Sure, lighting up a cigarette can make you feel like you're in a chic French movie, but the days where you can actually smoke in France are very much numbered.
In an effort to raise ‘the first tobacco-free generation’, the country is set to enforce a huge smoking ban – and when you take a look at the stats, you can see why. According to France’s public health body, 12 million people were smoking on the daily in 2022 – that’s around 25 percent of 18 to 75-year-olds.
But France is something of a pioneer when it comes to smoking restrictions. It banned smoking in restaurants in 2008, and Britain, Spain and Italy all followed suit.
There are already 7,200 tobacco-free areas across the country, but the government wants to extend the ban to include all beaches, public parks, forests and areas around schools.
Lots of towns in France already have plenty of designated non-smoking areas. Nice was the first place to establish a cigarette-free beach way back in 2012, and Paris already has hundreds of smoke-free zones across the city – mostly public playgrounds, outside schools, creches (nurseries) and sports centres.
But what this new ban means is that smoke-free areas will become the responsibility of the central government, rather than local authorities. They’ve also announced an increase in the tax on cigarettes, and a ban on single-use e-cigarettes is in the works, too.
It's thought that smoking causes a whopping 75,000 avoidable deaths in France each year, which is a whole lot of lives that could be saved. There are also concerns about the environmental impact of cigarette butts left on beaches: after plastic bottles, cigarettes are apparently the second biggest litter problem in coastal areas.
While the original smoking ban in restaurants was welcomed by the French public, not everyone is happy about this proposal. David Linsard, the mayor of Cannes, has said he feels that there are already enough restrictions on smoking.
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