Le Musée du Fumeur
Smoking will soon be banned from indoor public spaces in Paris. Is a museum dedicated to the classic French habit a celebration or eulogy?
By Rolf Potts


Wander through the 11th arrondissement of Paris toward the dead celebrities of Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and there's a decent chance you'll stumble across a small gallery called "Le Musée du Fumeur." Unlike the hallowed halls of the Louvre or the Musée d'Orsay, there is no tyranny of expectation in this tiny, smoking-themed museum. No smiling Mona Lisa or reclining Olympia dictates where the random tourist should focus his attention. Thus left to meander, the drop-in visitor may well overlook the more earnest exhibits here — such as Egyptian sheeshas or Chinese opium pipes — and note the small, red-circle-and-slash signs reminding guests that, in no uncertain terms, smoking is strictly forbidden in the Museum of Smoking.

In spite of this startling contradiction, there is a notable lack of irony in Le Musée du Fumeur, which crams an eclectic array of international smoking-culture relics into a 650-square-foot storefront near Rue de la Roquette. Inside the glass display cases, hemp-fiber clothing competes for space with 17th-century smoking paraphernalia and sepia photos of American Indian chiefs posing with peace pipes. Around the corner, a looped video about Cuba's cigar industry flickers above 1920s-era etchings of cigarette-toting debutantes and scientific drawings of tobacco plants. Out front, the gift shop hawks highbrow cigar magazines alongside glass bongs and rolling papers; DVDs produced by High Times perch on the same shelf as pamphlets on how to quit smoking. A curious-looking machine, the "Vapormatic Deluxe," which apparently allows one to inhale plant essences without creating secondhand smoke, retails for 299 euros.

In a more provincial part of the world — rural Moldavia, say, or a Nebraska interstate exit — such an unfocused array of smoking esoterica might well be relegated to some dank basement, advertised by fading billboards and listed in guidebooks alongside Stalinist monuments or concrete dinosaurs. But this is Paris, and the displays here are sleek, self-serious, tastefully illuminated and studiously clean; soft jazz mood-music alternates with piano and harpsichord compositions as you move from display to display. The closest thing to pure whimsy is a psychedelic mural painted in the back room — an oddly smoke-free scene, wherin cats strum guitars, flying robots clutch cans of beer, and busty women hitch rides from VW camper vans.

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