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Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette
Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette
Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette
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Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette

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For over a century, Italy has had a love affair with the cigarette. Perhaps no consumer item better symbolizes the economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian history. Starting around 1900, the new and popular cigarette spread down the social hierarchy and eventually, during the 1960s, across the gender divide. For much of the century, cigarette consumption was an index of economic well-being and of modernism. Only at the end of the century did its meaning change as Italy achieved economic parity with other Western powers and entered into the antismoking era.

Drawing on film, literature, and the popular press, Carl Ipsen offers a view of the "cigarette century" in Italy, from the 1870s to the ban on public smoking in 2005. He traces important links between smoking and imperialism, world wars, Fascism, and the protest movements of the 1970s. In considering this grand survey of the cigarette, Fumo tells a much larger story about the socio-economic history of a society known for its casual attitude toward risk and a penchant for la dolce vita.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 4, 2016
ISBN9780804799577
Fumo: Italy's Love Affair with the Cigarette

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    Fumo - Carl David Ipsen

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    ©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

    No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

    Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Ipsen, Carl, author.

    Fumo : Italy’s love affair with the cigarette / Carl Ipsen.

    pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-8047-9546-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8047-9839-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. Smoking—Italy—History—20th century.   2. Cigarettes—Italy—History—20th century.   3. Italy—Social life and customs—20th century.   I. Title.

    GT3021.I8I67 2016

    394.1'4—dc23

    2015028105

    ISBN 0-978-8047-9957-7 (electronic)

    Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

    fumo

    ITALY’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE CIGARETTE

    Carl Ipsen

    Stanford University Press

    Stanford, California

    To my mother (Zoc Ipsen, 1926–2010) and father (David Ipsen, 1921–2015) who between them enjoyed almost 100 years as ex-smokers

    Contents

    Figures and Tables

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction: First Puff

    1. Toscano: Smoking in Italy before World War I

    2. Macedonia: Smoking between the Wars

    3. Eva: Women and Smoking before World War II

    4. Nazionali: Smoking and Poverty in Postwar Italy

    5. Camel: Women, Sex, and Americane in the Postwar Decades

    6. Me ne frego: Smoking and Risk

    7. MS: Men, Women, and Smoking in the Era of Collective Action

    8. Marlboro Light: The Antismoking Era in Italy

    9. Pall Mall: Contraband and Privatization

    Epilogue: Cicca

    Appendix: 2006 Expert Report

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Figures and Tables

    Figures

    1.1. Italian tobacco cultivation and manufacture, 1871–1940

    1.2. Il Tabacco, 1900, with rare ad for Savoia cigarettes

    1.3. Muratti ad from Il Tabacco: Muratti Spagnolette are produced in England with pure Turkish tobacco.

    1.4. Ad for Eritrea cigarettes from Il Tabacco: The Eritrea cigarette is made exclusively from tobacco grown in the colony.

    1.5. Dentol ad from La Domenica del Corriere

    1.6. Ugo Ojetti in 1908

    2.1. Italian per capita tobacco sales, 1920–1940

    2.2. The cost of a Macedonia cigarette (in centesimi = 1/100 lire)

    2.3. Me ne frego cigarettes

    2.4. Formitrol ad (1930)

    2.5. Regina ad (1932)

    2.6. Smoking and sports: . . . the measured grin of BIGOGNO and the Argentine laugh of PIZIOLO . . . (1932)

    3.1. Domenico Induno (1815–1878), Donna che fuma (Woman smoking), 1878

    3.2. Luigi Conconi (1852–1917), Ebbrezza (Inebriation) or La vita libera (Free life), 1888

    3.3. Pietro Saporetti (1832–1893), Donna emancipata (Emancipated woman), 1881

    3.4. Almanacco della donna italiana 1925: Ideal Wife

    3.5. Almanacco della donna italiana 1925: They are smoking like Turks

    3.6. Giovanni Tonelli, Stracittà, La stirpe 1930

    3.7. Carlo Scorza, Tipi . . . tipi . . . tipi—Type 1 (1942)

    3.8. Carlo Scorza, Tipi . . . tipi . . . tipi—Type 2 (1942)

    3.9. Macedonia ad, 1936

    3.10. Smoko ad, 1940

    4.1. Italian tobacco cultivation and manufacture, 1946–2005

    4.2. Italian legal tobacco sales, 1950–2005

    4.3. Italian per capita income and tobacco consumption, 1953–2001

    5.1. Smoking prevalence for Italian men and women, 1949–2007 (DOXA)

    5.2. Smoking prevalence for Italian men and women, 1980–2003 (ISTAT)

    5.3. Lucia Bosé, Miss Italia 1947

    5.4. Pane, amore e fantasia (1953): Giulia declines the offer of a cigarette from Carotenuto

    5.5. Silvana Pampanini

    5.6. Ossessione (1943): Giovanna bends the weaker Gino to her will

    6.1. Serraglio: With the offer of a cigarette an invitation to friendship

    6.2. Mercedes: After the match: the pleasure of a Mercedes

    6.3. Denicotin: Toothpaste for smokers

    6.4. Bofil: Afraid? Smoking kills. Save yourself with Bofil.

    6.5. Frismok: Die for a cigarette?

    6.6. Smoking on Trial

    6.7. Silvana Pampanini, Oggi 1951: First installment of the major scientific study of tobacco

    6.8. Mina: Even with smoking I am a bit crazy and out of control. And are cigarettes really harmful?

    6.9. Il sorpasso (1962): Bruno Cortona scores cigarettes in Civitavecchia

    9.1. Italian tobacco seizures by Guardia di Finanza, in thousands of kilograms

    9.2. Total sales of tobacco in Italy compared to sales of national brands, 1981–2004 (legal sales)

    Tables

    4.1. Italian cigarette brands and prices, 1950–1951

    4.2. Nazionali prices, 1945–1974

    7.1. Prices of several cigarette brands in lire (packs of 20), 1969–1981

    Color plates

    CP 1. 1930s Italian cigarette brands

    CP 2. Federico Faruffini (1831–1869), La lettrice (The reader), 1864–1865

    CP 3a. Irene Brin, Usi e costumi, 1920–1940, 1944

    CP 3b. Irene Brin, Usi e costumi, 1920–1940, alternate cover

    CP 4. Il Tabacco, 1932

    CP 5. Daria Banfi Malaguzzi Valeri, Femminilità contemporanea, 1928

    CP 6. Deiva De Angelis (1885–1925), self-portrait, 1922

    CP 7. Edelweiss: The offer of a cigarette is an invitation to friendship, 1954

    CP 8. . . . Victor is a lifestyle

    CP 9. Domenica del Corriere: We will help you escape from the prison of smoking

    CP 10. La Voce del Tabaccaio: Sales figures for domestic and imported cigarettes, 1972–1973

    CP 11. MS sales, 1970–1980

    CP 12. Grazia, October 1958 (cover)

    CP 13. Grazia fashion spread (Rouchon), April 1973

    CP 14. Kim Top Line, Grazia, March 1986

    CP 15. Jessica Brown Findlay (Vogue Italia, June, 2012)

    CP 16a. Grazia fashion spread, April 1973 (Castaldi): A ‘surprise’ in the suitcase

    CP 16b. Another hiding place discovered

    CP 16c. . . . However, all is not lost

    Acknowledgments

    This project had an odd start for a historical study: my employment by a law firm to do research and write a report. So I guess I should start by thanking (or perhaps, ten years later, also cursing) Shook, Hardy and Bacon for pointing me to this topic. As the length of the project suggests, it went on a good deal beyond that initial phase.

    The transition from an expert witness report to a history was not a simple one. I carried out most of the subsequent research in Rome at several libraries: the Biblioteca Alessandrina, the Biblioteca Nazionale dello Stato, and the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea (BSMC). I encountered helpful staff at all of these, though I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the BSMC, smaller and so perhaps inevitably the most simpatica of the three. I also received a very warm and perhaps surprising welcome from the Federazione Italiana dei Tabaccai, which gave me free access to hard-to-find copies of its publications and supplied me with high-resolution reproductions at the end of the project. I did a bit of work at the Archivio Centrale, but this is really not an archival study. It might have been more of one, but at the office of the Monopolio dello Stato (the state entity that manufactured and distributed Italian tobacco products for almost a century and a half), I found very little in the way of material—by then the tobacco interests had been sold off—likely a typical case of administrative indifference. I benefited from the film collections at the Bibliocaffé Letterario in Rome and the Mediateca Regionale in Florence. I also found several useful and rare sources at Stanford University, coincidentally also home of Stanford University Press, my publisher for this book.

    None of this work would have been possible without institutional support, and throughout the decade that I worked on this project, I was a faculty member in the History Department at Indiana University. IU has been a good intellectual home because of the environment created there and because of support I received in terms of research grants and sabbatical leaves. In Rome I have been able to take advantage of my relationship with the American Academy, where I was a fellow during 1998–1999, to find a home during some of my research trips.

    I have benefited from friendships on both sides of the Atlantic, but among the most important, indeed crucial to the project, are those with Renato Ferraro and Giorgia Onofri in Rome and Massimo and Nicoletta Livi Bacci in Florence. Nicoletta, a remarkable woman, is, alas, no longer with us. Many other friends in Italy, Indiana, New York, and California have been supportive over the years. For careful reading and constructive comments, thanks to Peter Bailey and two anonymous readers at the Press. Two recent graduates of the University of Rome provided invaluable help as research assistants at two different phases of the project: Anna Ciambrone and Giorgia Melillo. Vivien Greene, curator at the Guggenheim, provided precious advice regarding the acquisition of images. And thanks to Jen Maher, whose wit and intelligence have in recent years been welcome daily companions.

    Major sections of the book were written in an unlikely place: Bear Valley in the high Sierra (7,000 feet), where my parents built a beautiful retreat when I was a teenager. Those surroundings seem to clear my occasionally muddled head and aid writing.

    My mother died a few years ago and my father after Fumo had already gone into production; it is to them, both ex-smokers, that I dedicate this book.

    Introduction

    First Puff

    SMOKING IS COOL. Much as we might want to deny the fact, for a century or so cigarette smoking carried with it a series of positive connotations: glamour, maturity, self-assuredness, sophistication, independence, rebellion, toughness. Smoking has also been an accoutrement of modernity and wealth. Only in the last decades of the twentieth century did a competing vision of smoking as dirty, ugly, wasteful, and, above all, unhealthy start to gain traction. But even in the twenty-first century and in the face of shocking rates of disease and death, that vision has not entirely won out. This book traces the navigation of that transition in a particular national culture, that of Italy. Even in this era of the European Union and globalization, we continue to perceive of nations and national cultures as discrete units. No part of the world is untouched by smoking, but each part has interacted with tobacco in its own way. In Italy, perhaps more than in many other places, smoking has interacted with the national culture—social, economic, political, and artistic—in profound and telling ways. The cigarette, I would argue, provides a lens on Italian society over time that has few peers among other consumables.

    At the risk of a pun, smoking is also a hot topic, at least for now. It may never be as fashionable a vice for historical study as, say, sex or gambling, probably because as compared to sex and gambling, smoking has few champions these days and is seemingly on the decline in much of the West. Yet while the practice itself is now widely condemned, the literature on the history of tobacco use continues to expand, for a number of reasons. One is that smoking was long an accepted and even celebrated practice in wealthier societies, a practice that might accompany and enhance both work and play, not to mention sex and gambling. In the movies, the cigarette acquired iconic status. Examination of this seemingly pointless activity reveals in fact a great deal about the societies in which it has been practiced (which is to say all societies). And the recent backlash against smoking—some describe it as puritanical—is no less revealing of contemporary social mores.

    The history of tobacco in the West is intimately tied up with the larger histories of economic and social development over the past five hundred years or so. Tobacco was one of the first products that Europeans encountered while conquering the New World, and so it is linked with the story of that conquest and subsequent empires. It fits into a material history of exploitation that included gold, silver, timber, herring, potatoes, corn, and other products that reshaped the Western world. Arguably these are the products that forged Western modernity, whatever that means, and, more concretely, laid the basis for European domination of the globe after 1500. It was access to New World resources that made the imperial project feasible and fueled the European innovations on which that project also depended.¹ The role of tobacco in that domination may be less obvious than some of the other items listed, but it is part of the process nonetheless.

    Europeans learned to smoke tobacco from the indigenous American peoples, and so that acquisition constitutes one of the earliest examples of cultural transmission between New World and Old. But Europeans quickly put the weed to their own uses, and while tobacco consumption in Europe may at first have been pharmaceutical, it quickly became a consumer product that, like tea and coffee, could accompany both work and leisure. Carole Shammas has studied these new imported groceries (which also included sugar products) of the early modern era (c. 1500–1800) in England and America. She finds in fact that tobacco was the first of the new mass-consumed commodities in Britain and was already widely used there by the mid-seventeenth century. Indeed, by about 1700 and for much of the eighteenth century, annual British per capita consumption hovered around 2 pounds, or enough for every person to have a pipeful a day.² This is a remarkable figure and helps to highlight the uniqueness of the British experience. Italian consumption, by comparison, reached that level only in about 1950 (see chapter 4), a mere 250 years later! Arguably, tobacco led the way in defining new consumption patterns that transformed the European economy.

    Tobacco, then, whether grown in the New World or the Old, played an important role not only in the growth of European trade, but also in the establishment of a consumer culture. Jan de Vries places the development of new consumer aspirations, for tobacco but of course for many other goods as well, at the heart of what he has called the industrious revolution. At the risk of simplification—he should be used to it by now—that revolution saw the European household (or more specifically the northwestern European household) develop new strategies of both production and consumption that helped realize the desire to acquire market goods of various sorts—manufactured or imported, for example—during the eighteenth century. One of those goods was tobacco, and de Vries recognizes, as does Shammas, that it caught on very quickly (more quickly, for example, than tea or sugar). De Vries in fact supplies figures still more startling than those Shammas presents. Dutch consumption seems to have far outstripped British levels around 1700, possibly exceeding 2 kilograms per person per year (so well over 4 pounds as compared to the English 2 pounds). Tobacco, it would seem, and the desire for it, played an important role in Europe’s unique economic development, at least in the dominant northwest. As de Vries concedes, though, little can be stated with certainty about the rest of Europe, and there is scant evidence that these imported groceries were much consumed in the Mediterranean region.³ Smoking probably became a significant habit in Italy only in the late nineteenth century.

    Tobacco use in the West after 1500 also involved a psychological dimension, one that arguably went beyond that of, say, potatoes or corn. As Richard Klein describes it:

    The introduction of tobacco into Europe in the sixteenth century corresponded with the arrival of the Age of Anxiety, the beginning of modern consciousness that accompanied the invention and universalization of printed books, the discovery of the New World, the development of rational, scientific methods, and the concurrent loss of medieval theological assurances. The Age of Anxiety gave itself an incomparable and probably indispensable remedy in the form of tobacco: it was an antidote brought by Columbus from the New World against the anxiety that his discoveries occasioned in the Eurocentered consciousness of Western culture, confronted by the unsuspected countenance of a great unknown world contiguous with its own.

    In this view, smoking starts to look a bit less pointless.

    As we have seen, tobacco took hold in Britain and the Netherlands and some other regions of the northwestern industrious/industrial core plus British America around 1700. The next important step, the one that ensured tobacco’s eventual success around the globe, came in the late nineteenth century with the invention of the cigarette. Flue curing of tobacco (which produced a milder, more easily inhaled product) and the invention of a machine that could roll thousands of cigarettes per hour produced an inexpensive and easily consumed nicotine delivery system, starting in the United States in the 1880s. Cigarettes, as opposed to pipes, cigars, or snuff, became an indispensable soldier’s companion during World War I, and by about the 1930s, cigarettes (flue cured or not; as we explore, flue curing caught on more slowly in Italy) were the tobacco product of choice in many countries. In the post–World War II era, cigarettes came to represent over 90 percent of all tobacco production and consumption in most countries.

    It is because of the changes of habit brought about by those technological developments that Allan Brandt has titled his fine work on smoking in twentieth-century (more or less) United States The Cigarette Century. Early in that work, he observes, There are few elements of American life in the last century that examining the cigarette leaves unexposed. It seems striking that a product of such little utility, ephemeral in its very nature, could be such an encompassing vehicle for understanding the past. But the cigarette permeates twentieth-century America as smoke fills an enclosed room. There are few, if any, central aspects of American society that are truly smoke-free in the last century.⁶ It was, of course, not only the cigarette century in the United States, and there is no reason to think that the cigarette will be any less effective in exposing other societies, especially those that followed in the wake of US economic expansion in the twentieth century. For as Klein observes, There is nowhere in the world that has not succumbed to the attraction of the cigarette.⁷ British consumption in that century in fact nearly matched that of the United States, and it is no surprise that the richest literature on the history of smoking looks at the Anglophone national contexts.

    It was also the cigarette century in Italy, though with significantly different rhythms and modes. This book explores the way Italian society navigated that century (again more or less) and seeks to understand what smoking and cigarettes can tell us specifically about that society. The smoking history of any country necessarily reflects economic realities, political developments, gender relations, and other societal norms, and those are the areas I have investigated.

    At the beginning of the cigarette century, say around 1900, Italy could not match British or American wealth, and tobacco consumption there reflected that fact, though Italy was already emerging as a significant producer. As everywhere else, smoking in Italy was initially an elite and male pastime. During and following World War I, the practice spread down the social hierarchy and became more widespread, though women in that still traditional society rarely smoked and male consumption remained below that of the major Anglophone nations. Fascism, in turn, had an ambivalent relationship with the nicotine vice (Hitler roundly condemned it), and consumption was fairly flat during the ventennio (twenty years of Fascist rule). As in other periods, any temptation to curb smoking was tempered by the considerable income that the state derived from the practice. But after World War II, the bel paese (beautiful country) made up for lost time. Women began to smoke in the era of the economic miracle starting around 1960, and Italian consumption caught up with the cigarette leaders by the 1980s, not coincidentally also the decade when Italy caught up in terms of wealth.

    Italian smoking took on special meaning in the context not only of the economic miracle but also of the Cold War and Italy’s conflicted relationship with the United States. It was, of course, in the depth of the Cold War that evidence about the negative health impact of smoking became irrefutable, though nonetheless much refuted. In part because of Italy’s relative economic backwardness, but also, I argue, because of a particular Italian attitude relative to risk, Italians responded slowly to the body of evidence that accumulated from the early 1950s linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other deadly diseases—evidence that had led to earlier declines in smoking in the United States and the United Kingdom.

    Much of the literature on smoking, including some of the best, treats tobacco as an evil, a position that is not surprising. From the point of view of public health, tobacco, especially in the form of the cigarette, was the scourge of the twentieth century and may be so for the twenty-first as well. And as if it were not enough to be purveyors of vice and death, the tobacco industry, and in particular the US tobacco industry, has gone to great lengths to complicate public understanding of the dangers of smoking, advertised some of its products as less dangerous and even sought to make cigarettes more addictive than they already were. As important as that side of the smoking story is, it leaves something out. In particular, it pays relatively little attention to what encourages people to smoke and what smoking means in social and cultural terms to both smokers and nonsmokers alike. Nicotine addiction and passive smoke are only part of the story, and there are unquestionably strong psychological factors that add to the allure of smoking and constitute its benefits; there must be benefits or no one would smoke. These factors include emulation of peers or role models, social camaraderie, perception of the glamour of smoking, and rebellion against authority (which might be parental, patriarchal, political, or ecclesiastical), or simply the desire to make a nihilist statement that the rules don’t apply to me.

    The standard work on the history of smoking in the United States may now be Allan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century (2007).⁹ Brandt traces the rise of the cigarette as a dominant product of modern consumer culture, especially in wartime. He covers the spectacular rise of the US tobacco industry and its aggressive and often deceptive promotion of cigarette smoking. Smoking among Americans in the postwar years was ubiquitous and nearly inescapable, indeed almost universal. That situation began to change with American and British studies that established a link between smoking and disease. In particular, the US surgeon general’s report in 1964 initiated a radical cultural change in the perception of smoking and smokers. The industry fought back, and Brandt devotes considerable space to the uniquely American story of industrial malfeasance, political maneuvering, and legal wrangling that has surrounded tobacco in the United States for the past half-century.

    Matthew Hilton tells a similar story for Britain in his much-cited Smoking in British Popular Culture, 1800–2000 (2000).¹⁰ Predictably Hilton spends less time on law and politics than does Brandt; no other country can match the United States in this regard. And he devotes more attention to understanding the motivations of ordinary men and women when their behavior does not correspond to the apparently rational expectations of the late twentieth century.¹¹ He is particularly interested in the conflict between the liberal independent individual and the interventionist state as it plays out in the history of tobacco use and its eventual regulation: the right of the individual to smoke versus the right of the state to impose limits on where and when one might smoke and to discourage smoking using taxation and age limits for purchasing tobacco. Hilton traces the changing cultural meaning of smoking, starting with how Victorian elite male society justified a consumerist, and so feminine, practice, and including the particularly British concerns about the dangers of smoking among children and the possible link between smoking and national degeneration even prior to World War I. Among the other peculiarities Hilton highlights are the class associations of different cigarette brands; by comparison, and perhaps not surprising, brands tended to cut across class in the United States.

    Both Brandt and Hilton provide good coverage of cigarette advertising in the two nations that were certainly the leaders in this regard. Similarly Britain and the United States led in research on the negative health effects of smoking, and the important work of Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill in the United Kingdom and Ernst Wynder and Evarts Graham in the United States is covered in these books, as is that of other researchers.¹² Both works chart the rise of the antismoking movement and antismoking sentiment following the revelations of the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, for our purposes, using the British Mass-Observation Surveys, Hilton explores the postwar attempts to understand the various explanations or motivations for smoking and the benefits of smoking: soothing of nerves; calming the spirit; an antidote to boredom, anxiety, depression, or loneliness; oral gratification; compensation for other cravings (eating, kissing, sex); and the aesthetics and tactility of cigarette smoking.¹³ These are all topics to which we return.

    Hilton devotes a fine chapter to women and smoking (and one also to children and smoking). The work on women has in some sense been superseded by two more recent books devoted specifically to that topic: Penny Tinkler’s Smoke Signals (2005) and Rosemary Elliot’s Women and Smoking since 1890 (2008). Together they give a rich and full picture of the history of women and smoking in Britain, and while they do of course speak generally to the issue of smoking history, I address them instead in my discussion of women and smoking in post–World War II Italy in chapter 7.

    Richard Klein, a professor of French literature, and Jason Hughes, a sociologist, take a rather different approach to the history of smoking than, for example, Brandt or Hilton. That difference is immediately evident from the titles of their respective books: Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime (1993) and Hughes’s Learning to Smoke (2003). Klein’s ode to the cigarette, now over twenty years old, was written when antitobacco sentiment was on the rise and is in some sense a response to what he sees as a new puritanism. In Klein’s words, I became persuaded that cigarettes are a crucial integer of our modernity and that their cultural significance is about to be forgotten in the face of the ferocious, often fanatic or superstitious, and frequently suspect attacks upon them.¹⁴ For Klein, cigarettes are sublime in a Kantian sense; they provide a negative pleasure that lies precisely in their futility and the fact that they are dangerous. Indeed, he claims that if they were not dangerous, they would not hold the same sort of fascination. Yet while Klein’s work celebrates the cigarette, it does so not in order to recommend smoking—Klein himself is an ex-smoker—but rather to recognize their benefits and the important cultural and social role they have played. It is their uselessness, he writes, that ensures the aesthetic appeal of cigarettes—the sublimely, darkly, beautiful pleasure that cigarettes bring to the lives of smokers. It is a pleasure that is democratic, popular, and universal; it is a form of beauty that the world of high as well as popular culture has for more than a century recognized and explicitly celebrated, in prose and poetry, in images both still and moving.¹⁵ Much of Cigarettes Are Sublime explores those celebrations—in Baudelaire, Mérimée, Svevo, Sartre, and the film Casablanca, among others—and in that is something of a model for sections of this book.

    Klein predicted at the time that the pendulum of repression might eventually swing the other way, reversing the demonization of smoking that characterized the 1990s. Given the continued popularity of smoking among young men and, especially, women who mix defiance with the now inevitable guilt associated with the practice, there is reason to believe that something of that sort may be taking place. And as others have pointed out, some of the attempts to regulate cigarettes, and especially to prohibit young people from purchasing or using them, seem to have backfired.¹⁶

    Jason Hughes is also interested in the social-psychological dimension of smoking and so the role that smokers themselves have in the construction and maintenance of their dependence. Without downplaying its importance (and tragedy), most would agree that there is much more to smoking than biological addiction. Hughes in particular traces how tobacco use has changed over time, starting with its original use among indigenous Americans. He explores what he sees as a transition from using tobacco to lose control or escape normality—indigenous American smoking of very strong types of tobacco—to its use as an instrument of self-control, epitomized by the mild cigarette. In this regard he places tobacco use in the context of what Norbert Elias has called the civilizing process.¹⁷ According to Elias, the modern period has been characterized by ever greater demands for self-restraint. Recalling Klein’s comments on the Age of Anxiety (i.e., the modern period), tobacco, and especially cigarettes, proved to be important tools in exercising that sort of restraint. As Hughes puts it:

    Tobacco use can be seen as a unique instrument of self-control: as involving both control by repression (to calm the nerves, to combat stress) and, increasingly during the twentieth century, control by stimulation (to stimulate the mood, to shape the body). Indeed tobacco use can be seen to constitute both control by repression and control by stimulation simultaneously: the suppressing of hunger pangs to stimulate the development of a thinner body. The paradox is that externally, by social standards, the body may be judged to be healthier as a result of smoking—the thinner body, the controlled body is, up to a point, also viewed as the healthier body.

    Hughes also links smoking to the concept of informalization, again from Elias. Briefly, the twentieth century has seen a gradual process of informalization in the West (e.g., scantier bathing suits and more revealing modes of dress), but rather than indicating a decline in social control, these developments are instead characteristic of a society in which a high degree of self-restraint is taken for granted. Notably the cigarette has played a role in this regard, most obviously, perhaps, in the fact that smoking is generally taken up by women precisely in tandem with the informalization process.¹⁸ Together, Klein and Hughes provide a guide to understanding the functions smoking has served over the past century or so for both individual smokers and societies at large.

    To the observations of Brandt, Hilton, Klein, Hughes, and others, I add some relative to what emerges from my own study as a sort of development profile in the contemporary history of smoking. By contemporary, I mean in the cigarette century and after. Tobacco’s widespread use in the late-seventeenth-century northwestern European core, plus British America, already on its way to becoming the seat of the world’s economic and military power, may reveal a different profile, but that is beyond the scope of what I hope to achieve here. The rest of Europe at the time, including Italy, was still mostly rural, poor, and nonsmoking and would remain that way into the twentieth century. The contemporary (or cigarette) profile then sees the emergence of tobacco as a mass consumption item only after the invention and mechanization of the cigarette in the

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