The French -- need I say more...
I thought the USA was going overboard with Politically Correct-edness but the French are taking this to new heights...
From the News Telegraph comes this article of the National Library and Jean-Paul Sartre:
France's National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
"Smoking," the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is "the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world."
And yet in its poster for an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of Sartre's birth the Bibliotheque Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher's Gauloise.
The library's president, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, confirmed that the cigarette had been discreetly smudged to comply with the 1991 loi Evin - a law banning tobacco advertising - but also so as not to frighten away potential sponsors from the exhibition, which opened yesterday.
Sartre's love of tobacco is well documented: he reportedly smoked his way through two packets and several pipes a day.
Indeed, all the best-known photographs of the author of La Nausee, such as his portrait by Henri Cartier-Bresson on the Pont des Arts in Paris, depict him with a cigarette or pipe in hand.
Christ on a Corn Dog, that is the equivalent of airbrushing Einstein's hair into a nice coif or having Henry Mancini do elevator renditions of Frank Zappa's Weasels Ripped my Flesh. Sartre was never without tobacco.
