French culture: Bleak chic
What is about being French that makes for so much misery ?
►http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591749-bleak-chic
One of the most perplexing questions of the early 21st century is this: how can the French, who invented joie de vivre , the three-tier cheese trolley and Dior’s jaunty New Look, be so resolutely miserable? To outsiders, the world’s favourite tourist destination embodies the triumph of pleasure over desk-slavery, slow food over fast, the life of the flâneur over that of the frenetic. Yet polls suggest that the French are more depressed than Ugandans or Uzbekistanis, and more pessimistic about their country’s future than Albanians or Iraqis. A global barometer of hope and happiness puts the French second to bottom of a 54-country world ranking, behind austerity-battered Italians, Greeks and Spaniards, and ahead only of Portugal. (...)
One reason could be the French appetite for brutal self-criticism. From Descartes onwards, doubt is the first philosophical reflex. “The rationalist tradition makes us sceptical; we exist through criticism,” argues Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher and director of Paris Sciences et Lettres, an elite university. “We treat those too full of hope as naive.” In “Candide, or The Optimist”, published in 1759, Voltaire mocks the folly of looking on the bright side in the face of unimaginable horrors. “Optimism”, says a disabused Candide in the novel, “is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.” When a French magazine recently tried to decode today’s national pessimism, it concluded: “It’s Voltaire’s fault”. “We find it more chic and more spiritual to doubt everything.”