One French exception that English speakers never grow tired of is the odd severity with which we judge our country. The pessimism and obsession with the decline of the French have been the subject of much writing in neighboring countries for the last 20 years. Some suggestive titles of articles: “Aux larmes, citoyens!” “France is doing well, but feeling miserable,” “Glad to Be Unhappy: The French Case” and “France’s Glorious Malaise.”
In recent years, the major English-language newspapers have almost all attempted an explanation for this self-critical tendency, which is so tenacious that they viewed it as a kind of national emblem. “The French are living off their malaise much as the British live off the royal family,” wrote New York Times correspondent Roger Cohen in 2013.
The pandemic and the presidential election campaign provided the perfect playing field for foreign correspondents who were puzzled by our gloom. “France is doing well, but feeling miserable,” headlined The Economist in November 2021, surprised that in any prime-time talk show, there is only talk of France “losing its factories and jobs, squeezing incomes and small businesses, destroying its landscapes and language, neglecting its borders and squandering its global stature.” In short, it’s a country that is “fractious and divided, if not on the verge of a civil war.”
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Yet, seen from elsewhere, France is not doing so badly. In an article published in the New York Times in January, the 2008 Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman awarded France the crown of the Western country that best managed the crisis caused by Covid-19. Mr. Krugman incidentally referred to the virtues of a model that English speakers readily label as socialist. France seems “in denial about its own successes,” the newspaper insisted a few weeks later, just ahead of the second election round, describing a country that has adapted much better to the modern world than it seems to admit.
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