Paris
In a changing world where public health is rightly a priority, it isn’t hard to feel for Parisians of a certain age who are reprimanded for their smoking habits.
One – let’s call her Élisabeth – is a notorious repeat offender who faces regular fines for puffing in public buildings. Born in the French capital in 1961, she well remembers a time when a packet of Gitanes or Gauloises was the ultimate expression of Gallic chic.
Whether getting up in the morning, going to bed at night, or indeed doing absolutely anything in between, a smouldering clope was not just permissible, but pretty much compulsory. Everyone from Charles de Gaulle to Brigitte Bardot was a proud chain-smoker, usually picking up the habit in their teenage years when tobacco was associated with sophistication and independence.
Those heady days of freedom are certainly over, and otherwise blameless men and women of a certain age increasingly face censure within President Emmanuel Macron’s nanny state. This is all particularly awkward for nicotine addict Élisabeth, because she is none other than Macron’s current Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne.
It was in July that the 62-year-old was last caught vaping in the National Assembly — France’s equivalent of the House of Commons — and threatened with a €150 (£128) fine. The Prime Minister has form for doing the same thing in numerous other public buildings, including the Senate.
No matter. Senior French elected officials seldom serve their prison sentences (ask twice-convicted felon Nicolas Sarkozy), let alone pay their fines, and Macron has just put Madame Borne in charge of his latest campaign to — wait for it — clamp down on puffers just like her.
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