France’s National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
“Smoking,” the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is “the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.”
And yet in its poster for an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of Sartre’s birth the Biblioth�que Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher’s Gauloise.
Via Wretchard, who notes the Orwellian nature of the sanitization.
If they want to do some real airbrushing, they could start by excising all those millions and millions of gallant Frenchman who stood up to zee Bosch and fought for la Resistance! Vive La Revisionisme!