Today is the beginning of the Toussaint school holidays. From this afternoon around 3 o'clock, my part of Paris will empty out for ten days as everyone brings their children to the grandparents' for the duration. It's a good time for tourists to go to the Puces de Saint-Ouen. Last year there was a good deal of anti-Halloween sentiment, but this year it seems to be more accepted-- I think people realize that the children love it. Even Parc Asterix (which by the way is really fun for a foreigner to visit) is getting in on the act with a Fête des Druides and Celtic magic.
Waiting at the doctor's office (left) this morning, I read an editorial in l'Express about the new civic sense in France. It is true that suddenly it has become uncool to smoke here (although all the young girls still do it to stay thin). Not only that, but twice in the last month I have seen a Parisian clean up after their dog-- after seeing someone do that only once before in all my years in Paris, and that was on the rue de Rivoli. People have slowed down on the highways, too. And one day as I was telling an American visitor how the taxi and post office queues used to be wild here, with people stealing your cab or your place in line, a Frenchwoman leaned over to interrupt, "Ça se fait beaucoup moins maintenant."
Personally, I think the explanation that as they travel more outside their own country, French people realize the ways in which France looks bad, and want to change. I wish more Americans could travel abroad.
The article's tone struck me as so French/unAmerican that I decided to translate it in toto:
Tobacco: Leave My Body Alone!
Will smoking in public soon be forbidden? When the ordinary behavior of yesterday becomes taboo....
"Thirty percent of the active population smokes: are we going to make them stand in the corner?" snapped a tobacco industry lobbyist in L'Express in 1997. It was good vision: we are going to make them stand in the corner, if the law proposed the 2nd of November by Yves Bur (UMP), vice-president of the National Assembly, is voted in. Its text aims to forbid tobacco in all public places, as in Ireland, including cafes, restaurants and businesses. History is going in that direction: already, Italy, Sweden, Norway and Malta have taken the step. According to a IFOP poll published by the Journal du dimanche, 88% of nonsmokers and 56% of smokers in France are in favor of the ban. And in a poll by Ipsos for Pfizer, three-quarters of the employees wanted an unpolluted environment, 21% of them forgetting-- like many employers-- that the loi Evin has forbidden smoking on the job since 1991. In a further turn of the screw, the Cour de Cassation [the Supreme Court of France] ruled in favor of an exasperated employee on the 29th of June this year.
In the book L'avènement du corps [The Advent of the Body] (Gallimard), Hervé Juvin explains that "physical capital" is now the object of a cult and even of a territorial and patrimonial combat. Because the body is sacred, one day soon smoking will be considered as vulgar and disgusting as tobacco-chewing or spitting on the ground. Nevertheless, the proportion of smokers is still large: 30% of people from 12-75 years old (from 40% fifteen years ago). The reasons that an ordinary behavior becomes old-fashioned and stigmatized are still a bit mysterious. Thus, it is now considered low-class to litter and rather classy to pick up after one's dog. The strength of the ban? No law was needed for men to stop urinating at every street-corner. The way of life simply evolves, with its puritanisms: today, you don't have the right to scold other people's children, even for them to give their seat to an old person-- nor to exercise authority in the name of the collective interest [not sure at all what is meant by this-- it looks like one of those euphemisms]. Tomorrow, SUVs will be on the scrap heap, along with plastic bags, and girls will no longer let hands wander to their behinds [!!! this is what made me decide to translate the article]. Everyone will do what they like with their body.
But...leave my body alone!
--Jacqueline Remy
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