HEALTH : French Light Up and Ponder the Nonsmoking Campaign

One of the biggest victories for the emerging French anti-smoking movement came some years ago when Lucky Luke, a celebrated cowboy comic strip character who could roll his own cigarettes with one hand while riding a horse, gave up the habit. Cigarettes, that is, not horses.

Today, he chews on a piece of straw.

Earlier this month, Parliament gave anti-smokers another boost by passing a law that bans smoking in public places and will prohibit all forms of cigarette advertising by 1993. More significantly, the law removes tobacco products from the cost-of-living index.

In France, tobacco prices are set by the Ministry of Finance. As long as tobacco was part of the index, the government was reluctant to raise prices because in heavy-smoking France, the change would be reflected in a key economic indicator.

Getting tobacco out of the index frees the government to assess heavier, proscriptive taxes and raise prices on all cigarettes, including the American-style blondes and the famous black-tobacco French cigarettes, Gauloises and Gitanes, that shroud many French cafes in a permanent blue haze.

But projected price increases, scheduled to take effect next fall, will not come without a fight from the state-controlled French tobacco company, SEITA. SEITA and its allies in the American tobacco industry have begun an anti-anti-smoking advertising campaign featuring a well-known newspaper cartoonist.

Jacques Faizant, famous for his daily front-page political cartoon in Le Figaro, drew an independent series of cartoons that have been widely published. A die-hard pipe smoker, Faizant, 77, portrays the anti-tobacco movement as a group of vicious Puritans who willfully violate the Rights of Man as defined by the French Revolution of 1789.

The cartoons depict French smokers as society’s lepers. One shows a sign at a public park prohibiting entry to dogs and smokers. Another shows a middle-class couple aghast at the sight of a passing pipe smoker.

“Look!” says the man, pointing at the smoker, “a terrorist!”

“Heavens!” shrieks the woman.

Faizant said he gladly accepted the offer from the French tobacco industry to fight what he calls the “growing ostracism of smokers.”

“I’m subjected every day to pushy nonsmokers,” he complained in an interview. “The other day I was in a smoking compartment of a train when a woman came through holding her nose and waving her hand in front of her face like she was going to die or something.”

Nobody said it would be easy to break smoking habits in France, where the image of a man with a Gauloise dangling from his lip is a cultural icon.

The French detest being told what to do. Naturally, many of the country’s 15 million smokers, in a population of 55 million, blame the anti-smoking movement on the United States, where the campaign is years ahead. Already, they say, there is an airline smoking ban. Who knows what could be next: No-smoking sections in cafes?

The population remains basically untouched by such American issues as secondary smoke inhalation and no-smoking in elevators.

“Absolutely everything in this anti-smoking movement comes from the United States,” complained Faizant. “We are always five years behind the States, and things can only get worse here. Everything good and bad comes from the U.S.A. except tripe sausage, cassoulet (baked bean casserole) and Sancerre wine.”