Although there’s no specific rule against it, French schoolchildren never eat out of lunch boxes. They either go home for lunch or eat at la cantine (school cafeteria). That means that in addition to registering children for school, parents have to trek to their local mairie (town hall) to sign them up for lunch service.
And that’s how we ended up in conversation with Monsieur Fitoussi, the director of the Caisse des écoles (the body that manages cafeterias and after-school activities) in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. We had to show him our tax return so he could decide what fiscal category we belonged to, lunch prices being scaled to family income, and in the process, we mentioned we were freelance journalists. Fitoussi jumped on the opportunity to boast about some of his office’s achievements, starting with the fact that 60 percent of the food served in all cantines is organic. Monsieur Fitoussi was quite proud of this. He reported that a delegation of Canadian school officials had just visited our arrondissement to talk about lunch menus. His next plan was to make sure all the fish in his cantines are “caught by French fishermen.”
Taking his cue from Fitoussi’s buoyancy, Jean-Benoît decided to relate some observations about other things that we, as foreigners, felt worked quite well in France, like good access to medical care, the excellent road system, reliable fast trains, high-quality teachers, and universal pre-school starting at age three. In our research we had also learned that life expectancy and productivity rates in France were high, and energy consumption low (the French use half the energy North Americans do). Jean-Benoît even backed up his claims by mentioning a fascinating study he had recently come across by the Atlantic Council, called Companions in Competitiveness, which concluded that France outranked the United States in infrastructure, education, and health care.1
Monsieur Fitoussi didn’t buy it. “You can’t possibly believe France has anything to teach to the world?” he replied. A mere thirty seconds earlier Monsieur Fitoussi had been bragging about foreigners who were interested in his achievements. Now he refused to believe that his country could do a single thing right. Monsieur Fitoussi’s reaction actually highlighted the one field in which the French do demonstrate unparalleled excellence: the art of extreme and extravagant self-criticism. When it comes to systematic pessimism, nobody does it better. The French are the world’s undisputed heavyweight champions of negativity.
While French bashing is practically a subgenre of the Anglo-American press, what amazed us when we lived in France was the degree to which the French press parrot it, almost to the letter. We considered it a bit of a riddle: are the French regurgitating criticism from outside the country, or are foreign journalists simply reporting all the bad things the French say about themselves, verbatim?2
We tend to believe the latter, based on the extent to which negativity, pessimism, and skepticism are permanent and universal features of French discourse. The form and intensity of this negativism have varied over time. On our first visit to France in 1992, the country was in the middle of severe budget cuts. The mood was foul. Then when we moved to France seven years later, the economy was vibrant and this negativity had waned. On visits and stays in France between 2004 and 2008, the mood slipped and pessimism seemed to be on the rise. But in 2013, we arrived in an all-time low (for us). France was grappling with economic stagnancy and fiscal reckoning. Even the French Left had lost its pluck. It normally blamed France’s problems on the usual suspects—capitalism and the United States. Not anymore.
Whether we were discussing language, the quality of cafeteria food at Radio France, or even bread, wine, or cheese, the prognoses were uniformly bleak. If we had written a travelogue about France after our year in France, we would have at least subtitled it Tout va mal (nothing works).
But things in France always sound worse than they are because of the simple fact that the French are chronically negative. The systematic pessimism we are describing goes well beyond the universal “no” with which most verbal exchanges are initiated (which we discussed in chapter 3). French negativism is a customary starting point in almost any French conversation. It is a form of hypochondria that frames almost everything the French say. In France, it’s as polite to start speaking to a stranger by complaining as it is to comment on the weather (as long you are complaining, that is).
French negativity doesn’t require any prompters. It is spontaneous and always presented as self-evident. If you contradict an assumed negative stance off the bat, the reaction will often be a baffled stare. After Julie finished an interview one evening with the director of one of France’s language-protection groups, she walked with the gentleman to the metro station where they were both leaving, in opposite directions. He asked Julie what she thought about public transport in Paris, evidently expecting a familiar complaint to ensue. When Julie answered, “It’s great,” the man just looked at her blankly, then turned on his heels and walked off. Witnessing unexpected satisfaction is one of the few things that leave the French speechless.
The popular expressions used to characterize France’s decline change over time, we noticed. Fifteen years ago, we frequently heard: “La France, ce n’est plus ce que c’était” (France is not what it used to be). Today, the French are so down they don’t seem to think their country was anything to start with. They have a new maxim: “The way the country is going today…,” alluding to the supposedly self-evident “decline” in French values. Then there is the good old “Ça, c’est la France!” (That’s France for you!), which actually translates as, “Of course things in France are getting worse.”
When it comes to negativism, defeatism, alarmism, and catastrophism, the French make full use of the resources their language offers. Expressions we heard describing this sentiment included morosité (morosity), sinistrose (malingering), vague à l’âme (melancholy), abattement (dejection), idées noires (gloomy thoughts), spleen (melancholy), cafard (the blues), and la déprime (depression). Thanks to the unique ability of the French language to transform adjectives into nouns, the French also have a special category of titles for the different groups of people affected by bad times. There are les insatisfaits (the dissatisfied), les agacés (the irritated), les énervés (the irritated), les impatients (the impatient), and les exaspérés (the exasperated), not to mention les râleurs (the moaners), les rouspéteurs (the grumps), and les mécontents (the malcontents), to name but a few.
Even the motto of Paris, Fluctuat nec mergitur (tossed by the waves, it doesn’t sink), has a curiously negative ring to it. France’s institutions seem to cater to a preordained pessimistic mind-set. When we left France, we had to close accounts for a number of utilities. After wrapping up our business with France’s electric company, we received a survey asking us to evaluate waiting times on the phone, quality of answers, the level of courtesy (amabilité), and other aspects of customer service. The four choices were nul (lousy), pas à la hauteur (not up to standards), correct (fine), and bon (good). In other words, on a French rating scale, the opposite of “lousy” is not “excellent.” “Good” is as good as it gets.
There’s an old joke that when two British people meet in the street, they shake hands, then get in line, but when two French people meet, they shake hands and start complaining about France. For the French, the glass is either half empty or totally, desperately empty. The French even have a way of presenting their pessimistic starting points so they don’t seem to require substantiation. It’s more of a state of mind than an opinion, but more of an opinion than an observation.
Because the French tend to be so negative about so many things, it’s hard to get an unbiased assessment of their actual feelings. Still, it’s a mistake for foreigners to take French negativism at face value—the same way it would be a mistake to think that everyone is happy in North America when they smile. (It’s just our peculiar way of being polite.) Over the years, we have learned to take the overly pessimistic viewpoints of the French with a grain of salt.
Though it seemed to go against the grain of everything happening in France, the spring of 2014 in Paris was Le Printemps de l’Optimisme (The Spring of Optimism)—at least thanks to a Frenchman named Thierry Saussez. It was actually a three-day event, the first of its kind, and consisted of high-profile round tables and workshops on positive thinking. Jean-Benoît met Saussez, the event’s founder and a right-wing political organizer, public relations specialist, former communications adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, and author. Prior to the event, Saussez had commissioned a national survey on optimism. What he discovered was that the French were, in fact, optimistic about their own prospects, but pessimistic about their society. “This is bizarre,” he told Jean-Benoît. “Think about it. How can 80 percent of people be optimistic about their own lives, while only 20 percent are optimistic about the society they live in and whatever doesn’t concern them personally?”
National statistics in France reveal the same dichotomy between high personal optimism on one hand and high “societal” pessimism on the other. Aside from France’s sustained high birthrate (which we discussed in chapter 5), generally considered a sign of optimism, the French, historically, have never felt things were so bad they had to leave their country. The French have always emigrated less than other European nations, and by a large margin. According to the latest figures available, the French have created six times more businesses than Germany, the UK, or the United States over a five-year period, a phenomenon generally considered to be a sign of optimism.3 In a recent survey by OpinionWay, 66 percent of French youth between eighteen and twenty-six stated they were “rather optimistic about the future,” a score 20 percent higher than that of older generations, which is surprising given that unemployment rates among French youth are high, above 20 percent. The French appear to be closet optimists wrapped in a thick cloak of pessimism.4
In April, just a month before Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event, the French TV channel TF1, roughly the equivalent of the BBC, launched a publicity campaign that made fun of France’s split personality. The concept was simple: a voiceover expressed a series of common gripes, then contrasted them with images that showed the exact opposite. “The French are sulky” was illustrated with an image of people around a table, laughing; “the French are lazy” showed a tractor tilling a field at dawn; “the French believe in nothing” showed a newborn; “the French are racist” showed a pair of black feet and white feet interwoven on bed sheets; “the French are losers” showed a French soccer team cheering a victory. It ended with TF1’s new slogan: Partageons des ondes positives (let’s share positive vibes). It could have been an ad for Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event. Sales of books on personal motivation and positive thinking are at an all-time high in France with sales of two hundred thousand or three hundred thousand copies now common.5
So why exactly do the French refuse to sound optimistic even when they are, or at least want to be? The answer is: some posturing mixed with philosophy and a few deeply anchored French taboos. Xavier North, a high-ranking French civil servant, was one of the first people to talk to us about this contradiction. We initially met North when he was in charge of cultural cooperation at France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then talked to him again, years later, when he was head of France’s main language regulation body, the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF). It’s a mistake to take the French attitude at face value, he told us. French negativism is simply the French manière d’être (way of being) with foreigners, a bit like the Japanese who tend to portray their culture as impenetrable to outsiders. “Negativism is posturing. To a lot of French, being happy seems naïve.” A number of famous French people have said the same thing in different terms, including the French actor Jean Gabin, who, in Mélodie en sous-sol (Any Number Can Win, 1963), declared, “L’essentiel, c’est de râler. Ça fait bon genre.” (The important thing is to moan. It makes you look respectable.)
To be fair, as a general manner of speaking, the French do consider criticism to be more honest than praise. To the French, unbridled optimism, enthusiasm, or unwarranted contentment all scream simplemindedness. As France’s most popular stand-up comedian, Jamel Debbouze, put it, you have to sound pessimistic to look intelligent in France.6 Overt pessimism has an elegant antiestablishment quality about it, like wearing all black. In a society where everyone is expected to produce opinions, negativism is a convenient form of intellectual prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear), a ready-made opinion that doesn’t have to be substantiated. The French even coined a metaphor for this, inspired from rugby: botter en touche (drop back ten yards and punt). The idea is, you proffer an énormité, then let people fight over it while you buy time to think of something interesting to say.
But French negativism is more than just posturing. French pessimists are on solid intellectual grounds, the product of an intellectual tradition favoring doubt over certainty that dates back centuries. The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) philosophized about the necessity of doubt. In his play The Barber of Seville, the French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais (1732–1799) writes, “J’aime mieux craindre sans sujet que de m’exposer sans précaution” (I would rather fear without reason than expose myself carelessly). Then the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau followed up with the claim that man was “born free and everywhere is in chains,” meaning things necessarily go downhill.7 In 1932, a young Albert Camus crossed happiness off the list of noble goals in life, writing: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”8
But the most forceful attack on optimism came from a contemporary of Rousseau, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) in his satiric novella Candide, or The Optimist. Voltaire actually wrote the novella in response to the new word “optimism,” which only entered the French lexicon in 1737. The story is of a young man, Candide, who grows up living a sheltered life in a castle, which gave him the naïve belief that “all is for the best in all possible worlds.” After a series of catastrophic misfortunes Candide is reduced to misery and concludes that “not all is for the best” and, as a result, that “one must cultivate one’s garden” (protect yourself). It is an astute description of the French mind-set that sounds familiar even today and fits the paradoxical findings of Thierry Saussez’s survey.
But it’s probably fair to say that French pessimism is a healthy reaction to another French tradition: excessive and unrealistic official boosterism. The eulogy of France is a subgenre of French poetry dating back ten or even twelve centuries, which French poets produced in an attempt to win their king’s favor through flattery. Such writings were commonplace until the Enlightenment, when a new form of hyperbolic and all-encompassing criticism—the pursuit of truth beyond authority—established itself as a type of counter-discourse. Perhaps because authority in France remained absolute (and in many respects, still is today), the French criticism of authority became absolute as well. Artists are automatically expected to embrace this.9 For that matter, absolute criticism lives on as a literary genre of its own. Some creators have built entire careers on pessimism, the prize going to French-Romanian writer Emil Cioran (1911–1995). Born in Romania, Cioran moved to Paris in the late 1930s where he published A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, and The Trouble with Being Born. Cioran was known for claiming that the only thing that made it possible to keep living was the possibility of suicide (he ended up dying at eighty-four, from Alzheimer’s disease).10
Negativism is also a ploy the French use to address taboo subjects like money, nationalism, and racism. Given the extent to which money is a private topic in France, speaking negatively about economic matters is the most acceptable way of broaching the topic. In a culture where the tax system tends to be punitive and people want to avoid attracting the attention of their neighbors or of tax inspectors, casting a negative light on anything relating to money, status, financial questions, or estates also operates as a smoke screen.11 The French don’t want to look like they are hiding anything, and the best way to deflect attention is to complain. According to historians, this tactic dates back centuries.12
Many extreme expressions of negativism in France also stem from repressed nationalism. One effect of the two world wars was that overt nationalism was virtually banned from public discourse in all of Europe. The only political party in France that openly embraces “love of country” is the far-right National Front Party. The love of country exists among the general population, but more often than not, it is expressed in the form of regret: “France is not what it used to be.” The same logic applies to the topic of race relations, yet another taboo in France (we address this topic at length in chapter 18). The French (except National Front members, anyway) are generally quite careful when they discuss the topic and tend to express their concerns, whatever they are, again, in the form of “France is not what it used to be.”13
Thierry Saussez’s Spring of Optimism event actually had a political agenda behind it that was surprisingly nonpartisan (given that Saussez ran President Sarkozy’s communications department from 2008 to 2010). Saussez denied being a proponent of positive thinking but said he hoped the event would lead to a lucid assessment of the risks of intractable French negativism. In his view, unrealistic negativism was politically dangerous. “It produces a discourse of victimization, impotence and malingering and pushes people to look for scapegoats. That’s dangerous.”
The French use the term sinistrose to describe this discourse. Though a synonym of pessimism, sinistrose is actually a term from psychiatry; it describes a condition best translated as malingering. The French term was created in 1908 to describe people who, having suffered a wrong owing to an accident, do everything they can to exaggerate the effect of it in order to gain compensation. That’s when negativism stops being mere posturing and starts acquiring a really ugly side. It has happened before in France. In a memoir called Strange Defeat, the revered French historian Marc Bloch (1886–1944) documented the experience of the first days of World War II, when the French army caved in the face of the Germany army. The capitulation was completely out of proportion with the actual threat France faced: the French army was a large, well-equipped army at the time. Bloch attributes the defeat to an excessively pessimistic, fatalistic attitude among French elites in the 1930s. What he describes is eerily similar to the mind-set the French have now, seventy-five years later.
The saving grace for the French this time may be that they have no objective enemy.