France bans Bogarting in public places…but leaves those other cultural abominations, the beret and turtle-neck sweater, un-banned.

“France bans smoking in cafe’s, hotels and clubs on Jan 1, stamping out the habit popularized by Jean Paul Sarte puffing Gauloises in hazy brasseries.”

Even with its faults, the simple beauty of this ban is that it obliterates something popularized by Jean Paul Sarte, and we can’t get enough of that. And for you folks educated in Connecticut sometime after 1965, the word is “brasseries”, which is not the same as “brassieres”.

The first, brasserie, is a place to eat and drink, and while away the time pondering Being and Nothingness, or moving your lips a Francais while pretending to read Le Monde, or The Guardian. A brassiere is something else.

Objections to the ban? Declaiming the obvious was David Droulez, head of the Friends of Pleasure and Taste Association in Paris, who defends his right to be stupid, un-hygienic, dirty and non-American. “Fighting” for his right to party, Dave said…

“Maybe we’re a bit stupid with our traditions, but we have a right to be as such and I cannot stand the idea of a hygienic, clean and, sorry to say, “American-style society”".

The ban also threatens France’s 800 water-pipe cafes, employing an estimated 4000 people. This assumes that the Hookah combustible is tobacco and not something else.

The Real Reason for the Smoking Ban

France has 14 million smokers, accounting for an estimated 72,000 deaths annually, which costs France about 3.1% of the country’s GNP. Now get this, for those of you in favor of a single-payer national health system:

“France wants to narrow its public-health care deficit to 4.2 billion Euros ($6.2 billion) in 2008 from 5.9 billion Euros in 2006″.

Don’t bother with the math. In 2006 France had a nearly a $9 billion dollar deficit with its public health care system. Limiting smoking in public places is not going to address this problem.

Archived in: France, Health Care