Ban on smoking outside: "What if this impulse to want to heal everything makes us all sick?"

Nathan Devers is a normalien, agrégé in philosophy, author of Espace Smoking (Grasset, 2021).

At first glance, a quasi news item. An insignificant dispatch, almost sympathetic, at the very least benign: lately, several French cities have decided to ban smoking outdoors. From Thionville to Grau-du-Roy via Pessac and Carrières-sous-Poissy, cigarettes are disappearing from common areas at their own pace. Free zones have been established. Citizens will be able to walk there in peace, without being inconvenienced, without being intoxicated, without being murdered by smokers and their bad example. Around them, no more stinking odors, no more gray curls, no more harmful attitudes. We will finally have cleared the streets of these semi-drug addicts, of all these unconscious people who take pleasure in putting themselves in danger.

True, smokers will growl. Like bad students deprived of dessert, they will whine a little. But, in the end, they will eventually fall into line. Ultimately, this educational constraint will allow them to get better. No doubt: in a year or two, they'll be thanking us for curing them.

What if it was the other way around? What if this impulse to want to heal everything made us all sick? What if this infantilization turns us into eternal children? What if this mania for cleaning cities dehumanized them? What if this policy of good led to a world of the worst?

It should be noted first of all that, contrary to what certain specialists repeat from evening to morning, smokers are not all fooled by their condition. I know that we would like to pass them off as beings without will, manipulated by the tobacco industry, influenced by the films of the 1960s, insane on nicotine and dreaming of withdrawal. But such an idea comes from another propaganda: that of hygiene. I know, we all know people who knowingly smoke. Either they are suffocating under an insurmountable daily life from which they escape for a cigarette break. Either they prefer to live less long but more intensely. Either they need to smoke to live in society. Either that, quite simply, they take pleasure in breathing fire. As amazing as it may sound, sometimes there are good reasons to hurt yourself.

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We will then be surprised by this calendar. Two or three months after the imposition of the health pass, here is a new symptom of the liberticidal drive. As if it were, according to Clausewitz's formula, a continuation of the medical order by all means. As if it was up to the state not only to prevent citizens from harming others, but from harming themselves. As if we were entering what Ruwen Ogien called the domain of “positive freedom”, that is to say in a society where freedom continues to be conditioned by injunctions, not only legal, but also moral. As if we were sinking even further into the abyss of health psychosis. All this in the name of an absurd syllogism: “Smokers put themselves in danger, therefore they are dangerous”. Has anyone thought for a moment about the consequences of such reasoning? Will we soon go so far as to imitate certain Chinese companies, by prohibiting the French from committing suicide?

Finally, we will recall where this passion for tobacco-free cities comes from. Some will invoke the American model: the United States is in fact all the avant-gardes. In the 1950s, they spread the cultivation of tobacco; nowadays, they rediscover their old prohibition demons. Other minds, less forgetful than the others, will push the genealogy to the point of failing on a Godwin point. Because the inventor of non-smoking areas in public places is none other than a man named… Adolf Hitler. Before the Third Reich, it happened that certain institutions, in particular religious ones, discouraged smoking, even that certain States, often theocratic, prohibited tobacco. It was Nazism, however, that rationalized and modernized anti-tobacco policy. Everyone has their references, of course. But, unlike cigarettes, History cannot be consumed.

Finally, we wonder what French cities will look like twenty or thirty years from now. Masked people every time a disease spreads, that is to say (almost) every day? Streets that look like hospital corridors? Fanatics of hydro-alcoholic gel and hand wash? Cultists of social distancing? Tyrannical hypochondriacs, demanding that the entire universe adapt to their terrors? Look-alikes of Nietzsche's "last man", obsessed with their desire to die as late as possible? Undead scuttling their existence by pretending to love him? The natural sons of Tartuffe and Argan.

It is the story of benevolent contempt, of irrational science, of sick medicine, of intolerance disguised as progress, of a vitalism that hates life. It's an old story, which Molière made fun of. This ancient history, however, is still at the point of its beginning.