Gauloises cigarettes are a brand of cigarettes, of French production. Gauloises cigarettes are manufactured by Imperial Tobacco after it was bought by Altadis in January 2008. Gauloises cigarettes first appeared in 1910. In 1984, the brand was renamed Gauloises Blondes. During World War II, these cigarettes were popular in France. During the Vichy regime, they had an unofficial motto: “Liberté toujours” (Freedom Forever).
Gauloises cigarettes have also been associated with high profile and inspirational figures representing the art world (such as Pablo Picasso) and the intellectual elite (such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Jean Baudrillard). In popular music, for example, French pianist and composer Maurice Ravel, American singer Jim Morrison and British music icon John Lennon. American artist Robert Motherwell used Gauloises cigarettes and cardboard boxes in many collages, including an extensive series of bags surrounded by bright red acrylic paint, often with notched lines in the painted areas. In the preface to his 2015 book Robert Motherwell: The Making of an American Giant, gallerist Bernard Jacobson says, “Motherwell smoked Lucky Strikes, but in his collage life he smokes Gauloises cigarettes, on which blue packs he now builds one composition after another. “exotic to me precisely because I don’t usually smoke French cigarettes.” And by including Gauloises packs, he makes a deft and succinct allusion to ‘French blue’: to the Mediterranean and the Matisse palette … to the smoke swirling in the Cubist assembly.”
Henri Charrière, French writer and convict, makes numerous references to Gauloises smoking in his autobiography Papillon. This, together with the romantic associations of France, has made Gauloises cigarettes a popular brand among some writers and artists: in virtually all stories and novels written by Julio Cortazar in Paris, the protagonists smoke Gauloises. John Lennon was a famous Gauloises Bleues smoker. Frank O’Hara, in his poem “The Day the Lady Died”, writes that he went to “a tobacconist at the Ziegfeld Theatre” in New York and casually asked for “a cardboard box of Gauloises”. In John le Carré’s 1979 novel The Smiley People, a key plot point is the hiding of a microfilm in a pack of Vladimir’s favorite Gauloises cigarettes.