FRANCE’S time-honoured pursuits of protesting and smoking combined to disrupt traffic on the Côte d’Azur and across northern France yesterday. The country’s tobacconists were venting their fury over draconian tax increases.

The demonstrations, near the borders with Monaco and Belgium, were part of a campaign by the 34,000 owners of bureaux de tabac, the state- licensed outlets founded by Napoleon Bonaparte, against the Government’s efforts to break the French love of nicotine.

The tobacconists, who hold a monopoly on tobacco sales, claim that the Government is threatening their livelihood with taxes that will raise cigarette prices by 50 per cent by the end of the year.

In the past fortnight thousands of protesting tobacconists have snarled traffic on motorways, treating captive motorists to lectures on the bankruptcy that threatens them because of much lower prices across the border. Last week they demonstrated in Paris outside the Ministry of Health after Jean-François Mattei, the Minister, outraged libertarians by saying that he wanted to turn France into a no-smoking zone.

Nothing less than the Gallic way of life is at stake, the tobacconists say, because the tobacco counter, often attached to a café or newspaper shop, plays a vital community role. “In the countryside especially, they are often the only shop which remains open all the time and they sell lots of other little necessities,” Jean-Paul Vaslin, director of the Tobacco Sellers’ Confederation, said.

His members are counting on traditional sympathy for interest groups threatened with change. “The bureau de tabac is a place where people share their opinions and this type of local shop is important in the eyes of the French,” he said.

The increases raise French cigarette prices per packet of 20 to within a pound of those in Britain, the most expensive in the European Union.

While smokers have declined slowly to about 34 per cent of the population — compared with 25 per cent in Britain — the authorities are alarmed at the continuing habit, especially among the young and among pregnant women. Nearly one third of expectant mothers smoke; one in five schoolchildren and half of all people under 25 smoke regularly. Nine eminent on- cologists said last week that half of all young smokers would die young from tobacco-induced causes.

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