According to the report, on average, 49% of Europeans believe their country is heading in the wrong direction, whilst the figure rises to 63% in France, a score only surpassed by that of Greece.
It's an outlook that hardly correlates with France's status as a leading economic power, its popularity as a destination for international visitors and expatriates, or with the high levels of individual well-being reported by its citizens.
That contradiction is highlighted by writer Sylvain Tesson who famously stated that, "France is a paradise inhabited by people who believe they are in hell."
So just what might be the explanation?
Social Inequality
The report considers that one of the key factors driving a pessimistic outlook is the sensitivity to social inequality, something which many commentators believe is keenly expressed by the French.
For French writer Bénédicte Manier, this sense of social injustice was most recently expressed in 2018 gilets jaunes movement. She considers that the drivers of the social elevator have been idle for decades in France and that schools are more likely to reproduce inequalities than to reduce them.
Although growing inequality and rising prices are not limited to France, American psychologist Martin Seligman suggests that the French may be more keenly aware of these divides due to their revolutionary history. "This glass-half-empty attitude is inherited from a long history of protest and is intimately linked to France's revolutionary character", he writes.
The taxes levied to maintain national unity may well make France a civilised country in which to live, but as they fall mostly on employment, they leave many feeling disgruntled with the gap between the gross and net figures in their wage packet.
Negatively Biased School System
Many observers also consider that the French school system, often criticised for focusing on students’ errors over their successes, may also contribute to the development of a pessimistic outlook.
The French school system tends to encourage competitivity and perfectionism over more typically Anglo-Saxon approaches of trial and error.
Peter Gumbel in his book 'On achève bien les écoliers' (They Shoot School Kids, Don’t They?) states that school children are almost never praised and frequently told the opposite.“Everyone I know who went to school in France bears the scars," he writes.
Critics of the school system consider that French schools install their students with a sense of fear (of punishment and bad grades) and a lack of self-confidence, fostering a belief that there is no point trying if you can’t reach perfection.
According to Ilona Boniwell, a leading French consultancy on strategies to improve positive thinking, whilst adult immigrants to France tend to maintain their initial level of optimism even after many years, the same is not true of their children: “as soon as their children enter the French school system, they adopt the level of optimism — or rather pessimism — of their classmates,” she states.
Many commentators consider that this negative outlook may spill over into the nation’s worldview. Could competitivity in the classroom lead to a lack of trust and social cohesion on a national scale? Might the lack of a ‘growth mindset’ on a personal level lead to a difficulty envisaging a brighter future for the country?
Lack of Collective Identity
Nevertheless, a pessimistic outlook does not necessarily equal individual unhappiness and it is certainly true to say that it is not felt in the same way by all social groups. Previous studies have shown that just how you are affected will depend on your age, economic status, where you live and other factors. However, a socio-economic profile of the responses was not provided in the EU study.
Although some studies suggest that a pessimistic outlook can lead to more instances of depression, this does not seem to be the case for France, where levels of individual happiness appear to be rising, a phenomenon known as the 'paradoxe français'.
Regular studies of French attitudes show that on a personal level a majority of them are satisfied with their life and that they were personally optimistic about their own futures. French pessimism, therefore, seems to be more about national identity and perception of a collective future.
Chloé Morin, a researcher in France, sees France’s pessimism as a result of a “crisis in the idea of a nation”. She highlights that, with the rise of globalisation, categories such as old versus young or rural versus urban have often become more meaningful than nationality.
Other commentators suggest that a lack of collective identity may be linked to French people feeling that their voice doesn’t count, something listed by the EU study as a factor influencing pessimism.
The highly centralised state in France and the two-round electoral system may equally contribute to this sense of powerlessness.
Leading French author Mahir Guven notes that “economic, political, media, cultural and intellectual power is concentrated in Paris, while the rest of the country is consigned to the background.”
Narratives of Nostalgia
Studies also suggest that pessimism about the future can be linked to nostalgia and a belief that things were better in the past.
As Guven points out, nostalgia is woven into political discourse on both the left and right, “Conservative types contrast the French Republic of the 21st century with the empire of the 17th and 18th centuries. On the left, they are nostalgic for Jean Jaures, the Front Populaire of the 1930s, the post-war period, Mitterrand in 1981, the people’s victories over power”.
Other periods which seem to hold nostalgic power in France’s collective imagination include the economic boom and stability of the period between 1946 and 1975 ( 'Le Trente Glorieuses,' ) which France has almost made official.
There is also an idealised vision of a rural France, which can be attributed to the late exodus of the country from agriculture. In 1955, 6.2 million French worked on the land, which in 2020 was down to 400,000. It is a vision that obscures the poverty of past rural life.
Idealisation of the past by both the left and right is likely to breed pessimism and dissatisfaction with the present. For the French, modern politicians will always be seen as failing short when compared to an idealistic vision.
Others consider that the intellectual tradition in France leads to too much introspection, with a consequential increase in feelings of anxiety.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, an Oxford academic who wrote 'How the French Think', considers that one explanation for their unhappiness might simply be caused by "too much thinking" and that the French might be better off simply getting on with living life rather than spending too much time trying to analyse it!
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