I guess that also applies to France... because why would we use machines when we could just walk into a shop and buy cigarettes without ID?

I remember my much older sister sending me off to buy cigarettes for her when I was maybe 12 and having zero problems. Many of my friends smoked through high school, also with zero problems acquiring cigarettes.

So yeah, using machines to buy cigarettes as a kid? Unimaginable for me, but I'm guessing not the way you were imagining it.

Exactly, I'm not in France but that practice was pretty common in most Western countries not that many decades ago (see my reply to this post). I didn't mention it but where I am (Australia) it also was pretty common for a kid to go to the shops to pick up cigarettes for, say, a parent.

When I first went to France decades ago (I've relatives in Paris) I found smoking was even more culturally entrenched than where I am, there were posters everywhere for Gitanes, Gauloises and other cigarettes. In fact, France is the home of many classic posters advertising or showing people smoking, many are so good they're now considered works of art.

I've not been to France for some time but I gather in recent years the French's attitude towards smoking has changed dramatically and the practice is now frowned upon culturally—or at least that's my perception from a far. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's not what I'd have expected (anyway, not to such a degree); unlike the puritanical guilt-ridden English, I'd have thought French culture was more resilient. What brought this change to my attention was the recent kerfuffle over the French icon Jacques Tati's M. Hulot where posters on the Métro were censored—M. Hulot is portrayed sans pipe!

My immediate reaction was 'sacrilege, the vandal who did that had an unmitigated damn hide—what the Hell's going on in France to allow that to happen?'. You see, I'm a great Tati fan and Jour de fête, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle are some of my most loved films—so the 'desecration' affected me personally.

As I've mentioned, I'm a nonsmoker and I applaud the reduction in smoking in recent years but vandalizing a cultural icon is carrying the anti-smoking message too far, it not only rendered M. Hulot's most idiosyncratic characteristic mute, but also make a mockery of the anti smoking message and it's likely to have been counterproductive. If what happened to M. Hulot had occurred in the UK or Righteous America I'd have said 'that's to be expected' but that it occurred in France was a total surprise.

No doubt, there was a backlash from Tati fans. I've not heard the outcome, what occurred in the wash-up?

BTW, As a kid I saw Mon Oncle not long after the film was released and I was enthralled. I never tire of seeing it.

TBH, I think "frowned upon" would be an optimistic take on the current attitude towards smoking. It is still (to me) inexplicably common and popular.

That said, I actually think you've got an inverted view on French opinion. I'd say it's what you consider a desecration that didn't matter to us. People do stuff, sometimes silly stuff, and I think we generally do not lose sleep over it. The notion that it was vandalizing some cultural icon is honestly the kind of thinking that we'd be less likely to abide, more than we'd oppose anti-smoking vandalism. :)

But: maybe I'm just projecting.

I've not been to France for well over a decade so I've no personal feel for the current cultural mindset so in my ignorance "frowned upon" seemed a way of extrapolating with only limited information. I thus cannot say whether I've an inverted view of French opinion, what I can say however is that my opinion was formed from multiple press reports that many in France were outraged and that some politicians were even calling for a change in the law to stop any repetition (as I've mentioned, I'm not au fait with subsequent events).

As a fan of Tati films of course I'm hyperbolizing to a degree but it's not anti-smoking vandalism that's my main point. The issues are complex so I have to be careful what I say here, I cannot give a long explanation on HN to cover every nuance; and paraphrasing is dangerous, when doing so issues can become black and white when in fact they're various shades of gray.

The best I can do here is to say that the Hulot's pipe issue is symptomatic of a bigger problem in society(ies) where after a problem or issue is identified there's often an overreaction that's not necessarily beneficial to the outcome, it can not only slow down solutions but also it's likely to create a very charged and ugly political environment.

There are many instances of this, nuclear power and accidents, Montreal Protocol/CFCs, Plastics/pollution, CO2/fossil fuels vs renewables vs climate change, fear of chemicals/chemicals in the environment, etc.—all matters I obviously cannot cover here in detail.

I will however come back to the smoking/tobacco matter for a moment. This controversy has divided societies to various degrees for decades, and much of the debate is emotional rather than rational (that said, I'm not suggesting for a second that smoking isn't dangerous, it certainly is). In some countries such as the US, UK and Australia (especially so anglophone ones) debate is no longer just that but rather has descended into a screaming match between sides, logic no longer reigns. Some opponents of smoking act almost to the point of hysteria when anyone with a cigarette comes near them but many of these very same people are quite prepared to sit near a camp fire or BBQ and not complain about the smoke—and in so doing they'll absorb a much higher dose of carcinogenic dioxins than they would from someone with a cigarette. As with those other examples, all too often emotions overrule facts.

Now briefly back to Tati's M. Hulot. When those films were made in late 1940s through to the '60s smoking was not only culturally acceptable but also it had a certain prestige and sophistication about it. Now that in many countries smoking is on the nose so to speak what are we to do? One obvious option is to ban these films altogether, or to give them an 'R' rating so only adults are able to view them. If this trend were to continue (which in my opinion is highly likely) then we could end up in a situation where we see people sneaking into movie theaters in the dead of night or in the case of online streaming viewers would have to first provide verifiable ID of proof of age. If alive today long-dead filmmakers of these once-deemed harmless movies would be horrified.

To some extent this has already happened, many truly classic Warner Bros cartoons of my childhood are now banned from television, same with The Three Stooges on grounds of them being too violent. That said, the hypocrisy is truly outrageous, these days there is any amount of gun and gratuitous violence on TV, in movies and online. Most find this acceptable, only a comparatively small minority of the population actually objects to the violence. So much for objectivity.

Moreover, I expect such problems only to increase. Recently, I've been watching TV soaps from the 1960s (on free-to-air TV) and frankly there are themes—both dialogues and images—that would not appear in TV programs made today, in fact I'm surprised they too haven't been withdrawn because of content that's 'unacceptable' to modern audiences (again, I cannot go into specifics for reasons stated).

The broader issue is how far do we go to protect society from not only itself but also from its past, and what effect does such action have on society? The extension thus is how do we measure whether interventions have positive or negative outcomes, or is often the case how do we quantify the actual damage when opinionated groups within society lobby government for laws that overprotect and mollycoddle citizens? Evidence is that in recent decades certain rules introduced to protect society have ended up making its citizens less resilient, moreover it wasn't necessarily obvious this would occur when they were introduced.

For example, rules introduced to protect the welfare of children have in recent years become so strictured that we're now seeing instances of negative outcomes, consequences are that some kids have become dysfunctional. Overprotecting kids out of fear for their safety has become so all encompassing that we're now witnessing all too many instances of kids being too frightened to leave their homes unless accompanied by an adult, isolation from the world around them has made them fearful of it. If you'd mentioned to anyone that could happen to kids when I was that age they'd have quickly retorted that you were bonkers.

That might seem a long stretch from banning M. Hulot's pipe from the Métro but it is not. Fact is, this is how the rot begins. As I implied, making the correct calls to protect society is both complex and fraught with difficulty. That's not to say we don't need them or that we shouldn't try because we definitely do need them. What we don't need are decisions made on the spur of the moment by the opinionated, rather we need to make time to develop well thought through strategies

"Unimaginable in most countries."

Well, perhaps so these days, but it wasn't at all so when I was a kid. At somewhere between 10 and 12 years old when still in primary school occasionally we kids bought cigarettes on our way home and ducked off somewhere secluded to smoke them.

A few shopkeepers wouldn't sell them to us but many would. There weren't many cigarette machines about (they were usually located on railway stations, in theater foyers etc.), but those in use could be operated by anyone including us kids. Moreover, cigarettes were very cheap, they had nothing like the huge taxes on them of today—so cheap we had no difficulty in purchasing them out of our pocket money.

Kids smoking was frowned upon by most parents and teachers but it wasn't illegal. That's why we smoked in secluded places where we wouldn't be seen. (Back then, smoking was accepted and considered pretty normal for adults, especially men. Since then attitudes have changed dramatically.)

For the record, except for that occasional experimenting as a kid I've never smoked since, nor have I ever had any desire to do so.