Smokeless Europe.

President Jacques Chirac is pursuing his "war on tobacco" with the passion one might expect of a man who struggled to quit the deadly habit. Already France's 14 million smokers face big, boldface new warnings that smoking kills and, perhaps only slightly less worrisome to a Frenchman, can damage sperm, reduce fertility and cause impotence. Come January, the last of three rolling tax hikes will have raised the price of a pack by more than 50 percent to about 5.50--nearly 2,015 a year for a pack-a-day smoker. That helps to explain why the amount of tobacco consumed in France has begun to drop substantially for the first time in decades--particularly among men.

Indeed, the tobacco industry is under attack all over Europe, where half a million people are believed to die from tobacco-related illnesses each year. Ireland is set to ban smoking in public places-- including pubs and restaurants--as of the new year. European Union Health Commissioner David Byrne has promised legislation banning smoking in the workplace across the Continent. New limits on tobacco advertising and the tar and nicotine content of cigarettes went into effect in June, and the EU is preparing to eliminate 1 billion in subsidies to the tobacco industry. Through-out Western Europe cigarette consumption is either just holding steady or beginning to fall, as in France, Germany and Spain.

In response, French tobacconists have staged a series of increasingly radical protests, culminating on Oct. 20, which marked the latest tax increases, with the nation's first "day without tobacco" demonstrations. The tobacconists' confederation says 95 percent of members closed their shops. Some vendors lit carton-burning bonfires. Earlier, 100 angry vendors closed the border with the tiny duty-free Pyrenean nation of Andorra (where cigarettes sell at 40 percent of French prices). Confederation leaders say Chirac's war threatens 200,000 jobs in French tobacco fields, and claim to have collected 4.3 million signatures protesting the new taxes. Radical tobacconists are threatening to disrupt elections by refusing to distribute ballot stamps, a task they perform in some rural districts. Members of the right-wing National Front party are even attempting to mobilize angry smokers--who tend to be conservative--against the center-right government.

These protests look increasingly like the desperate moves of an industry in retreat. France first required small warning labels in 1991, but most smokers just ignored them, joking that France is not California. Until the late 1990s the government held stock in the Seita tobacco company, which once held a near monopoly on tobacco sales in France. Seita eventually merged with a Spanish rival to become Altadis. In a sign of how much attitudes have changed, the French state launched its first big lawsuit against the tobacco industry this summer, seeking more than 18.6 million in compensation for the cost of caring for alleged tobacco victims. The targets of the suit: Philip Morris, JTI Reynolds, Rothmans and Altadis, which argued that ...