Down with Vaping! Vive le Cigarette!

Mon dieu, the French love vaping. One cannot traipse down a street in this country without encountering somebody sucking on a plasticky vape pen. Young people, old people. I saw some infants with vapes instead of binkies. I suppose it’s not surprising to see, considering how the French used to love cigarettes. Honestly, is there anything more French than a sallow youth in a black turtleneck expelling a thin, hopeless stream of smoke at an outdoor café on a gray Parisian afternoon?

Non.

Even I, lifelong hater of cigarettes, must admit there’s something a little cool, something je ne sais quoi, about smoking traditional cigarettes. Vaping, not so much. Vaping is all of the nicotine addiction with none of the ennui. It’s like smoking a Gameboy.

Tobacco first made its way to France in the 16^th century by way of the Spanish colony of Santa Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. According to the website, Mr. Snuff (which, disappointingly has nothing to do with snuff films), the French monarchy viewed tobacco as a potential cash crop, and French farmers were encouraged to grow the plant as a way to generate income, to reduce reliance on imported tobacco, and for its perceived medicinal benefits.

Serge Gainsbourg. So cool.

Those Frenchies took to smoking like canards a l’eau. By the mid 17^th century, tobacco was being grown on French plantations and in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadalupe, as well as in Quebec, Canada. By the Napoleonic Wars, French soldiers were hand-rolling their own ciggies and only a few decades later, the French were selling commercially produced cigarettes to the masses. Smoking became as ingrained in the culture as complaining about the English.

Even the French, however, could not forever deny the habit’s deleterious health effects. Over the last twenty years, smoking rates have fallen among the French. From a 30% average of daily smokers in 2000 to a 23% average in 2023. This mirrors trends in other countries, although the French still outpace global daily cigarette consumption, which currently hovers around 15%.

Vaping rates have filled in some of the gap. As of 2024, half of all French youths between 11-17 had reported trying e-cigarettes. Various laws have been proposed to curb French vaping but I don’t think they’ve gotten very far with effective regulations.

Nor should they.

It doesn’t seem fair to deprive these people of their nicotine (named, by the way, for Jean Nicot, the 16th century French ambassador who first introduced tobacco to his homeland). The nanny state bureaucrats are already such sticks in the mud about wine and cheese consumption. Now they want to kick away the final leg on the three-legged stool of Frenchiness? Sacre bleu!

We must preserve the hedonistic streak of these people. It’s a demure hedonism, to be sure, one evolved from centuries of discrete trysts with mistresses, a little too much booze at lunch, and a penchant for powdered wigs and rouge. The French are a proud mixture of courtly and corpulent.

The traditional French pastry is a perfect example of this dichotomy. No desserts are more decadent, yet they’re also generally petite, their garishness belied by their size. The vape fits right in with their libertine streak. It’s compact and colorful and sometimes explodes. Just like Coco Chanel.

(Chanel was also, apparently, a Nazi spy, but are we really going to hold that against her? We will, yes.)

The existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once gave up smoking. He found it difficult, writing “I did not care so much for the taste of tobacco that I was going to lose, as for the meaning of the act of smoking. [I had to reduce] tobacco to being only itself: a leaf that burns; I cut [its] symbolic links with the world. Suddenly my regret was disarmed and quite bearable."

A reasonable way for a brilliant mind to quit. Alas, his resolve could not endure. Sartre picked the habit up again within the week and smoked for the rest of his life. This seems like the right decision for somebody who is most famous for devoting himself to considering the question of whether life is worth living. Perhaps, for Sartre, without cigarettes, it was not.

One of the best decisions I ever made was not taking up the habit in the first place. I found the whole idea repulsive, not least because I felt like I was being lied to and manipulated to pick up cigarettes as an act of rebellion when there could have been nothing more conformist. To smoke, I thought, was to veer left under the mistaken impression that “they” wanted me to veer right. In telling us to avoid vice, they were secretly, and deliberately, pushing us into its embrace. Well, I wasn’t going to fall for it!

The French did, though, and made it their own. Even they, however, cannot make vaping look cool. Juliette Binoche taking a drag from a cigarette? Tres chic. Juliette Binoche sucking down some watermelon e-liquid? Tres gauche. Maybe that was a bad example since Juliette Binoche can make anything look good. Here’s a picture she posted a while back of her drinking water with a straw. Somehow, she looks excellent doing it.

When did drinking water get so arty?

And here she is smoking a cigarette. Devastating.

It doesn’t seem right that something that looks so good on this person should also be so terrible for her.

You cannot, however, find a photo of her with a vape because Juliette Binoche has standards. So should the entire French citizenry! Down with vaping! À bas le vaportage! Vive la cigarette!