Pave: Pas Fumer Redux

Le jour 219 de Sarko

On. Bust. Bust. Off. On again. And come January 1, the French nanny state will extend its on-again public smoking ban to private establishments.

The IHT publishes a bathetic piece on the death of café society. Oh, how we wept! Oh BOO hoo HOO! The fag-ends of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir never to be seen again. Oh boo hoo HOO! [Warning: Hanky alert.]

WILL THE SMOKING BAN IN FRANCE
MEAN THE END OF CAFÉ SOCIETY?

PARIS December 18, 2007 (IHT) - Less than one year after France imposed a nationwide ban on smoking in most public places (including hospitals, schools and offices), it will extend the ban to bars, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs - and the most cherished of all spaces: the café.

... While many smokers find the ban in cafés unthinkable, polls show that 66 percent of the usually feisty French support the law and those who don't have mustered little resistance.

CAFÉ PHILOSOPHES TO LOSE ESSENTIAL TOOL-OF-THE-TRADE
French Must Learn To Think Without Smoke
[Photo source: Richard Harbus/IHT]

"All my customers smoke, all my employees smoke. What are we going to do?" wondered Olivier Colombe, 43, owner of Parisian cafés Le Panier and Le Faitout. For Colombe, the new ban poses practical problems, too. Without cigarettes to occupy them, he explained, smokers won't be so willing to wait a long while for their food and drinks; cooks and waiters will have to work faster, resulting in the sort of rapid customer turnover that is typically very un-French.

Véronique Moran, 51, who has smoked for 40 years, and is a regular at Le Cyrano, a café in Paris's bustling Place de Clichy:

The ban on smoking in cafés is the end of a type of person. Now, people think about working more to make more money, being competitive, staying in shape, being good-looking.

Oh! The shame! To work more! To make money! To be fit! To be [Sputter.] good-looking! The shame, the shame!

Olivier Seconda, 43, is a regular at the café, and though he doesn't smoke, he finds the imminent ban excessive:

Our motto in France is: liberty, equality, fraternity. The café is the place that represents that. You're free to smoke, everyone pays the same price for a beer and different kinds of people converse with one another. This new law is a hindrance to that.

It is this sort of wispy -- but false -- romantic -- but irrelevant -- argument that ban proponents love: Oh! Things change. Yes, yes, it's all so sad. Too bad. [They dab at teeny tiny tears.] Now, stop smoking.

Pave, of course, does not encourage Frenchies -- or readers -- to smoke. If you do not smoke, please do not start. Those who do should consider quitting. Pave does not feel these are the state's decisions to make, that the citizen is best equipped to decide for himself or herself, that commerce best determines a proprietor's business practices.

If it were a national health budget issue, the state should suck it up or adjust coverage, as do insurance companies. If it were a criminal mortality issue, the state should outlaw the sale of tobacco and smoking outright. [Pause.] The only country in the world to do so is the Kingdom of Bhutan. [Pause.] But France's creeping bans are creeping prophylactic nannyism and the French state should butt out.

One step closer to the logical endpoint of state nannyism:

the citizen's hearth.

PFFT (What is this?): State prophylactic nannyism 5 | Happy smokeless France 1 | Rayonnement français 1½