France is finally stubbing out its romance with smoking. Maybe the rest of us should too

If the country that glamourised the cigarette is finally breaking up with the nasty habit, then maybe we should too, writes Emilie Murray

To deal with the shame of my smoking addiction, I often joke that the reason I keep at it is because I live in Paris and that frankly, it would be rude not to take part in the French national pastime.

The first time I smoked a cigarette I was 14. I was at a girl’s birthday party, and a group of us huddled around a firepit in her back garden, passing a rolled-up cigarette between us. I remember it tasting awful and desperately trying not to cough.

Almost a decade on since my first drag, I have slowly but steadily worked my way up to the category of “smoker”.

It’s hard to say why I took up the habit to begin with. I can’t hide behind the excuse that I didn’t know better, the way my parents or grandparents might have. I did know better. Every packet makes sure of that, brandishing in bold the unhealthy and shortened futures on offer.

The fact is cigarettes will kill you. But at 14, I was far more preoccupied with looking cool than with whatever toxic fumes I was feeding my body.

The harder thing to explain though, is why I’ve kept going. 

This fact is made painfully obvious this time of year. January is when we collectively take stock of our lives and attempt, through a series of radical gestures, to become better, fitter, healthier versions of ourselves. 

And as quitting season begins, the question of whether I’m finally planning to stub out my bad habit arrives with a familiar mix of hope and mild accusation.

But this time it feels different. The longer my friends and I have been out of school and college, the clearer it has become that most of them have moved on from this phase of juvenile hedonism.

To deal with the shame of my addiction, I often joke that the reason I keep at it is because I live in Paris and that frankly, it would be rude not to take part in the French national pastime.

And in a sense, I’m not entirely lying. In France, nearly a third of adults still smoke, the highest rate in western Europe.

I’m a firm believer that every nation keeps a fatal habit that helps define it. The Irish have in the past been associated with alcohol. The French, from Sartre to Gainsbourg, have their cigarettes.

France's changing relationship with smoking

But recently, as it turns out, you can’t even rely on the French to smoke without judgement anymore.

Last summer, France introduced sweeping new restrictions on outdoor smoking, effectively making it illegal to spark up anywhere children might be present, with hefty fines for those who break the rules. When I read the announcement, I rather selfishly felt as though some small but essential part of French national identity was ending.

There is no debate in my mind that tobacco bans and taxes have saved countless lives. The world is better for them.

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France’s National Committee Against Smoking says more than 75,000 smokers die each year of tobacco-related illnesses, accounting for about 13% of all deaths. The financial toll is just as stark, costing the state tens of billions of euro annually.

But here, in the nation of Gauloises and Gitanes, it is easy to romanticise tobacco. From the films of Jean-Luc Godard to Belmondo’s dangling cigarette, smoking in France is more than a daily ritual.

It has become a shorthand for rebellion and existential cool, representing a bygone era of glamour. La cigarette carries a symbolic weight no disposable vape could ever replicate.

As I write this, it is snowing in Paris. The streets are slick and bright with cold, the kind that drives sensible people indoors. And yet I know the café terraces will still fill with a small, stubborn crowd, with their one gloved hand busy with a cigarette.

The social side

That, for me, is maybe why I’m still drawn to it even when I know how bad it is for me. Smoking is social. Inside a pub, you tend to stay with the people you arrived with, anchored to a table. 

Step outside with a cigarette and the geometry changes. Lighters are borrowed and strangers talk freely. For a few minutes, you become part of a wider, temporary in-group, bound by the few minutes it takes for something to burn itself away.

In a time increasingly defined by loneliness, it feels good to have an easy way into company, however imperfect that way may be. Screens and the slow degradation of community have only intensified the craving for real, in-person connection. But lighting up is not the solution, it’s a substitute, and a dangerous one at that.

Emilie Murray: 'France’s new outdoor bans feel like a cultural intervention, an attempt to dismantle a habit that had long been protected by style, myth and nostalgia.'

France’s new outdoor bans feel like a cultural intervention, an attempt to dismantle a habit that had long been protected by style, myth and nostalgia. If even the country that taught the world how to glamourise a cigarette is now trying to dismantle the habit, it suggests the romance is finally losing its hold.

And perhaps Ireland should pay attention. We were once pioneers of tobacco control. 

In 2004, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce a workplace smoking ban, a move that made global headlines and helped recast smoking from social habit to public-health threat. Two decades on, our progress has stalled, as some statistics show.

But if France can begin to break up with its longest love affair, that may be the clearest sign yet that the rest of us should too, even if that means looking 20% less cool.