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Humanity has consumed tobacco since the dawn of times, but it took two cataclysmic global conflicts to elevate the cigarette into a defining symbol of modern life. What began as a marginal indulgence soon became both a weapon of comfort and a vehicle of mass addiction. So, beware, reading might cause dependence!

Trenches, matches, and marches – every soldier carries a pack in his knapsack

Tobacco overshadowed human history for millennia, smouldering in pipes, rolled into cigars, dipped in narghile, chewed, sniffed, patched, etc., each puffing taking these clouds to new heights and forms. Albeit omnipresent, it was not until two world wars ravaged the globe that the cigarette, that slim white cylinder of fire and ash, became more than just a habit. Thus, it became an international icon, a socio-cultural currency and one of the most devastating engines of profit in modern times.

If we take a step back, US citizens would never have bound themselves so tightly to tobacco without the hand of the federal government, which is one of the ironies of it. Big Tobacco, in every country, is often cast as an adversary of the state, forever embattled with regulators, civic groups and public health authorities. But the truth is stranger, as industrial complexes and governments did not simply collide, they colluded. From the trenches of WW1 to the corridors of the Marshall Plan, cigarette’s rise was choregraphed by institutions (supposedly) devoted to public good.

However, at the start of the 20^th century, cigarettes were a marginal part of society, even seen as shameful, derided by moralists as “little white slavers” [1] and associated with minorities, street gangs and sinful vice. In the “respectable” circles, pipes, cigars and chewing tobacco was the bon ton. Yet, war remains a great equaliser, by the end of WW1 most soldiers’ rations constantly featuring cigarettes, a symbolic and pragmatic act as they would calm nerves, build solidarity and distract them from “more serious vices” [2]. Also, Red Cross parcels included cartons of cigarettes, leading to the slang “soldier’ smoke” [3] as nurses lit them for the wounded. Yet, this was more than provision, it was a deliberate policy choice [4], where the state guaranteed markets for companies and companies supplied morale for the state.

Dropping packs instead of bombs worked too well, with US and European consumption of cigarettes surging from 7% to around a quarter [5] of total tobacco use [6] between 1914-1920. Furthermore, the cigarette’s intrinsic design, entailing flue-cured leaf, deep inhalation, machine-rolled paper tubes (by 1930s), filters that promised safety, advanced the transition as it was a product of modernity. To top it up, advertising magnified widespread adoption and transposed cigarettes into not just an acceptable pastime but an honourable endeavour, extension of patriotism, empowerment and masculinity.

Skipping forward, WW2 deepened the relationship, with manufacturers and farmers capitalising on patriotic fervour [7] through slogans like “Lucky Strike green has gone to war”, Camel’s “Just like a taste of home”, “From here to victory it’s Chesterfield”, etc. Tobacco crops served different purposes, keeping US farmers afloat, even as mechanisation squeezed margins, while in Europe, especially across war-torn cities, cigarettes were not just smoked but a real system of barter and trading, a “currency of survival” [8], used to buy necessities, clothing and even train tickets. Here, the Marshall Plan enters the story in full swing, as the engine of European recovery devoted a staggering one billion USD, or 1/3 of its food aid budget [9] to nothing else but tobacco. Ostensibly this propped continental manufacturing and processing capacity, although it just habituated millions to the taste of American blends, with over 90% of Weste Germans ending up in 1949 preferring US-style cigarettes [10] over traditional Greek or Turkish varieties, a trend also fuelled by NATO PX stores and American GIs. Moreover, prisoners of war also lived through tobacco’s duality as aid packages ensured their plenitude but also transformation into hierarchical determinants [11] through bribing, gambling or bartering.

Similarly, London, like most other European capitals, leaned heavily on smoking too. During the Blitz it is recorded that cigarette breaks became true rituals [12] of collective resilience, a pause between sirens and rubble. Afterwards, the Treasury depended on tobacco excise for as much as 10% of its revenue, paradoxically financing the welfare state through carcinogenic substances.

Smoking guns, smoking cigarettes – and an enemy more perfidious than bullets

Yet, behind the cultural and economic glamour was labour. In southern US black farmers and poor white sharecroppers cultivated tobacco under exploitative contracts [13] and cyclical depth, while across the pond women hand-packed cigarettes until displaced by machinery. The cigarettes’ smoke was built on the ashes of invisible hands, from rural workers to factory girls and colonised labour in the far lands of Africa and Asia, making them affordable enough to be universalised. The transition towards the Cold War perpetuated the entanglement as US soldiers in Korea or Vietnam received free packs in their rations. This practice not only introduced locals to its widespread use but also created entire generations of veterans with lifelong habits, with Defence Departments serving as the largest distributors of tobacco until the 1970s [14].

Nonetheless, this exponential socio-cultural growth and grey-ish renaissance was somewhat short lived. The link between smoking and lung cancer, observed initially in Nazi Germany (early 1939 works), later confirmed by Doll and Hill in 1950s Britain [15], alongside numerous others, meant that the haze began to fade. Yet, governments hesitated, as revenues were too high, the habit too normalised, the companies too powerful. Also, the denial playbook was in motion until early 2000s, as companies doubled down and funded research institutes in Hamburg, Vienna, Geneva and London to fabricate uncertainty. As Brown and Williamson memento infamously highlighted “we need not prove that smoking is safe (…) we need only create doubt” [16].

At the peak of this industrial expansion, as tobacco turned from Big to Monolithic, the US Surgeon General issued the famous 1964 report clarifying it is indeed a risky endeavour. Hence, warnings crept onto packs, albeit initially in muted tones like “may be hazardous” rather than “is deadly”, and resistance came from the margins, medical associations in Italy, activist students in West Germany, environmentalist in Scandinavia etc. However, television and radio advertisements purred reassurances (filters being safe, slim being good for pregnant women, smoking as an alternative to medicine, etc.) [17], public banners framed it as a lifestyle, shops added entire rows of tobacco and cinema bathed heroes in the artistic outlook of smoking.

Thereafter, Europe, once the laboratory of addiction was the first to pick up the torch and experiment with resistance. For instance, Norway banned cigarette advertising as early as 1975, Finland set a goal of becoming smoke-free in the 90s, Irland banned smoking inside public spaces in early 2000s, France stripped brand logos, Germany brought warning labels, and regulation after regulation began extinguishing it. The decline was not necessarily statistical but a social shift, as Berlin cafes removed ashtrays, the London pubs were free of old fug and in Paris, where intellectual performed their brilliance in smoke, the Gauloise became a relic.

Regardless of this fact, cigarettes’ empire endured and seem to be the longest we have ever created. As US and European consumption plummeted in general, from nearly 50% mid-century to under 20% today [18], the crown did not shrink it migrated. So, nowadays 80% of smokers now live in low and middle-income countries [19], whereas alternative nicotine formats are taking a surge across Euro-Atlantic circles. Thus, tobacco followed the contours of globalisation, where war-time morale boosting or post-war reconstruction once meant shipping cartons to Hamburg and Lyon, expansion now means saturating Jakarta, Lagos and Sao Paulo. The cigarette, perfect in war and normalised during recovery, now became the commodity of global capitalism’s new frontier, a plague decimating the periphery.

La vie en smoke – from filter to a life filler

In the post-war period, cigarettes were not merely smoked, albeit their “medicinal” and practical usage during combat, they were turned into a performance [20]. Nowhere is this clearer than in Europe, where tobacco became an aesthetic in itself.

Jean-Paul Sartre, pacing in Paris cafes with his endless Gauloises, made smoke the medium of thought, the haze that surrounded existential proclamations (and increasing profits). Also, Simone de Beauvoir’s cigarette poised with precision, turned smoking into a feminist gesture of autonomy, an act that collapsed the masculine monopoly on vice and gave rise to its adoption across cultural subgroups (empowerment). In Italian neorealism, Marcello Mastroianni’ smouldering cigarette became inseparable from erotic melancholy, a sensualisation of consumption, whilst Anna Magnani’s quick drags punctuated grief as much as her words and generated sentimentalism with each puffing. Gradually, through such icons and everyday people, cigarettes were no longer mere tools but a punctuation, a pause, a weapon, a seduction, a way of living, your way.

In parallel, American culture mythologised smoking differently, from the cowboy to the frontline hero and lastly the rebel. More than an advertisement, the Marlboro Man (rugged, solitary, backlit by sunsets) transmuted paper and leaf into an archetype of masculine vigour, a powerful moment of control. Also, James Dean, with a cigarette dangling from his lips in Rebel without a cause, made smoking shorthand for alienation and defiance, for a systemic opposition and upheaval. Moreover, in noir cinema, the femme fatale’s exhaled smoke became a veil of mystery and threat, a curtain that needs to be elevated. In every single one of these instances, the cigarette was not an accessory but essence, an object that condensed narrative into gesture (and addiction).

Similarly, in Britain, the postwar cigarette break was as much a ritual of class as of relief, with workers all taking their allotted smoke as a moment of solidarity and dignity. Hence, George Orwell, himself a heavy smoker, described how cigarettes were one of the few pleasures of the working poor, “the cheapest way of buying pleasure”, offering a small ownership of time against the regimentation of industrial labour.

“Fast fume” – the fast food’s (step) relative

Otherwise, the very materiality of cigarettes mattered, with its slender and disposable shape perfectly suited to reflect 20^th century’s cult of speed and convenience. Unlike other forms of consumption, which require a somewhat ritualistic preparation, cigarettes were instant (lit, inhaled, discarded), mirroring the acceleration life, from faster trains, louder cities to deadlier wars. Walter Benjamin once remarked that, in modernity, humans became “shock absorbers of experience”, with smoking being both armour and narcotic against it.

However, cigarettes also encoded contradictions, symbolising intimacy, like two strangers sharing a light, a lover tracing the burn of another’s match, solitude, like a figure at a station that waits for the unknown, rebellion, like youth in leather jackets, flicking ash at authority, conformity, like white collars inhaling in synchronised breaks, etc. This mutability, this quintessential existence, was Big Tobacco’s genius and one of the main reasons it caught on so fast after WW1, as every drag cold mean something else, an ad infinitum propaganda machine. It became even a perpetuum mobile since, once internalised, these narratives were self-replicating and reinforced by the group itself.

Ironically, even the waste product (ashes) was spined into social metaphors. Roland Barthes, dissecting cultural signs, noted how cigarette smoke in post-war advertisements suggested not just pleasure but a “luxurious wasting away”, the beauty of consuming oneself. The smoke was literally to vanish in style, it was both vitality and slow decay, Eros and Thanatos entwined. Then, there is no wonder that cigarettes became bound up with feminist and emancipatory movements in the interbellum. When Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew and “father of public relations”, orchestrated his 1929 Torches of Freedom March in New York, where women lit Lucky Strikes in public as a declaration equality, he tapped into something profound. By the ‘50s, liberation was marketed in smoke, as women could take up space, consume and damage themselves as freely as men.

The dark(er) side of… ashes

But tobacco’s post-war symbolist capital carries darker ironies, a gesture of freedom that brings chain smoking and addiction, glamourous joie and pessimistic cancer prognostics, lively emancipation and reliance on multinationals that grew rich on labourers’ poverty. Yet, they became so entrenched into our collective memory that, by the time activists pushed back, to stub a cigarette was not just to quit a habit but to kill and entire aesthetic of modernity [21].

Nonetheless, even if they are a rare(r) sighting in real life they still seem overwhelmingly portrayed across cultural settings and especially in contemporary art forms this powerful imagery lingers. In this regard, cigarettes are not mere consumer products, but engineered desire, a metaphor for late-stage capitalism, a realm where private profits, socialised harm and globalised markets translate into Leviathan-esque corporations. However, probably more damaging is that this playbook of socio-cultural manipulation and social engineering did not end with tobacco but paved the way for pharma, sugar, oil, etc. alongside other spin-offs.

All in all, the history of the cigarette is not only about warfare, politics or economics, but profoundly about our very own humanism. To understand it is to understand how governments regulated and pushed it, corporations profited from it, advertisers sold it, doctors denounced it, all while artists, writers, thinkers and performers infused it with meaning and transposed it into an archetypal symbol. It is also about witnessing how something as small as a cigarette, initially meant to calm the nerves of young troops sent to kill other over some unknown stretch of land, could become the vehicle of intimacy and death, solidarity and exploitation, glamour and decay. To trace smoking’s clouds is to trace how modernity imagined itself, beautifully destructive, fleeting, alive, forever going onward. But in the end, we must ask, with urgency, as this unfolds, will we recognise the new cigarettes of our age, before another billion lives are lost to them?

Notes:

[1] Milov, S. (2019) The cigarette: A political history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[2] Winter, J. (1985) The Great War and the British people. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[3] Roper, M. (2004) The secret battle: Emotional survival in the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

[4] Brandt, A. M. (2007) The cigarette century: The rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America. New York: Basic Books.

[5] U.S. Department of Agriculture (1920) Tobacco situation: Consumption statistics 1914–1920. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

[6] Brandt, A. M. (2007) The cigarette century: The rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America. New York: Basic Books.

[7] U.S. Department of Agriculture (1947) The tobacco situation: 1947 report. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

[8] Gately, I. (2001) Tobacco: The story of how tobacco seduced the world. New York: Grove Press.

[9] Milov, S. (2019) The cigarette: A political history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[10] Brandt, A. M. (2007) The cigarette century: The rise, fall, and deadly persistence of the product that defined America. New York: Basic Books.

[11] Hacker, B. C. (2001) ‘The prisoner’s dilemma: Cigarettes and survival in World War II camps’, Military History Quarterly, 13(4), pp. 52–61.

[12] Calder, A. (1991) The myth of the Blitz. London: Jonathan Cape.

[13] Milov, S. (2019) The cigarette: A political history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[14] U.S. Department of Defense (1975) Health consequences of smoking in military personnel. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

[15] Proctor, R. N. (1999) The Nazi war on cancer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[16] Brown & Williamson (1979) Smoking and health proposal. Internal company memorandum. Legacy Tobacco Documents Library.

[17] Hilts, P. J. (1996) Smokescreen: The truth behind the tobacco industry cover-up. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

[18] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014) Current cigarette smoking among adults in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

[19] Eriksen, M., Mackay, J. & Ross, H. (2012) The tobacco atlas. 4th edn. Atlanta, GA: American Cancer Society.

[20] Roper, M. (2004) The secret battle: Emotional survival in the Great War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

[21] Hilts, P. J. (1996) Smokescreen: The truth behind the tobacco industry cover-up. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Photo source: PxHere.com.