No More French Benefits

If twentieth century French author, poet, philosopher and filmmaker Jean Cocteau believed that the French were simply Italians in a bad mood, what would he make of the malaise hovering over the French today? That feeling that things are going to hell in a hand-basket, that French culture has fallen between the cracks of global perception and that the solution is nowhere in sight… if there even is one. It is a notion of hopelessness and depression that seems to define French society in the twenty-first century. Living in the past because the present and the expected future are so unpleasant. “Liberté, égalité, morosité,” as the Paris newspaper, Le Monde, puts it.

New York Times Op-Ed contributor, Maureen Dowd fills in the supporting data (July 6^th): “The French have higher rates of taking antidepressants and committing suicide than most other Europeans. And while arguing about how to move forward, they feel trapped in the past, weighed down by high unemployment and low hopes, the onerous taxes that drove Gérard Depardieu to flee, conflicts with immigrants, political scandals, Hollande fatigue, Germany envy, economic stagnation, a hyperelitist education system, and cold, rainy weather that ruined the famous Paris spring. Instead of confronting the questions at hand — how to adjust to globalization and compete with the Chinese — the French are grieving their lost stature and glorious past, stretching back to the colonial empire, the Lumières, the revolution, Napoleon, even the Jazz Age writers and artists. They’re stuck in a sentimental time warp as vivid as the one depicted in Woody Allen’s ‘Midnight in Paris.’”

If France weren’t such a spectacular country, why would so many Americans travel to or at least yearn to travel to Paris and the French countryside? The infamous Parisian “cold reception” of foreigners hasn’t been a deterrent, because the City of Lights just has too much to offer, from amazing architecture, the finest museums in the world, food beyond expectations and a sense of history around every corner. Lafayette came to our aide in our Revolutionary War, just as we sent our troops to Europe in WW I and II. While occasional chills float through the atmosphere, there remains a connection between “us and them” that will not go away.

The fact remains that as an economic experiment, the European Union has not been able to overcome the ponderous weight of financial disasters amidst the cacophony of cultural attitudes about money, lifestyle and the value of hard work. The irreconcilable differences between the failed and failing economies (especially Portugal, Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, etc… and perhaps even France) and the Teutonic discipline of the Nordic nations led by Germany, the unwillingness to face a whole pile of major banks teetering on the edge or the need to create a social environment that prioritizes getting people back to work, and deep, historically-determined economic inequalities have simply aggregated into clouds and waves of hopelessness with occasional surfacings of bitterness and anger.

The French have almost given up, even as the hard-charging Germans shrug and note that they have been in worse times and survived. Dowd brings it down again: “Joie de vivre has given way to gaze de navel. The French are so busy wallowing in their existential estrangement — a state of mind Camus described as ‘Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?’ — that they don’t even have the energy to be rude. And now that they’re smoking electronic cigarettes, their ennui doesn’t look as cool. It’s not that they’ve lost faith in their own superiority. They’ve lost faith that the rest of the world sees it. The whole country has, as Catherine Deneuve says of her crazy blue moods, une araignée au plafond — a spider on the ceiling.” NY Times.

It’s hard to quantify attitudes and cultural leanings in defining and solving huge economic problems. The numbers measure unemployment, stock market performance, relative currency values, consumer confidence, GDP, debt-to-equity ratios… but they really struggle with how people facing challenges are raised to cope with such difficulties. First, national myths of superiority need to be dispelled as vestiges earned by those who live before but no longer determined contemporary life. Then, society must roll up its collective sleeves, push away even precious barriers to progress and get to work.

This is a lesson for Americans as much as anyone else. Want to have a superior lifestyle and success quotient? Earn it yourself. It’s not what your ancestors handed to you, but what you do with that legacy and what you add to it as you move through life. Perhaps, Jean Cocteau’s French perspective really says it all: “Life is a horizontal fall.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and it’s time that we stare down the incumbent elites and excessive entitlements and solve our own malaise, knowing we have done it before and can do it again.