France douses ‘last social pleasure’
January 02, 2008
PARIS — The smell of cigarette and cigar smoke may never completely disappear from Le Saint Claude, a combination bar, café, betting shop and tobacconist in southeastern Paris. But France’s new smoking ban, which took effect yesterday, has altered the chemistry of the place.
“They are taking away one of the last little social pleasures we have left,” said François Deille, a 65-year-old lifelong smoker who is one of the bar’s regulars. “To have a little drink, watch the races on TV with my friends and smoke cigarettes – what harm were we doing?”
Like most of the patrons who usually puffed away non-stop in the bar, he was not smoking. But next to him at a rickety square table in the little bar, his pal Jean-Luc Lesbordes was in open rebellion.
One of his hands trembled slightly around his mid-morning glass of red wine. The other held a filterless cigarette that was burned down almost to his fingers.
“I’m not going outside to the sidewalk to smoke, not in the middle of winter,” Mr. Lesbordes said. “And I don’t think they’re going to start fining anybody right away for this stupid law.”
With the New Year, smoking was banned in bars, restaurants, bistros, cafés, discos and all other “places of conviviality,” as the French put it. Germany has enacted a similar restriction.
Smokers who persist in lighting up in no-smoking areas in France risk a 68 ($99) fine. Offending proprietors can be fined between 135 and 750, with the top penalty for those who encourage law-breaking by, for example, putting out ashtrays for their customers.
Le Saint Claude, like many of the old-style cafés, never provided ashtrays anyway. Customers simply tossed their finished cigarettes on the concrete floor. They were swept up once or twice a day, around the feet of the regulars buying lottery tickets and consulting the day’s racing form.
Nevertheless, the City of Paris plans to distribute 10,000 small white tins to bars and restaurants over the next few weeks so that smokers banished from inside will use them as personal ashtrays when they go outside to light up.
Minister of Health Roselyne Bachelot said the government has no plans to create a squad of smoking police to enforce the new law. Nor does it plan to make exceptions for bars and cafés that are licensed to sell cigarettes, as demanded by tobacconists.
“I’m convinced that things are going to work themselves out in a reasonable manner,” Mrs. Bachelot said this week.
Despite some grumbling, the French seemed to adapt quickly to the first phase of the anti-smoking law that took effect one year ago for office buildings and public places such as hospitals and train stations.
But critics warned that it may not be so easy enforcing the expanded smoking ban, especially outside the big cities where the combination bar-tobacco store serves as the only local gathering spot.
“I invite Madame Bachelot to go to a rural café that sells cigarettes and see if this smoking ban is as easy to enforce as she claims,” René Le Pape, president of the Confederation of Tobacco Dealers, said in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde.
France was one of the first countries to require health warnings on cigarette packages, in 1976. But it is one of the last in Europe to extend its smoking ban to places where people eat, drink and socialize in public.
French establishments will still be able to accommodate smokers if they wish. Indoors they are supposed to close off a separate space for them and equip it with ventilators. Outdoors, smokers can be seated if their tables are blocked off from other customers.
The mechanics are still being worked out.
Around the corner from Le Saint Claude, for example, the busy Au Metro brasserie was experimenting with a two-tiered sidewalk café. Non-smokers were steered to tables enclosed in clear plastic sheeting and warmed by electric heaters. Smokers were seated at little tables in the open air.
Inside, Au Metro had posted no-smoking warnings everywhere.
Sitting underneath one of the warnings, Antoine Marquette, a taxi driver, drank his coffee with an unlit pipe in his hand. Someone – Mr. Marquette smilingly denied it was him – had scrawled a message on the notice. “No to Yankee imperialism,” it said.