France's fondness for inventing odd laws to change human behaviour entered new territory today. A criminal offence is to be created to punish the act of promoting excessive thinness. Those found guilty will face up to three years in jail and 45,000 euros fine.   

This is not a laughing matter. The offence is defined in a government-backed bill that has just been tabled as part of the campaign to combat anorexia nervosa. The first use of prosecutors to tackle eating disorders is broadly aimed at the media and fashion world, but especially at the websites and blogs of the so-called pro-ana movement.

While many of these are support groups, others promote starvation as a "life-style choice", with girls and young women posting their wasting images as "thinspiration" for others.

Social sites such as Facebook and Myspace have recently resisted pressure in Britain and other nations to purge their pro-ana entries. You can see that it must be hard for them to distinguish between dangerous propaganda (soon to be illegal in France) and networking among troubled or just curious people.

The new offence is defined as "provoking a person to seek excessive thinness by encouraging prolonged restriction of nourishment" to the point of risking of death or damage to health. The maximum penalties are applied if the person dies.

Some experts and fashion leaders oppose the bill, which is expected to be passed by Parliament within months. "You do not solve this kind of problem with the law but with understanding," Jean-Paul Gaultier, the designer, told the press today. Didier Grumbach, head of the French Couture Federation, backed a new voluntary code, which was also released today, but he said that it was not up to the state to legislate on beauty and aesthetic criteria,

The law, modelled on the offence of abetting suicide, was tabled by Valérie Boyer, an MP from President Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement. Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, gave it the government's blessing at the release of  the code for the media, advertising and fashion industry on 

"The pro-ana movements which spread their messages of death on the web must be the target for special attention,"  Bachelot said as she presented Boyer's draft bill along with the voluntary charter. Up to 40,000 people suffer from anorexia in France, the great majority of them girls and young women. Laurence Chirac, the 48-year-old elder daughter of  the last president, has been incapacitated for two decades with the disease. The daughter of Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, the country's star television newsman, died of anorexia.

The obvious catch is how you prove this offence. What is excessive thinness (une maigreur excessive)? This will probably be left to judges to define but it might be measured as a body mass index, said Boyer. BMI rules have been set by some model agencies and fashion houses since 2006 when the Madrid fashion show imposed a minimum index of 18 for catwalk models.  This apparently translates as a minimum weight of 56 kilos (123 pounds/8.8 UK stone) for a height of 1.75 metres (5 feet 9 ins).

France last year banned a deliberately shocking Italian fashion advertisement featuring Isabelle Caro, a French model-actress who has written a book on her continuing battle with the disease.

The voluntary code, which was drawn up by a panel led by two eminent psychiatrists, commits the fashion, media and advertising world to raising acceptance of varied body shapes. "We undertake the promotion of diversity in the representation of the body, avoiding all stereotypes which could favour potentially dangerous canons of beauty," said the signatories.

Marcel Rufo, a famous child psychiatrist who headed the panel, said that he fully backed the use of the criminal law in fighting anorexia. The disease remains a mystery but everything had to be done to prevent vulnerable girls being encouraged to starve, he said. Among other new rules, magazines should be forced to mention the fact that 60 percent of their pictures are electronically retouched, he said. "Fashion does not make people anorexic but it can push vulnerable teenagers towards it."

Some critics of the measures say that the government is acting after the event because the big fashion and cosmetics firms have already changed their ways and stopped employing the sickly stick-figured models that were in favour a few years ago. That's not very convincing. You only have to open a fashion magazine or look at the posters around Paris to see that very thin is still very in. Whether the police should get involved is another matter. 

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