PARIS — Overnight, conviviality has taken on an entirely new meaning in France.Under a sweeping decree that took effect Wednesday, smoking has been banned in every commercial corner of “entertainment and conviviality” — from the toniest Parisian nightclub to the humblest village cafe.

No matter that cigarette is a French word. Or that the great icons of French creativity — Colette to Cocteau, Camus to Coco Chanel — all smoked. Or that Paris boasts a Museum of Smoking. Or, in fact, that Paris has named a street after Jean Nicot, the 16th-century French diplomat who took tobacco leaves imported from America to Catherine de Medici to treat her migraines. (Nicotine was named after him.)

The ban is the final step in a 2006 prohibition on smoking in public places, which had granted postponements to restaurants, bars, discos, casinos and other commercial pleasure enterprises so that they could better brace themselves for smokelessness.

On Wednesday, Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot visited the high-ceilinged, 100-year-old Wepler brasserie in Paris and announced that there was “perfect” compliance with the new rule.
 

“This is a new art de vivre,” she said, even as she warned of consequences for “repeat offenders and rebels.” (Smokers who break the rules will face fines of $100 to $661. Owners can be fined $198 to $1,100.) Michèle Alliot-Marie, the interior minister, has told the country’s police that they do not have to meet quotas in issuing fines and urged them to leave policing to “competent” agents like public health inspectors.

The ban was supposed to take effect on Tuesday, but to preserve the New Year’s Eve party spirit — and avoid the risk of violence — French smokers were given an extra day of grace.

About 12 million French people — about 20 percent of the population — are smokers, according to official figures, and more than 70,000 people die in France every year from smoking-related illnesses and secondhand smoke.

The decree coincides with a broad Europe-wide nonsmoking movement that began four years ago when Ireland banned smoking in public places. But here, there are fierce pockets of resistance. Opponents say the ban signals the erosion of French liberté. They say it is undemocratic because it was not passed through Parliament but imposed by government decree.

Some owners of smaller bars and cafes contend that the ban is unfair because it favors large, wealthy establishments that can take advantage of loopholes. (Smoking is allowed in outdoor cafes and sophisticated indoor “hermetically sealed areas, furnished with air-extraction systems.”) Indeed, in writing the ban, little thought seemed to have been given to the country’s 800 water-pipe tea houses, most of them extremely modest enterprises owned by ethnic Arabs.

“We have sacrificed everything to open these little places, borrowing money from our family members, using our cars and apartments as collateral, and what’s going to happen to us?” said Tariq el-Hamri, the 33-year-old owner of Dar Daffia (House of Hospitality), a water-pipe bar in Paris. “If the government wants to have healthy people, it should stop selling cigarettes — and alcohol.”

Mr. Hamri belongs to the Union of Hookah-Pipe Professionals, which plans to challenge the ban in French courts and is lobbying for the same exception for water-pipe smokers that is in effect in parts of the United States and Canada. Expensive and space-consuming hermetic sealing is not an option for most of them. “We are second-class citizens,” said Badri Helou, president of the union, which was created last February and has 270 members. “The reason you come to a water-pipe club is to smoke a water pipe. The mint tea and the pastries come afterward. We cannot survive on them. It would be as if you go to the movies and there’s no film — just popcorn.”

The Confederation of Tobacco Dealers, which represents 28,000 tobacconists in France, has accused President Nicolas Sarkozy of duplicity.

During the presidential campaign last year, Mr. Sarkozy called for flexibility to protect small businesses. “To ban smoking in places where tobacco is sold, is somehow strange,” he said at the time, adding that there should also be leniency for the small cafe-tabac in a village of 750 people where “if it closes, there is nothing else.”

The confederation’s newsletter reprinted the opening two-page spread in a recent issue of Paris-Match that shows Mr. Sarkozy at his desk, lighting a cigar. “Is the Élysée Palace a private space where one can smoke or a place of work?” said René Le Pape, president of the confederation. “The president is setting a bad example. This is a provocation.”

For Mr. Le Pape, the ban signals the demise of a part of French culture. “It means the destruction of village life,” he said. “What will happen to the ritual of arriving at the cafe in the morning to read the morning paper over a coffee and a cigarette?”

At Le Musée du Fumeur (The Museum of Smoking), there is concern that the French may not be able to think as well without their cigarettes. “All our great writers seem to have been smokers,” said Michka Seeliger-Chatelein, one of the curators.

Still, there are efforts to keep a sense of humor. The cafe-restaurant Le Fumoir (The Smoking Room) has made gifts of its signature ashtrays. The cover of the current issue of Le Figaro Magazine retouched black and white photos of Che Guevara, Jacques Brel, Brigitte Bardot and other passionate smokers; they grip giant yellow buttercups instead of cigarettes between their lips.

Most establishments seemed resigned to the ban. “We are not taking sides,” said Colin Peter Field, the head bartender at the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz. The bar will continue to sell 40 to 50 types of upscale cigars and is studying plans to renovate its outdoor spaces to accommodate smokers.

“Once you’ve hung yourself,” Mr. Field said, “you’re not going to drown yourself as well.”