Smoking

When I lived in France in the 1980s, I smoked cigarettes. Practically everyone over the age of 13 smoked, indoors and outdoors; the smoke was everywhere. Laetitia smoked, and both of my host parents smoked, though Jean-Marie was by far the most serious smoker — he was never without a cigarette, routinely going through two packs of unfiltered Gitanes a day. (It actually surprises me that none of the old photos of him, or me, show us smoking.)

The last time I saw Jean-Marie was in 1998, when he was being treated for lung cancer. He was home from the hospital, where he'd been getting chemo and radiation, and he had lost all his hair. By that time I had already quit smoking; the US Congress had called Big Tobacco on the carpet a few years earlier, and most US states had banned smoking in public places. Smoking was still common in France in 1998, but Annie had quit, and I remember her chastising Karine's husband Jean for smoking, pointing out the object lesson in our midst.

Jean-Marie died a few months later. Other families here have the same story: one person told me all of his male relatives smoked like chimneys, and all were dead from lung cancer by their late 60s.

Today, smoking appears to be prohibited in public indoor spaces in France; in Normandy, I rarely smelled cigarette smoke. But Paris is another story -- and Marseille is even worse.

In both cities, every outdoor cafe still has ashtrays (ashtrays!) on the tables. It's impossible to eat a meal at an outdoor restaurant without smelling cigarette smoke. “Bumming a cigarette” is still very much a thing here. And vaping... ugh, vaping is everywhere.

The tobacco industry is, sadly, still very much alive and well and thriving in France.