MPs give Coco her cigarette back

JACQUES Tati has got his pipe back and Coco Chanel her cigarette after MPs voted to ease the anti-smoking Loi Evin’s rules on tobacco promotion.

The National Assembly cultural affairs committee was reacting to protests after the Paris Metro rejected posters for a Tati exhibition showing him with his trademark pipe; the designers changed the pipe into a toy windmill instead.

MPs said the law, passed 20 years ago, should not mean censoring the country’s cultural heritage.

They pointed to heavy-handed political correctness that had seen the habitual cigarette airbrushed from Audrey Tautou’s hand in posters for Coco Avant Chanel, a similar thing happening to a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Gitane removed from Serge Gainsbourg’s fingers.

Socialist MP Didier Malthus said the interpretation of the law by the advertising watchdog Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité had turned into a “caricature”.

The amendment, proposed by the Socialist Party, said "falsification of history, censorship of creative works, the denial of reality should remain the ignominious mark of totalitarian regimes".

Jacques Grosperrin of the UMP was the only MP to vote against the amendment.