Martine Perez is a physician, the editor for science and medicine at the French daily Le Figaro and editor-in-chief of the newspaper’s health supplement and internet site. She is the author of numerous works including Le Traitement hormonal de la ménopause, la fin d’un mythe. Ce que les femmes doivent savoir.


To protect the population’s health, Finland recently ruled to ban smoking by 2030. Yet France continues on its schizophrenic path: although smoking is the known cause of 70,000 deaths a year in France, more concern is shown for the unproven dangers of genetically modified foods or the health risks of Bisphenol A or nuclear power. But as Martine Perez points out, the tobacco industry begins manipulating the population at a very young age, and it makes vast profits — of which the State is the main beneficiary.
The time has come to abandon a mindset that refuses to make the real health risks clear. Could France successfully ban smoking? What do politicians have to say? Would France actually be able to enforce the precautionary principle?

• A daring, polemical point of view.

• A journalistic investigation by a health expert who brings to our attention the real — and imagined — health risks.

• Included here are interviews with France’s presidential candidates on what is bound to be a highly controversial issue.