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From July 1st, new French anti-smoking legislation will ban smoking in outdoor public places, including beaches, parks, school grounds, sports facilities, and bus shelters. The aim is to make smoking “disappear” wherever children are present. But even before it comes into force, the law is proving impossible to enforce and discontent is growing.
The new law follows a law passed in 1991—the Evin Law, named after its author, then-health minister Claude Evin— that already banned smoking in places “intended for collective use.” It mainly concerned enclosed spaces. The novelty of the 2025 law is that it will apply outdoors.
Today, in principle, everyone seems to agree on the benefits of the new measure. But in practice, it is proving unenforceable. At the local level, there is concern: municipalities have neither the budget nor the staff to monitor the population and issue the fines required by the law. In smaller municipalities without a municipal police force, the question does not even arise. “What do they want? I’m not going to go and stand on the beach myself to act as a police officer,” exclaims Agnès Cercel, mayor of a small village with a leisure center that falls under the law. “As usual with measures taken by the state, they don’t bother to see if we can comply,” she laments.
Given their resources, mayors will have to make a call, and it won’t be in favor of the cigarette hunt: “If we have to choose between a real safety issue for a resident and passive smoking, we know where our priority lies,” explains Laurent Bonnaterre, mayor of a small town in Normandy.
The hierarchy that exists between safety and tobacco is not a fantasy of the far right. At a time when crime is skyrocketing across the country, the fight against secondhand smoke really seems like unnecessary regulatory harassment and a secondary priority.
The question of the place of cigarettes in society is not just a health issue; it has a strong cultural and emotional dimension.
In 1991, the introduction of the Evin law had already caused controversy in France, where cigarettes have a powerful cultural image, associated with a lifestyle and elegance typical of French identity. The act of smoking a cigarette embodies both a form of freedom and nonchalance to which the French are very attached. The Evin law went so far as to retouch photos of historical figures to remove their cigarettes, as in one of the most iconic portraits of the writer André Malraux, or their pipes, an indispensable accessory for the filmmaker Jacques Tati. It took a corrective law passed in 2011 for Malraux to get his cigarette back and Tati his pipe.
However, one strategic location is resisting: café terraces. For the time being, they are not affected by the ban, much to the regret of former minister Evin, who would like to see the law go further. But cafés are culturally highly symbolic, and a ban on smoking on terraces would be perceived as an extremely aggressive gesture by the French population.
