France's mental ills

PERIGUEUX, France, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- Every two years since 1985, the celebrated French sociologist Gérard Mermet has published a detailed assessment of his nation's mood, and the new edition of 'Francoscopie 2007' says that the country is suffering from three simultaneous mental conditions.

It is schizophrenic, Mermet suggests, because it is aware of globalization and other changes underway in the world, but refuses to accept these realities.

It is paranoid, he says, because the French believe they have been comprehensively betrayed by their own elites and that the world is engaged in a "global conspiracy" against them.

And France is hypochondriac, Mermet concludes, because the country is in reality more prosperous, healthier and better educated and its economy more productive than ever before. The French as individuals claim to be happier and better off than ever, and yet the French collectively exaggerate their problems to persuade themselves that they are trapped in a pattern of decline.

More than three-quarters of the French respondents in a series of polls told Mermet's pollsters that they are pessimistic about France's future, while optimistic about their own personal prospects.

The mood is summed up by the French terms for the post-1945 era, which ignores the concepts of Cold War and post-Cold War that the Anglo-Saxons use. For France, the 30 boom years after 1945 were "les trentes glorieuses," three glorious decades. And the thirty slow-growth and high unemployment years since have been pitiful, known as "les trentes pitieuses."

This is not the first time Gérard Mermet has been so pessimistic. Two years ago, when he published the last edition of 'Francoscopie' he claimed that "France is paralyzed by its fear, handicapped by its national shortsightedness, lacking imagination, numb, closed off, depressed. We refuse to adapt. Compared with our neighbors, we are not open to reality. Rather than accepting the facts, we prefer to ignore them, deny them or twist them. A masochistic, even a suicidal tendency is developing."

In an interview at the time with Le Parisien, Mermet claimed that France's electorate had "zero confidence" in the country's politicians, whose inflated rhetoric and practical failings and inability to pursue a steady course of economic reform carried much of the responsibility for the sullen national mood.

"They need to be courageous, show that their careers as less important than the future of France," Mermet said. "Unfortunately, they're giving the opposite impression. Things will radicalize. There is a real risk of explosion: we are in a pre-revolutionary situation."

In the country that brought the world first popular political revolution in 1789, and which to this day celebrates the July 14 fall of the Bastille Prison in that year as the great national holiday, such a phrase is not used lightly. Mermet does not quite say that now, but France is in a pre-election situation. This is the twilight phase of the presidency of Jacques Chirac, which has lasted for 12 years, and without some extraordinary upset the next president will be someone of a new generation; either the tough and conservative Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy or the attractive but relatively inexperienced new female Socialist leader Segolene Royal.

The polls currently show them running neck and neck, and while Sarkozy talks of the need for a "rupture" with the past and Royal of "a complete renewal of France," neither one quite captures that dramatic and radical style that Margaret Thatcher brought to a Britain in a similar mood of decline and despair in 1979.

But France seems ready for decisive and hard-driving leadership. In a special poll of 2,535 anonymous respondents from the French version of 'Who's Who?', Mermet has now found that these elites demanded radical change, and 59 percent said that France needs to grow out of its mood of inevitable and irreversible decline. These members of France's powerful elites in business, politics, diplomacy, university, arts and the media all called for more free market reforms and more individual self-reliance rather than dependency on the French state. They wanted much more investment in education and a deeper commitment to the European Union. They also saw globalization, currently depicted as a deep threat to French identity, as a potential benefit for France, bringing more competition and more flexibility as France's economy had to adapt, to modernize and to change.

Mermet's new 'Francoscopie' study says that despite the national gloom, the country is well-equipped to face the future with confidence. Many French corporations compete strongly with the world's best, like Total in energy, Danone in foods, Louis Vuitton in luxury goods, Renault and Citroen-Peugeot in cars, Lafarge in construction, Airbus and so on.

And the French underestimate how well their economy and society are doing in some ways. The gap in incomes between rich and poor are narrowing, not increasing, as most French believe. Real disposable incomes are rising along with living standards and public health and the French National Health Service is one of the world's best. And on the whole French industry is competing well, despite the well-known burdens of high taxes, the 35-hour weeks and voluminous regulations.

Mermet suggests that maybe the French need to travel more, both to see that things are not uniquely grim in France, and to learn that most of the rest of the world sees the French as enjoying a remarkable high quality of life. Mermet found that only one in 10 French people each year travels abroad -- one of the lowest travel patterns in the whole of Europe.