France seeks wider smoking ban Are the days of smoking on French beaches numbered? The country's health minister fervently hopes so, but I have my doubts. Following the 2008 ban on the weed in closed public spaces - bars, restaurants and similar - and the recent extension of this ban to e-cigarettes, Marisol Touraine now wishes to see tobacco ejected from open spaces. These include beaches but also parks, university campuses, outside school gates and inside bus shelters. That said, the health minister is not all alone. Following the 2011 lead of La Ciotat (near Marseille), spots like Nice, Cannes, St Malo and Ouistreham have already declared certain of their beaches non-smoking. Local papers have been full of pictures of self-satisfied local councillors unveiling "no smoking" signs on the prom. As has been pointed out, this works because all the resorts have other beaches unaffected by the prohibition, so everyone's happy. However, a blanket ban would run into cultural hurdles in a country once defined by the pall of Gauloises fumes which hit you on entry. Significant figures like actors Jean Gabin and Lino Ventura, poet Jacques Prévert, musician Serge Gainsbourg and President Georges Pompidou were rarely seen without "une clope au bec" ("a fag stuck to the lip"). The cigarette has been the essential indicator of Left-Bank bohemian cool, of sensual feminism (see Catherine Deneuve) and, in its yellow maize-paper incarnation, of the honest peasant guile which underpins the entire nation. For some at least, it has now become a symbol of resistance for a people which does as it's told, but only up to a point. Then it does what it wants. Since the 2008 ban, and despite some full-frontal anti-tobacco campaigns, the number of French smokers has actually increased - from around 25% to 30% of the adult population (though there's been a dip this year after price rises). These smokers delight in pointing out the contradictions of an official policy which urges all to quit, while still paying subsidies to France's 2000 tobacco growers. It is also noted that France spends more on compensating tobacconists for loss of earnings than it does on anti-tobacco campaigns. And, as my friend the tobacconist says, stupendous price rises (80 per cent in 10 years) have done little to cut consumption but a lot to stimulate a parallel tobacco trade. Many French smokers now travel to neighbouring countries to buy cheaper fags, or stay home and buy contraband. Smugglers are once again coming over the Pyrenees, their knapsacks full of tobacco. The parallel trade is reckoned to be worth €3 billion a year. This is, in short, not a nation which is going to give up smoking without a fight - and I very much doubt that that fight will be lost on the beaches.