La dinde froide.....
Even cold turkey sounds different in French -- not quite as cold, not quite as definite....
This week the conversations in the smokey bars and bistros and restaurants of France have all but gone up in smoke when the law was proclaimed which will ban all smoking in public places. But only in 2008. After all -- there is a general election in France next year which has to be won. And every politician worth his tobacco knows that no election can be won without a bit of cigarette ash on the ballot paper.
Ironic that this year also sees the anniversary of Jean-Paul Sartre, and for the Sartre retrospective which was on in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a poster was designed -- simple, effective and eminently recognizable : a black and white photograph of the master in a typical pose, peering through the fug around him from his ever present cigarette, his hand in a typical smoker's pose --- only...what is that? No cigarette! Magically, the cigarette has disappeared from between his fingers! Would the law against showing any cigarettes in advertisements, the Loi Evin, have been possible without the invention of photoshop? Surely a question that could not possibly be discussed without lighting up first........
The same thing happened with another writer -- and Minister of Culture -- that is "French" culture, mind you! -- who was a chain smoker all his adult life and never ever seen without a cigarette between his fingers or dangling from his lips.
In 1996 a book cover with his photograph was changed to show him holding a .....nothing!..between his fingers and
in 2001, when a postage stamp of Malraux was printed, using the famous photograph of Gisèle Freund, taken way back in 1935, the image of André Malraux was strangely altered -- (posthumously, mind you, because no way was he going to adhere to any silly law that stopped the French from smoking!) 
Where will it end? Will they continue to photoshop history and pretend that no one has ever smoked in the past? Imagine Humphrey Bogart without his cigarette. And Serge Gainsbourg..... The mind boggles -- and that is without any nicotine to addle the brain! In France, as someone recently commented, smoking is part of the intellectual initiation rite of the youth. At the age of sixteen you get your first scooter, you join the Communist Party and you roll your first cigarette. The cafe and cigarette culture here isn't just about being sociable, it has an intellectual aspect too. The more brainy you are, the more you smoke, she so rightly said.
Probably why all the artistic people smoke like the proverbial chimney -- and as my young friend, Pierre, commented: "It looks well cool!" It is not that the French aren't aware of the fact that up to 65,000 of them a year die of smoking-related diseases, it's just that to the French, smoking simply doesn't equate with lung cancer and bad breath. To them it translates as chic, romantic - an intrinsic part of Gallic culture......I mean -- just LOOK at Serge -- would he look anything as chic, as romantic, as intellectual as he does without that cigarette dangling, and that smoke around him?........
Arrrggghhh! Forget I ever asked!
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