer’s famous tagline (“Winston tastes good/Like a cigarette should”).
“Winston tastes good,” she said, “like a cigarette had oughta!” It was a particularly low moment for television crassness. What today we would call “definite cringe.” To paraphrase a lyric from “Casablanca”’s immortal theme song, you needn’t remember this.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
