They've taken Sartre's cigarettes (AKA From Being a Cig to Nothingness)

[Tigers2B1]

The PC wars rage on with or without regard to history – They’ve airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s cigarettes out of a picture to be displayed. Is this a start? Will future generations forget that Sartre was a two pack a day guy? Or that pipe — sad.

**…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 doctoring of the photo was first spotted by Libération, fittingly enough the Left-wing newspaper founded by Sartre.

The exhibition, which runs until Aug 21, shows previously unseen letters and manuscripts by the prolific writer and author of the immortal line: “Hell is other people.”**

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=MZXETCMASRXDDQFIQMGCM5WAVCBQUJVC?xml=/news/2005/03/10/wsmoke10.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/03/10/ixworld.html

[Yllaria]

They should have just put a fig leaf over it. It would have been more appropriate.

[pasunejen]

Sartre never smoked. To the Ministry of Love with you!

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Truth is dead.
<hangs head>

[DrDeth]

Ok, that is a bit too PC. But, when you know that Big Tobacco does pay well for any depictions of smoking- such as movie stills used for promos, and of course actual smoking in the movies- then it’s not so crazy after all. In other words, if you see a still from a movie, and it has “Big Name Star” with a cig in his/her hand/mouth- dudes have been payed off in most cases.

Thus, BT is trying to manipulate you, so I understand a little counter-“terrorism” work. This particular instance goes a bit too far, sure.