The gendarmerie may be in for a busy summer. It will soon be illegal to smoke outdoors in France, the government having ruled that ‘tobacco must disappear where there are children’. The ban will apply anywhere near youngsters, from the ski slopes of La Plagne or Courchevel to the boulevards of Reims and Marseille. Defense de fumer.

If you hoped to stroll down Paris’s Rue de Verneuil, sucking on a Disque Bleu while striking Serge Gainsbourg poses – sultry Sixties star Serge was seldom seen sans cig – then you have only 29 full days left to do it. From July, it will be illegal to light a cigarette en plein air. Those who disobey will be fined 135 euros (£113).

Can this really be la belle France, which gave us such classic images as the young Brigitte Bardot smoking a cigar and Audrey Hepburn holding a cigarette holder as long as a magician’s wand?

France was the land of Gitanes and Gauloises with their artsy blue packets. John Lennon favoured the latter while French author Albert Camus was more of a Gitanes man. The musky aroma of tabac brun, coiling to the ceiling, gave French cafes a distinctive scent along with the tang of pastis and a whiff of barmaid’s armpit. From July, unless you are on a specified cafe terrace, lighting up will be met with a

Clouseau-style hand on your collar and a grunt of ‘vous êtes attrapé, old son’.

In many Western countries, we have become accustomed to smoking bans in offices, shops, on public transport and other enclosed places. Life is a lot fresher as a result. Smokers are still allowed to huddle outside office blocks to satisfy their craving. It’s a compromise that seems to work.

French actress Brigitte Bardot smokes a cigarette in A Very Private Affair

French actress Brigitte Bardot smokes a cigarette in A Very Private Affair

Tobacco taxes pay for a lot of public services. We should thank nicotine-addicts for paying so much to the public purse.

Apart from the odd gasper in dissipated younger days, I have never been a smoker. I did work as a barman in smoky pubs in the early 1980s, so have passive-inhaled a fair amount.

In my first job on Fleet Street, I and four other reporters shared a small office with a boss who worked his way through 20 Rothmans a day. The atmosphere close to deadline could become fuggy.

But banning tobacco in any outside location, no matter how remote or blizzard-blown? This takes matters significantly further and it sets my not-particularly libertarian antennae jangling. What would Gitanes-lover – and author of the anti-tyranny novel 1984 – George Orwell have made of this latest gambit from Big Brother? Under a clear sky, should we not be cut some legal slack?

At a time when freedom feels under threat and nannying Western authorities are meeting pushback from populist political parties, have the French just nationalised the open air? It is certainly paradoxical that a republic established under the 18th century slogan ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ is now taking a guillotine to the first of those values.

The French language gave us ‘nonchalance’, ‘insouciance’ and ‘sangfroid’. Are such concepts to be ground under the boot of modern authoritarianism?

For this to happen in France seems mad. In the Second World War, the dangled cigarette became a symbol of the Resistance. Gauloises were seen as embodying the values of la France profonde as opposed to those of the compliant Vichy regime. That goose General de Gaulle made sure he was photographed with a cig stuck in his gob as a result.

France is the country of husky Catherine Deneuve, actressy essence of the post-coital Craven A. Postwar intellectualism was personified by the Parisian thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who when not stroking their existentialist chins were to be found puffing angst-ridden cigs. Now this same France is going to arrest anyone having a crafty fag outdoors.

The ban is being justified on the grounds that smoke could imperil the health of children. Catherine Vautrin, France’s minister for children, health and family, said: ‘The freedom to smoke must end where the freedom of children to breathe fresh air begins.’ Fair-minded Mail on Sunday readers may instinctively sympathise with the virtuous Vautrin. It obviously makes sense not to expose youngsters to the tobaccoey smog that used to infest pubs, railway carriages and many offices. Who else here can remember ashtrays on London Tube trains? Yuck.

Catherine Deneuve glances at the camera while in 1960

Catherine Deneuve glances at the camera while enjoying a smoke in 1960

But how great a threat can cigarette smoke really be outdoors? Does the wind not dissipate any danger? Is it beyond the wit of children or their parents to move a few yards if someone lights a Marlboro Red in the street? If a grandfather is puffing on his pipe on a riverbank bench, is it so deadly a menace to his grandchildren playing nearby?

Maybe the danger to children is being exaggerated for political purposes. Madame Vautrin’s pious pas devant les enfants stance would be more convincing if politicians in Europe, and Britain, routinely showed equal concern about the effects on children of drugs, pornography and knives. French politics is in a state of paralysis. Madame Vautrin, 64, is trying to create headlines to alleviate a sense of ministerial drift. Maybe her position is also ‘political’ in a wider sense, of being driven by an administrative elite that wishes to assert itself on a disobedient populace. The motive here could be a vengeful ‘that’ll teach them not to vote for Marine Le Pen’s lot’.

My friend Kate lives in St Tropez, the Mediterranean resort where hedonists have long converged for boozy, Gitanes-wafted lunches. ‘The air is blue with outrage at this law,’ reports Kate. ‘Who will now employ the kids who scan the beach for fag ends? But some of my French friends say no one will take any notice.’

Maybe the ban will indeed be met with a Gallic shrug. But just you wait. I bet it leads to demands for something similar in Britain.

Every half-pint pressure group and blowhard backbencher, itchy for publicity, will make a hullabaloo. The BBC and its pantaloon’d pied pipers will seize on this ban as the next must-do thing.

A line has been drawn in the sand. Liberté has taken a whack. Finger-waggers are giddy with prohibitive power.

One last thing. St Tropez has three nudist beaches. One hint of Gitanes smoke and Inspector Clouseau will be whizzing there in his van, sirens wailing. Let’s hope he’s careful about where he clamps his manacles.

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