France may not be the first European country to ban outdoor smoking, given that the city of Milan showed the way last January. But, as befits its administrative traditions, it has certainly devised the most Byzantine regulations, purportedly designed to shield children from noxious tobacco fumes.

As of this week, French citizens are no longer allowed to smoke in public parks, on beaches during the holiday season, at bus stops (even unsheltered ones), or on any street near a school, playing field, gym, library, or swimming pool. In short, anywhere within 10 metres of a child.

Penalties start at a €135 fine, which can jump to €375 and then €750 for repeat offenders. Be sure to watch for public notices, since at least 1,600 towns hurried to add some 7,000 specific criteria, which range from the logical (in Strasbourg or Paris, no-smoking zones extending beyond 10 metres in front of schools or sports areas are clearly delineated on the ground) to the frankly insane (beaches at Cannes or Agon-Coutainville provide specific areas where smoking is forbidden all year round).

Citizens are, however, allowed a gasper in a red-light district, an industrial zone, a car park — or a restaurant or café outdoors terrace, however close it may be to any of the above no-smoking zones, because the hospitality lobby won that one, on behalf of a profession devastated by Covid, inflation and Ulez regulations.

It’s hard not to recognise this distinct brand of French administrative nanny-statism that flourished during Covid: the absurdity of self-signed, 15-question affidavits required for every trip outside the home; pharmacists greenlit to vaccinate while vets were barred; and so on. All this is tempered, as ever, by a dose of special-interest pandering. It’s obvious that smokers packed into café terraces pose more risk to children than a lone soul lighting up on a windy Breton beach.

I should mention at this stage that I don’t smoke, I don’t like the smell of cigarettes, and I don’t let people smoke in my house (the smell clings to fabrics for days). When I lived in New York, I could understand those co-op building rules that banned smoking altogether, because I certainly knew when my neighbours were at it; here in Paris, where I live on the fourth floor of a relatively quiet street, I can smell the smoke in the street outside my windows.

But what I resent even more is the slow, inexorable creep of state intrusion. For years now, the French — gripped by a kind of moralistic presentism, where every historical figure must be retrofitted with 2025 sensibilities — have been airbrushing cigarettes from the mouths of icons: Jean-Paul Sartre in postwar cafés, de Gaulle during the Liberation of Paris in 1944, André Malraux in the Spanish Civil War. These were moments when bullets, not cigarette smoke, posed the real danger.

I would much rather my country focused on fixing its crumbling infrastructure. Regional trains now often take a third longer to reach their destination, thanks to decaying tracks. Instead, we get another wave of pettifogging regulations.

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Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based journalist and political commentator.

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