At the Café de la Banque in Marseille it had just gone 8pm and Manon Rouvillois was on to her third cigarette. Or fourth. “I don’t count them,” she laughed.
Rouvillois, 31, has been smoking since she was 14. “You smoke your first cigarettes because it’s cool,” she said. “From the age of 15 it was really regular.” Her parents were “very anti-smoking … but they quickly accepted it”.
A graphic designer, she gets through ten or fifteen a day, the first with a coffee on her balcony before breakfast. They used to be Vogues. Now they are handrolled, because “rollies” are cheaper. “It’s my first reflex of the day,” she said.
Smokers occupied five of the 11 tables at the terrace where she was sitting. Tobacco fumes danced in the light of the heat lamps. Rouvillois has never tried to quit. “It’s unimaginable,” she said. “The only times I wanted to, it was for financial reasons, it wasn’t for my health.”
She is no outlier: among working-age French adults 31.1 percent are smokers, almost three times as many as in the UK, 11.9 percent. Almost 12 million French men and women smoke every day, according to the latest official estimates. At the same time, casual smoking is ticking up and more French women smoke now than 50 years ago.
This is far out of step with the developed world, or even the world as a whole, where one in five adults are thought to smoke now, compared with one in three in 2000.
In global rankings France sits among the top 20 smoking nations, beside countries in southeast Asia and eastern Europe. In western Europe, it is out on its own.
“In France, the weather is a bit nicer, which means that lots of people eat outside, and take a lot of time to eat,” said Éric Malbos, a psychologist who helps smokers in Marseille to quit. “You know that lunch breaks — for example, at work — in France are among the longest in the world … You take your time to sit down, you take your time to talk and you take your time to smoke.”
Smoking is part of the culture in France, in a way it is not elsewhere. The image of a sultry Serge Gainsbourg with cigarette in his hand, in his case unfiltered Gauloises, or more recently his daughter Charlotte, wields power in the French soul.
The French League Against Cancer found in 2021 that 90 percent of French films from 2015 to 2019 featured characters smoking, for an average of 2.6 minutes, the equivalent in duration of six TV adverts. Mathieu Kassovitz, star of Amélie and director of La Haine, responded to that research by saying: “We have cigarettes in real life so they should be in movies too. Leave movies alone.”
French smokers are more likely to be poorer and to live in the south of the country but the habit cuts across society: 17 percent of people with degrees smoke, 25 percent of people with jobs.
In February, French tobacco shops sold 1.6 billion cigarettes, more than a 20-pack for every member of the population, including babies. That figure excludes rolling tobacco and cigars.
“The weak progress made by France in the fight against smoking, compared to other countries in the European Union, has numerous explanations,” France’s National Committee Against Smoking said in a report this month. The overarching one, it said, was the continuing influence of the tobacco lobby.
It isn’t just the power of the global tobacco corporations. Under a system dating to the 17th century regime of Louis XIV, tobacco is sold under a monopoly by 22,800 tobacco shops, or tabacs.
“Across France, from urban estates to rural areas to city centers, the tobacconist-bar-newsagent is an integral place of conviviality, exchange and dialogue. Sometimes it’s even the last ‘public service’!” Philippe Folliot, a senator who campaigns for the tobacconists, said in 2016.
He and others argue that they are the last bulwark against the emptying of the French countryside. Today you can pay your school fees, buy a train ticket and buy ammunition for hunting in a tabac, as well as buy stamps, a lottery ticket or a beer.
Tabac shopkeepers are legally employees of French customs, under the Ministry of Finance. Anti-smoking campaigners say the tobacconist confederation retains the ear of a large chunk of politicians. Philippe Coy, the confederation’s president, was awarded France’s highest civilian honor, the Légion d’honneur, in 2023. François Torpart, of the National Committee Against Smoking, said government efforts to curtail smoking had been “stop and go”.
French policy is apparently aligned with other nations. France banned tobacco adverts in 1991, 12 years before Britain. It banned smoking indoors in 2007, the same year as Britain. It brought in plain packaging ten years later, the same as Britain. Taxes on cigarettes are the third highest in the EU, behind only Ireland and the Netherlands, at $10 for a pack of 20 as of July last year. At the counter a pack costs $13.50 on average. In the UK taxes are higher and a pack of 20 costs $21.33 on average.
However, a thriving black market accounts for almost 33 percent of the cigarettes sold in France and, it is estimated, nearly 50 percent of the 35 billion counterfeit cigarettes smoked in the EU annually.
Cigarettes also flood into France from neighboring countries where tobacco is less heavily taxed. Only 5 percent of the tobacco sold in Luxembourg, where cigarettes cost a third of the price in France, is smoked in the Grand Duchy. President Macron’s government has a moratorium on price rises in France with taxes locked to inflation until at least 2027.
There has been some success in discouraging younger smokers. In 2022 about 16 percent of 17-year-olds smoked every day, down from 25 percent five years earlier. But smoking remains the largest avoidable killer in France, leading to about 75,000 deaths a year. The victims used to be almost all men. Now women make up a large proportion. The number of women dying from smoking doubled between 2000 and 2014, to more than 19,000.
That is because a generation of French women took up smoking in the 1970s, persuaded that it liberated them. A nationwide screening of 4,300 women in 2023 found that 90 percent were at risk of heart disease, which is the biggest killer of French women, six times deadlier than breast cancer.
Françoise Molique was never a serious smoker. The retired nurse, 65, from Lyon had her first cigarette at 16 or 17. About 15 years ago she became addicted.
“I started smoking again because of my colleagues,” she said. “At the hospital. One of them smoked and she said, ‘Let’s take a break.’ So I went to smoke with her.” Molique smoked more and more until “in the last few years of working I smoked half a pack a day, not quite, but between eight and ten cigarettes a day.”
She has managed to cut back to only the occasional smoke, and says she no longer buys cigarettes. But her two adult daughters smoke. “It bothers me a lot, a lot, a lot,” she said. “I didn’t smoke how they smoke.”
Richard Assheton is a writer living in Marseille