No smoking

That’s not a command, that’s (evidently) an observation, as various photos of famous past smokers get retouched to eliminate any indication that they did, indeed, shorten their lifespans and dirty their living spaces with the “filthy weed.” Latest victim: 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 Bibliothèque Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher’s Gauloise.

The library’s president, Jean-Noël 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.

No doubt that biographical information will eventually be redacted, too.

It’s one thing to say that smoking is bad, and to forbid it in public places and so forth. I give that a hearty hip-hip-hurrah. It’s another thing to Winston Smith it out of the public record. Bad show.