France Ends Smoking Ban In Posters And Photographs

The French have long been synonymous with tobacco use, with national icons like fashion designer Coco Chanel and filmmaker-comedian Jacques Tati usually seen puffing away on the streets of Paris.

And now, politicians will be letting those bygone heroes indulge in their favorite vice once more, as a French parliamentary commission voted Wednesday for a bill that would exclude cultural heritage from the stringent health legislation passed in 1991 that forbids any direct or indirect promotion of smoking, the AFP is reporting.

"The falsifications of history, the censorship of works of the mind, the denial of reality... should remain the ignominious mark of totalitarian regimes," the bill proposed by the opposition Socialists is quoted by the Telegraph as saying.

The anti-smoking law had been known to spark outcry several times in recent years, usually in connection with a cultural matter. Tati's trademark pipe was replaced by an absurd-looking yellow windmill in a 2009 campaign -- a move which one cinema expert said would have made him "die laughing." Earlier that same year, producers of the biopic Coco Before Chanel dropped a poster campaign which featured actress Audrey Tautou holding a cigarette in her hands.

And when former president Jacques Chirac's cigarette was removed from the cover of his memoirs, celebrity author Frédéric Beigbeder sneered, "[This] is a denial of historical reality, like Stalin erasing one by one the members of his Politburo."