THE spirits of Jean-Paul Sartre, Serge Gainsbourg and France’s other late great nicotine lovers could almost be heard spluttering over Paris yesterday after the mayor proposed the unthinkable: cigarette-free cafés and restaurants.

Aware that he should not attempt the impossible, Bertrand Delanoë stopped short of following New York and Ireland with an outright smoking ban. Instead, he is to offer the city’s 12,000 cafés, bistros, brasseries, restaurants and hotels a special “smoke free” quality badge if they banish all smoking from their premises. Café owners, who already see themselves as an endangered species, said the idea was a kiss of death that would chase away more of their customers.

They were scathing at the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint Germain, the grand literary watering hole whose past chain-smoking regulars included Gainsbourg, the late singer-composer, Francis Bacon, the British painter, and Françoise Sagan, the novelist who died last weekend at 69. “We will never take part in this scheme,” said Carole Chretiennot, a manager. “It is unbelievable stupidity. This flies in the face of individual liberty. When you come into Flore, you have the smell of coffee and a cloud of smoke. That makes the ambience.”

At Marivaux, on the Boulevard des Italiens, Christine Bichat, 35, a bank executive took a drag on her Marlboro, and laughed at the idea of a bistro sans cigarette. “Maybe they should ban coffee and wine while they are at it,” she said.

The fact that M Delanoe, who smokes several small cigars a day, could venture the idea shows how far France has moved from the days of pungent clouds from Gauloises and Gitanes. Smoking, still practised by 35 per cent of the population, is banned in the French workplace, on high-speed trains and the Paris Métro. Mme Chretiennot, of the Flore, added: “France will never ban tobacco like in the USA. The French are less sheeplike.

“We are a land of freedom and, faced with bans, we like to be rebellious and undisciplined.”

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