H/T Walt for this report:
Smokers fume as France mulls ban on ‘too cool’ Gitanes and Gauloises
The news was enough to have French smokers choking on their morning cigarette: France is considering banning some tobacco brands because they are just too cool.
Among those threatened are Gitanes and Gauloises, beloved of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg, who was said to puff through five packets of filterless Gitanes a day.
The ban, which could also cover the Lucky Strike, Marlboro Gold, Vogue and Fortuna brands, is the logical conclusion of a new public health law – based on a European directive – which stipulates tobacco products “must not include any element that contributes to the promotion of tobacco or give an erroneous impression of certain characteristics”.
Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vague”, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociability”.
I think that if I were French I’d be getting very seriously pissed off with the French government.
This is a government that’s waging a cultural war against its own people. It’s taking French cultural icons – and what else are Gauloises and Gitanes but French cultural icons? – and attempting to suppress them.
The French people have had to suffer a lot in recent months. For it’s very much the French people who have come under attack in recent months. Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, and now Nice, have all seen ordinary French people coming under murderous attack. Because all these attacks have been aimed at them. Not at the French government. Not at the French armed forces. Not at the French police. It’s all been aimed at ordinary people.
And the government does next to nothing about it. They’ve even been told that they’re going to have “to learn to live with terrorism.” And now the government is launching a cultural attack on ordinary people. They’re going to have to live with terrorism, but they can’t be allowed to live with smoking.
The French government may as well be on the same side as the Islamic terrorists.
And, in fact, given that the Islamic State is even more antismoking than the French government and the EU, the French government arguably really is on the side of the terrorists. It shares the same goals, and it treats ordinary people with the same contempt.
One good thing about the Front National’s Marine Le Pen is that she’s a smoker. I hope she smokes Gauloises. Or Gitanes. I think that if I were French I’d vote for her. What else do I need to know about her?
Frank Davis 
More nonsensical silliness from anti-smoking politicians. Like the home-grown anti-smoking crusaders this side of the Channel, they really are scrabbling around for something to do, these days, aren’t they? It almost seems as if, once a country has imposed a ban, their main raison d’etre ceases to exist and they have to think up increasingly daft measures/stories to try and keep their precious “cause” in the limelight. After all, if, as they say, France is going to go the “plain packaging” route or similar, then all those “cool” images will no longer be visible in any case, will they?
But at least in this article (probably because it’s to do with France, and not here) they point out that it’s the result of an EU instruction; whenever the antis push some piece of anti-smoking legislation through here, it’s rarely mentioned that it’s emanated from the EU. And at least, too, the French are honest enough to recognise that cigarettes are, by and large, still regarded as “cool” – although, as usual, anti-smokers are barking up the wrong tree as to the reason why. Smoking, even today, is still regarded as cool, not because of the design of the packets or the brand names, but because cool people tend to be drawn to do it, whereas anti-smokers – by and large the most uncool, staid, unexciting people on the planet – don’t do it!
As I’ve said, anti-smokers do tend to look like the type of people who don’t get invited to the party.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that antis tend to have lots of annoying traits and habits themselves: the guy talking too loudly in the break room, or the lady always going on about her personal problems. They love to exhibit these traits freely and openly.
Anti-smokers are not in the cool category.
Real Gitanes were destroyed by the healthists in 2010 but some of the history and the principal logo can still be seen here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanes – worth saving for posterity before even that article is banned.
The Gauloises logo is missing from the wiki entry https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauloises
But the text is important:
“Between the World Wars the smoking of Gauloises in France was considered patriotic and an affiliation with French “heartland” values. The brand was associated with the cigarette-smoking poilu (a slang term for the French infantryman in the trenches) and the resistance fighters during the Vichy Regime.[1] Their slogan was “Liberté toujours” (Freedom forever).”
Great slogan and ideal names, images and products for the fight against the corrupt, malign, oppressive, ruling elite.
Their slogan was “Liberté toujours” (Freedom forever).
This detail makes me profoundly sad, and profoundly angry.
For one thing it illustrates perfectly the distance the prohibitionists have travelled on their quest of cultural vandalism, and how far from their original demands and justifications they have moved.
How DARE they destroy such a symbol. Who gave them the right?
The entire dictatorial, prohibitionist establishment from top to bottom is one of madness, and evil, and greed, and lust for power; the exact characteristics that defined the Nazi regime, and the exact things countless brave people in the western world fought and died to defeat.
The only positive that I can see is that with every new attack, the prohibitionists show themselves and their true intentions more clearly to more people. They are the enemies of freedom, simple as that. The unexpected vote for Brexit shows that freedom DOES still matter, that it always will, and that the progressive (fascist) tide can always be turned back.
It very well may be the slogan, “Liberté toujours” (“Freedom forever”) that they want to ban more than the cigarettes themselves. While cigarettes alone subtly promote a sense of freedom, rebellion and individuality, the slogan may be too bold for the globalist elite. Banning the sale of these cigarettes kills two birds with one stone. The globalists have been slowly denormalizing/represssing/eliminating symbols of freedom and rebellion. Take for instance the Confederate and Tea Party flags here in the U.S.
NOW
Reporting the ban, Le Figaro said that while the directive was “relatively vague”, it clearly covered anything suggesting “masculinity or femininity, physical slimness, youth or sociability”.
THEN – Nazi (Eugenics) era
Advertising bans included a ban on ads implying that smoking possessed “hygienic values,” as were images depicting smokers as athletes or even sports fans, or otherwise engaged in “manly” pursuits (Proctor, 1997, p.460).
Dare I say that Gitanes and Gauloises must be the first products to have ever been so treated? Where even the brand name is to be banned for being too cool? How cool is that?
This is absolute insanity. The antismoking machine needs to be disassembled and soon!
tobacco products “must not include any element that […] give[s] an erroneous impression of certain characteristics”
As if the anti-tobacco cult had never resorted to “erroneous impressions” to further its insane agenda!
As for “physical slimness”, when all the relevant data is put together (and not pulled asunder, as tobacco “researchers” have egregiously been known to do from the word go), it appears that tobacco smokers enjoy considerable protection from overweight, as well as from neurodegenerative diseases (by many accounts, more scary and degrading than cancer itself!). Rethorical question: is the evidence about a link beween lung cancer and smoking so compelling as to cancel out and override these vital considerations?
Serge Gainsbourg’s best work, probably conceived in a blue haze of Gitane smoke:
AKHZTbAS0QyCkIIjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymotion.com%2Fvideo%2Fx4tece_serge-gainsbourg-manon_music&usg=AFQjCNFsAaMCtfZTTY1h43EAseZAk3lSCA&bvm=bv.127521224,d.ZGg
http://www.jukebox.fr/serge-gainsbourg/clip,manon,sqfsm.html
Dear Mr Davis
And in next week’s news: France bans the French.
DP
Reblogged this on Contra la ley "antitabaco" and commented:
Por si alguien tenía dudas de que los políticos occidentales actuales van en contra de la cultura y el pueblo que les ha votado.
My first ciggies of choice — I’m going back many moons — were Gitanes. I remember also trying Sobranie Black Russian, Stuyvesant and Du Maurier. No self-respecting college student with newly-found intellectual pretensions would’ve been seen in public with a plebby brand such as Players! Alas, I’ve now gone down-market: I smoke whatever has the lowest tar/nicotine content.
Stop Press: Public Health Puritans in New Zealand are now hell-bent on giving us all a guilt complex about alcohol. (I imagine the NZ vintners are seething about that.) What next? Plain packaging for alcoholic beverages?
“What next? Plain packaging for alcoholic beverages?”
Yup. That one’s in the pipeline, ready to go. Labels defaced with the exact same sort of repulsive, miserable ‘warnings’ that we currently see on tobacco products.
There’s something deeply, deeply wrong with the Public Health Freaks.
If one’s very existence, one’s job and one’s funding are dependent upon and or, funded by ‘risk analysis’ then the peddling fear mongers must ply their wares like snake oil salesmen of yore, as loudly and as compellingly as possible. Their wares are snapped up by the policy makers who fund them in the first place, and whose addictive perversion is the ‘precautionary principle’ that requires the merest whiff of speculative risk as ‘evidence’. Beats me why they actually bother to get out of bed in the mornings, or indeed produce off-spring who have, like them, like all of us, a 100% chance of death.
In time they will reap what they sow, of that I have no doubt. They will be as successful at banning cigarettes as they were in controlling marijuana. As they peddle their predictable, tedious and totalitarian way around ‘lifestyle’ choices, they simply open up expanding vistas of opportunity and ultimately, places where libertarians will flourish. They will become the very reason for their failure, much like the Borg and their mantra, ‘resistance is futile’ … surely the greatest inciting challenge to ever spur anyone with the exception of the most invertebrate, to do just that, to resist with all one’s will, ingenuity and sagacity.
*beckons to you from the shadows* “Hey Monn-sewer, Voulez vous buy a pre-censor copy of Asterix? Also got some Lucky Lukes where he *hushed tones * isn’t sucking on a bit of straw …if you know what I means, Mon Brave?”
I buy Gitanes whenever i am in France. However last month it was really difficult to find them. I got some finally but i am guessing they wont reappear under French plain packaging and will go the same way as Disque Bleu and the magnificent Boyard. Very very sad !
“Boyards”…now there’s a blast (usually straight to the lungs) from the glorious past of French smokes. I doubt it will be long before no ‘tabac brun’ is produced in France at all. Just as the German equivalent ceased to be grown a couple of years back.
Mind you, if you manage to find an unopened pack of tin of caporals on ebay, you can easily rehydrate them and enjoy a smoke so strong that it contravenes not only the EU tobacco Directives but UK drug laws too, as this guy does https://smokerscult.com/ (in German). I recently went to the Semois in the hope that Semois tobacco was similar to ‘brun’ (hence my profile pic) but unfortunately it isn’t. It is however very tasty and well worth the time and trouble acquiring it .
I don’t understand a word of German but that’s still a great site to peruse.
Here another great site, and in English this time. It is a looong page but well worth the reading about the cigarette in the C20 film & photographic culture, with each country and brand of cigarette explained and interpolated:
“Yves Montand: Of a generation of Frenchmen who were born with a Gauloises hanging from their lip. The position of Montand’s hand on the cigarette gives the impression that it detachable, which it is not. French pronunciation was adapted to enable talking while a Gauloise hangs from your lip and indeed the entire French language was developed because of the difficulties of pronouncing Latin while doing so.”
Serge Gainsbourg: Reportedly there is a photograph of Serge Gainsbourg not smoking a cigarette, but I have never seen it, nor do I believe it exists.
http://mitteleuropa.x10.mx/tech_tabak.html
Ooh! that should keep me quiet for a few days.
Oh yes! Bookmarked for further perusal!
of a new public health law – based on a European directive
That certainly helps the ‘Frexit’ (?) campaign.
A previous EU directive.
“From 1 January 2014 herbal smoking products will have Tobacco Products Duty charged on them unless they are to be used exclusively for medical purposes.
If you’re a UK manufacturer of herbal smoking products you must:
apply to become both a registered tobacco factory and a registered store”
https://www.gov.uk/herbal-smoking-products
“This change is being made to bring UK legislation into line with the European Directive 2011/64/EC on the structure and rates of excise duty on manufactured tobacco, which indicates that herbal smoking products can only be exempted from excise duty when they are used exclusively for medical purposes.
The current exemption granted to all herbal smoking products in the UK provides such products with an unfair advantage over their tobacco counterparts
Click to access herbal_smoking_products.pdf.pdf
I thought that was the whole point of extortionate taxes on tobacco.
Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word,”Humptdy Dumpty said,” it means exactly what I say it means, not more or less.” So “tobacco” means every non-tobacco herb and everything that contains –or even doesn’t contain — nicotine, like e-cig juice. Okay. Got it.
O/T slightly: German TV News this evening is reporting an ‘incident’ in a Munich shopping mall…possibly several dead…possibly terrorist attack.
Why does WordPress keep on rejecting my password and then ask me for a new one? Getting fed up. boing007
Yup Ms Le Pen does smoke, however this one’s got a cork coloured filter:
And the lady doth vape.
It’s very possible that I’m biased, as a smoker of tobacco, but I much prefer the photo of Le Pen smoking, as she appears to be an intellectual, about to engage in deep thought about some pressing matter.
Conversely, the photo of her vaping makes me think she’s playing a little soprano recorder, in the midst of a painfully out-of-tune performance of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
Exactement! Couldn’t have said it better. Just a shame she is smoking , probably, an ‘American’ style cig …or perhaps a Gauloises Blondes Red :(
Of course if she really wanted to look intelligent in a ’68 way then she’d hand roll something French and Black…well maybe not ‘Black’ in her case :P
Madame Le Pen visited Quebec last year and all the political parties shunned her. Some said that she should not have been granted entry into Quebec, while others demanded that she immediately leave the country. slugbop007
Naturally. In this day and age, if you don’t conform strictly to the dominant PC narrative, then you are classified as persona non grata. It matters not how valid your political stance nor how incontrovertible your scientific evidence. If your beliefs / knowledge are in contradiction to the consensus, you are out.
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