The country that made smoking sexy is breaking up with cigarettes

PARIS (AP) — Brigitte Bardot lounged barefoot on a Saint-Tropez beach, drawing languorous puffs from her cigarette. Another actor, Jean-Paul Belmondo, swaggered down the Champs-Élysées 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 ($153) in fines.

After glamorizing tobacco for decades, France is preparing for its most sweeping smoking ban yet. The new restrictions, announced by Health Minister Catherine Vautrin, will 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, over 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, around 75,000 people die from tobacco-related illnesses each year. Although smoking rates have dipped recently — fewer than 25% 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 U.S. carriers began phasing it out in the late 1980s and early ’90s. 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 Clémence Laurent, a 34-year-old fashion buyer, sipping espresso at a crowded café 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 Lévy chuckled throatily, her voice deeply etched — she said — by decades of Gauloises. “I smoked my first cigarette watching Jeanne Moreau,” she confessed, eyes twinkling behind vintage sunglasses. “It was her voice — smoky, sexy, lived-in. Who didn’t want that voice?”

Indeed, Jeanne Moreau’s gravelly, nicotine-scraped voice transformed tobacco into poetry itself, immortalized in classics such as François 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. Britain, Spain and Sweden have all implemented significant smoking bans in public spaces. Sweden outlawed smoking in outdoor restaurant terraces, bus stops and schoolyards back in 2019. Spain extended its bans to café terraces, spaces still exempt in France—at least for now.

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.”