Smoking French Icons Allowed to Puff on Posters Again

French politicians have voted to amend a strict anti-tobacco law that snatched cigarettes and pipes from images of some of the country's most famous smokers.

Fear of breaking the 20-year-old Evin Law, which banned the direct and indirect promotion of tobacco and alcohol in public places, had led authorities to remove dozens of smokes from historical images. The legislation first sparked public outrage in 1996, when the post office used a photo of renowned author Andre Malraux for a stamp but airbrushed out his ever-present Gauloise.

The law was back in the headlines almost a decade later when philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre -- who dragged his way through two packs of Gauloises and two tobacco-stuffed pipes a day -- had a cigarette digitally deleted from his fingers for a National Library exhibition poster.

But the legislation's most absurd moment came last year, when legendary French comic actor and director Jacques Tati had his trademark wooden pipe swapped for a bright yellow toy windmill in a poster advertising a retrospective of his films in Paris.

Following the Tati incident, health minister Roselyne Bachelot admitted the rules were being taken too far. "We're getting pretty ridiculous with this," she said.

Historical figures are now free to puff away in public. On Wednesday, parliamentarians approved an amendment to the law, excluding portrayals of "cultural heritage" from the ban. "The falsifications of history, the censorship of works of the mind, the denial of reality must remain the heinous marks of totalitarian regimes," according to the measure, which was proposed by the opposition Socialist party, reported Agence France-Presse.

However, as AOL News pointed out last summer, France isn't the only nation trying to scrub smoking from the history books. In June, the U.K. press reported that an unknown censor had airbrushed a cigar from a World War II photo of Winston Churchill that sat above the entrance to London's Britain at War Museum. And in 2003, U.S. print giant Allposters secretly tweaked the original artwork of the Beatles' "Abbey Road" LP, excising a cigarette from Paul McCartney's right hand.