The country that made smoking sexy is breaking up with cigarettes
[May 31, 2025]
By THOMAS ADAMSON
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.
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Accompanied by Swedish Movie star Ursula Andress, French actor Jean
Belmondo looks down at a pack of cigarettes being offered to him at
their hotel's pool-side bar, April 18, 1967, in Acapulco, Mexico.
(AP Photo, File)
 “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.”
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