When a Nasty Habit Is Part of Your National Identity

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On my first weekend living in Paris, I decided I had to learn how to smoke, and quickly. I sat in the dismal studio apartment I shared with a roommate and lit up Gauloise after Gauloise until my face turned a shade of chartreuse. I was an exchange student in the mid-'90s, and this was the intensity I applied to most activities that held the possibility of transforming me into the person I wanted to be. Parisians smoked, and if I aspired to be a Parisian, which I desperately did, then I would smoke. By the end of the weekend, I could sit in a café with a cigarette dangling from my lips like a shorter, swarthier, coughier Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless.
When I learned recently that France will soon ban smoking outside—banishing it from under lonely streetlamps and on park benches, where a last puff could be shared between lovers—it seemed that some essential part of French national identity was ending. If you are forbidden from lighting up in almost every social situation, then smoking, mon ami, is effectively illegal.
Russians have their vodka. Americans have their McDonald's and AR-15s. Japanese have a concept called karoshi, which apparently means 'working so hard that you die.' Every self-respecting nation has a fatal habit that helps define it—a guilty pleasure its citizens indulge in despite the scoffing of foreigners, and because doing so almost proves that their identity is worth dying for. The French—Sartre and Bardot and Gainsbourg and Houellebecq—have their smoking. 'I drank the coffee, and then I wanted a cigarette,' thinks Meursault, the antihero of Albert Camus' novel The Stranger and, after the Little Prince, likely the first French person in literature many students of the country's language will encounter. 'But I wasn't sure if I should smoke, under the circumstances, in Mother's presence'—he's sitting vigil over her dead body. 'I thought it over; really, it didn't seem to matter, so I offered the keeper a cigarette, and we both smoked.'
[Read: The allure of smoking rises again]
Before I go much further, let me be clear: Cigarettes will kill you. I'm old enough to remember a 13-hour flight during which I experienced the slow asphyxiation of being stuck in the smoking section. The world does occasionally improve, and fewer people dying of lung cancer is certainly one of the ways.
But nostalgia does not come with health warnings.
What was most alluring about cigarettes, besides the notion—okay, the fact—that I looked cooler holding one casually between two fingers, was the quality of time that opened up in the space of a smoke. It's been a while—maybe 20 years—since I've touched a cigarette, but what I still remember, more than the nicotine, is the sensation of pressing 'Pause.' For the few minutes it took a cigarette to become ash, I had nothing to do but enjoy the silence or the chat I was having outside a bar.
These moments of idle nothingness—or acute presence—are a source of nostalgia for me in part because they belong to the aimlessness of youth, and because our phones have since become a constant portal to somewhere else. But they also make me wistful because this sense of time out of time feels so very French. Think of the languidness of a French meal, with its aperitif, entrée, plat, fromage, dessert, café. Or the nation's incredible shrinking workweek—now 35 hours, by law—in favor of more leisure time for love affairs and philosophical debates. Or the month of August, when no one is around. Or strikes, when everything stops. Or the years it takes to make good cheese and wine. Or that glorious description of the concept underlying the country's internet-privacy laws: 'the right to be forgotten.'
This whole cultural preference seemed to have been hand-rolled into every cigarette. Smoking was like a type of punctuation—life's em dash—forcing me to slow down, and putting everything else in relief. Sartre once contemplated quitting (really), but he couldn't bear what that would do to the rest of his existence. 'I used to smoke at the theater, in the morning while working, in the evening after dinner, and it seemed to me that in giving up smoking I was going to strip the theater of its interest, the evening meal of its savor, the morning work of its fresh animation,' he wrote in Being and Nothingness. 'Whatever unexpected happening was going to meet my eye, it seemed to me that it was fundamentally impoverished from the moment that I could not welcome it while smoking.'
[Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain's Paris]
This is an eloquent description of a severe addiction. Smoking is a disgusting habit, and I don't miss it, not really. But I do worry a bit about France. What Sartre was articulating—a life of enjoyment, of savoring those evening meals and the theater and mornings spent lost in thought—can be hard to come by in our world. Did smoking help those moments materialize out of our otherwise hectic lives? Maybe.
For the French, I always sensed that smoking, even when its dangers were well known, was almost an illustration of existentialism. The act seemed in some way to distill the central idea of that most French of philosophies: True freedom is terrifying because it means taking responsibility for every single choice we make. But not taking responsibility is worse—it is to live in bad faith. Smoking, that controlled flirtation with death, is the perfect test of this proposition. You know it's bad for you; you do it anyway, fully aware that you are taking your fate in your own hands. Maybe this is also why the cigarette has always signified rebellion—especially for women living in cultures bent on circumscribing their choices. Even as our cultural mores and our health standards evolve, the cigarette retains this symbolic power. A blueberry-flavored vape (currently exempt from the new law) could never carry all this meaning.
That Godard-and-Truffaut version of France that I'm pining for was obviously already a thing of the past even when I lived there. And that past is even further in the past now. A little less than a quarter of the country's population takes a drag every day. And young French people, thankfully, are not buying my romanticism—the trend line curves downward more dramatically for them. As for the new law, which carries a 135-euro fine, a survey of French people (conducted, I'm imagining, over zinc countertops and demitasses) found that 78 percent said they were happy to be done with cigarettes in public places. Maybe they're tired of the 2 billion butts that collect on the streets of Paris every year. That might convince me.
These days, when I'm feeling sentimental, instead of smoking, I'll just mainline a film from the New Wave era, such as Godard's existentialist drama Vivre sa vie. Anna Karina is there, playing Nana, a woman who leaves her husband and becomes a sex worker (strangely, a common storyline in French movies of the period). She is sitting in a café, puffing away. 'I think we're always responsible for our actions,' she says. 'We're free.' Free to do any number of things, she says, dreamily invoking the Sartrean credo as smoke curls around her black bob. She is free to close her eyes, to be unhappy. And she takes responsibility for this. 'I smoke a cigarette,' she says, a mischievous smile on her lips. 'I'm responsible.'
Article originally published at The Atlantic