Nearly every student placed it just a few spots behind the US, easily in the top 25% of inequality. They were almost universally wrong when it came to accurately identifying France on the same chart. They had no problem identifying where on the chart the US fell: nearly every hand went up to indicate that it had the highest inequality of any rich democracy. I showed them a chart of inequality levels among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations, but with the country names chopped off. Several weeks ago I took a straw poll of my students – nothing statistically significant, but a snapshot of the general outlook of bright, politically aware first-years at Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious and globally high-ranking universities.
This doesn’t correspond to measurable reality, but the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are powerful. In this tale, France has been submerged by immigration and Islam, or by ultra-neoliberalism, or by authoritarianism (or some combination of these). It has had four decades of structurally high unemployment a lost decade of stagnating incomes after the 2008-09 financial crisis lower levels of social trust than its happier northern European neighbours (made worse by Emmanuel Macron’s use of article 49.3, which forced the legislature to choose between passing the unpopular retirement reform or holding new elections) a population shifting away from rural towns towards urban centres and a slow, rolling recognition of its relative decline on the global stage.īut there is an incredible disconnect between what tourists see, what foreigners living in France see, what French people living abroad see, what this recently naturalised français sees, and the hyperbolic, catastrophist nature of France’s own domestic discourse about itself (that is, the French people convinced their country has gone to hell).
Of course, France isn’t a literal paradise.
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