Henri-Pierre Jeudy fears the new sanitary order

The writer and CNRS sociologist reacts to the smoking ban which comes into force in France this January 1st 2008. "Society's new sanitary order seems to be well and truly imposing itself on the ruins of an era when a taste for freedom and for life was expressed through plumes of smoke, now the symbol of a grave, unhealthy mistake. ... This impression of living 'the end of an era' curiously coincides with the disappearance, both ostensible and insidious of individual freedoms in the name of an optimised management of society. ... The public health care economy justifies an increasingly coercive control of private life, the body belongs less and less to individuals who are finding themselves obliged to consider it a product they are responsible for. Hence the multiplication of dietary, sanitary and biological advice destined to become applicable norms."

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