For more years than anyone can count, Paris's ubiquitous cafés have brimmed with people lingering for hours on end with cigarettes over coffee or drinks; over platters of cheese or bowls of onion soup; over newspapers, novels or textbooks; over gossip, break-ups or political debate. Sartre and de Beauvoir, philosophizing at the Café de Flore with spirals of cigarette smoke floating above their heads, helped create a smoking persona that to some extent still exists.
"Smokers are more passionate," said Véronique Moran, 51, who has smoked for 40 years, and is a regular at Le Cyrano, a café in Paris's bustling Place de Clichy. "We're more sensitive, we think about things and talk about things deeply, we get carried away, we rebel against things."
But today these rebels find themselves more marginalized than romanticized. "The ban on smoking in cafés is the end of a type of person," Moran said. "Now, people think about working more to make more money, being competitive, staying in shape, being good-looking."
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"All my customers smoke, all my employees smoke. What are we going to do?" wondered Olivier Colombe, 43, owner of Parisian cafés Le Panier and Le Faitout.
For Colombe, the new ban poses practical problems, too. Without cigarettes to occupy them, he explained, smokers won't be so willing to wait a long while for their food and drinks; cooks and waiters will have to work faster, resulting in the sort of rapid customer turnover that is typically very un-French. "Long dinners with several bottles of wine and lots of discussion are going to be difficult," he said. "The ambience will be totally different."
Will the smoking ban in France mean the end of café society?
By Jon Frosch
Published: December 18, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/18/europe/smoke.php
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