Unhappy City: On the Cultural Dimensions of Happiness, or the French ‘Joie de Malheur’

“Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner.” This, writes the American expatriate writer Edmund White in his 2001 book, The Flâneur, is what it is like to live in Paris for years, or in his case, even decades. “It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.”

The French have such an attractive and sophisticated civilization, and their taste in every domain—from gastronomy to fashion and philosophy—is so sharp and yet subtle, that the foreigner can easily be seduced into believing that mastering the French way of life is a sure although jealously guarded path to existential happiness. But if this true about France, White continues, “then why is [the foreigner] so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming over the Emperor’s Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais? . . . Why is he unhappy . . . even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?”

Even by European standards, the French enjoy a relatively high quality of life, ensured by a liberal welfare state, universal healthcare, free access to higher education, and generous labor benefits, including a minimum of five weeks of paid vacation a year and a mandatory thirty-five hour workweek. And for someone from chaotic yet obstinately optimistic America—where an entire generation of college graduates has been crippled by debt and an unexpected illness or accident can bankrupt the uninsured—France appears an idyllic hamlet of sanity and social comfort.

But despite their cultural affluence and material prosperity, the French remain notoriously unhappy. In a recent poll conducted by the European Social Survey group, France consistently obtained “high scores in negative dimensions of mental health, such as psychological distress and mental disorders.” Among thirteen European countries surveyed between 2002 and 2010, France ranked second-to-last in perceived wellbeing and life satisfaction, trailed only by Portugal. Similarly, in 2011, a WIN-Gallop poll revealed that expectations for the coming year ranked lower in France than in Iraq or Afghanistan. The prevalence of depressive tendencies in France correlates to one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, constituting the primary cause of death among French adults between the ages of 30 and 39, and an exceptionally high consumption of psychotropic drugs.

The economic implications of these findings are paramount. While American enterprises like have gone to exorbitant lengths to ensure the happiness of their employees, the French continue to languish in an idiosyncratic gloom, reinforcing concerns about the declining influence of the French nation in an increasingly globalized world.

In a study published in 2011, the French economist Claudia Senik describes the apparent contradiction between material prosperity and perceived wellbeing in France as the French happiness paradox. In her study, Senik attempts to disentangle the influence of objective circumstances versus cultural factors by comparing levels of perceived wellbeing among immigrants and French expatriates. She found that while immigrants who move to France report higher levels of happiness than their French counterparts, the longer immigrants live in France, the less happy they claim to be. Meanwhile, individuals native to France who have emigrated to other countries continue to report comparatively low levels of happiness. These findings are consistent across different socioeconomic strata, suggesting that there is something peculiar about French culture—that is, “the ensemble of psychological and ideological mechanisms and dispositions that constitute the process of the transformation of experiences into wellbeing”—that is making France’s population miserable. The mere fact of living in France, writes Senik, “reduces by twenty percept the probability of declaring oneself happy.”

Senik concludes by arguing that the French education system and other instances of early socialization are largely to blame for the unhappiness of the French. In stark contrast to the liberal education system in America, education in France is characterized by its conservatism and severity. In the year I spent teaching English in a high school in southwestern France, I was shocked by the austerity of my colleagues, who were quick to deliver criticism and discipline yet withholding of counsel and encouragement.

Writing for The New Yorker in response to Senik’s article, Richard Brody instead attributes the characteristic malheur, or unhappiness, of the French to the critical content rather than the formal structure of the education system in France. Put another way, Brody suggests that it is the what rather than the how of French education that is responsible for the ennui of the French. “Unhappiness,” Brody writes, “often implies the desire for change—in circumstances, or even in oneself—and so dissatisfaction with life despite its material benefits suggests a kind of idealism—of intellectual vision of possibilities beyond the actual.” From this perspective, Brody suggests, the collective discontent of the French might be the expression of an idealistic intellectualism invested in introspection and ideological critique.

Indeed, French philosophy has long explored the intersection between the private and the public, the personal and the political. As early as the sixteenth century, the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne examined subjective experience as a form of ideological critique; his innovative essays combine introspection with sociopolitical commentary. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, the radical political philosophy of the French Enlightenment coincided with an increased focus on self-reflection; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contributed to the constitution of modern political thought with the publication of Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité (“Discourse on Inequality”) and Du contrat social (“The Social Contract”), also revolutionized the autobiographical mode with his Confessions, and later, Les rêveries d’un promeneur solitaire (“Reveries of a Solitary Walker”).

While France is known for its decadent aestheticism and joie de vivre, an international reputation that further complicates the French happiness paradox, Brody suggests that the French instead revel in a kind of “joie de penser, a joy of thinking that derives pleasure from its [own] displeasure and derives constructive energy from its self-conscious sense of resistance.” In other words, if the introspective skepticism constitutive of French culture is a constant source of “self-renewing, self-critical, self-affirming unhappiness,” it also produces a peculiar kind of pleasure in and of itself, an auto-affection that Brody terms joie de malheur, or a “joy of unhappiness.”

The apparent contradiction between material comfort and existential ennui is an absurdity that suits the French like a well-tailored jacket, and for centuries, the French have refined their paradoxical joie de malheur into an unparalleled artistic expression. Indeed, argues Brody, “rhetorical pessimism in the face of a perhaps unparalleled atmosphere of aesthetic sophistication and dialectical nuance may be precisely . . . [the] most remarkable and distinctive product” of French society.

Brody cites the experimental documentary Chronique d’un été, directed and produced in 1960 by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, as a case in point. An early experiment in cinéma vérité, the film begins with a series of interviews on the streets of Paris, each initiated by the deceptively straightforward yet strangely disarming question: “Are you happy?” Over the course of the discussions and digressions that follow—with factory workers, struggling artists, impoverished immigrants, university students, and even a suntanned starlet from Saint-Tropez—the basic premise of a person’s private happiness becomes inextricably linked with politics and the ability to speak and be heard in the public sphere.

Each of the subjects portrayed in Chronique d’un été is, in their own way, both happy and unhappy (and the one in spite of the other). And while many of the subjects portrayed express private concerns about work, money, family, and love, Brody argues that “the howling unhappiness that the film uncovers has its roots in politics and history, or, rather, in the repression of politics and history.” Over the course of the film, personal happiness (or a lack thereof) becomes a means of talking, albeit in abstract terms, about the Algerian War and allegations of the French Army’s use of torture in Algeria, as well as the pervasive silence regarding the complicity of the French government with the German Occupation and the deportation of French Jews to concentration camps during the Second World War. In this way, Chronique d’un été breaks down the barrier between the private and the public, constituting even the most intimate of confessions as a form of sociopolitical commentary and ideological critique.

How, then, can we define what it means to be happy in France, and what precisely do we mean when we say that the French are unhappy? Is the French happiness paradox the product of an austere and inflexible education system, as Senik argues, or is rhetorical pessimism just French for a joie de penser, as Brody suggests? Is the collective discontent of the French contributing to France’s economic decline, or is the distinctiveness of France’s cultural sphere a product more valuable than worker productivity? Are the French truly unhappy, or are they simply lacking a language to express an underlying condition that might otherwise be described as happiness? Is this place heaven or hell?

One way to understand the French happiness paradox is to read it in the way that Albert Camus, the existentialist author and philosopher, reinterprets the myth of Sisyphus in his 1942 essay by the same name. In the Greek myth, the gods punish Sisyphus for attempting to evade death and condemn him to perpetually push a rock to the peak of a tall mountain, at which point the heavy stone would tumble back down the steep slope.

Camus reads the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory for the absurdity of human existence. For Camus, the feeling of the absurd comes from the realization that the world lacks any inherent meaning, order, or reason. Camus writes, “At this point in his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need [for reason] and the unreasonable silence of the world.”

Yet despite acknowledging the absurdity of existence, Camus rejects suicidal despair as an ethical response to the meaningless of life; instead, he offers the myth of Sisyphus as a radical affirmation of life. The lucid recognition of the absurdity of existence “drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.” Paradoxically, by liberating us from the futile search for future meaning, the recognition of absurdity allows us to live fully in the present, in the beauty, pleasure, and “implacable grandeur” of existence.

Camus concludes his essay by leaving Sisyphus at the foot of his mountain, preparing once again to push his mortal burden to its peak. “At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, [like] Sisyphus returning to his rock, in that silent pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him.” Recognizing the “wholly human origin of all that is human” is what allows man to attribute meaning to an inherently absurd existence. And for this reason, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

To take up Camus’s famous refrain, I like to imagine that the French, for all their existential grumblings, are happy. And it is their relentless recognition of and reckoning with the absurdity of their own existence that gives meaning to their joy.

Sidewalk City, Continued: On the French Art of ‘Flânerie’ and the Sexual Politics of Public Space

Anyone who has spent time in Paris, of any class or gender or race, will have observed that Paris is a city designed for pedestrians. Apart from the café—that timeless Parisian institution to which I dedicated fifteen hundred words a couple of weeks ago—the sidewalk is the most democratic space in this gilded capital city. Indeed, the romantic allure of the café is wedded to the casual voyeurism of watching the crowd as it streams by on the sidewalk. If the café is a pacific island, the sidewalk is a tempestuous river, the crowd its pulsing current.

Pause: I remember a time when I was sucked underwater while braving the waves that batter the Anse du Diamant on the southern coast of Martinique. For a brief, panicked moment, I was afraid that I would drown then and there beneath the brilliant blue of the Caribbean Sea. But in my panic, I remembered that the only way to escape a strong current is to force your body to go limp and to allow yourself to float to the surface with the natural movement of the waves.

To be swept up in the swirling current of a crowd, to yield to a movement that surpasses the volition of any one of its individual actors, abides by the same principle: it is an act of deference or submission; it requires a respect for the crowd as an independent entity that ebbs and flows and obeys its own mysterious gravitational pull. It is a dangerous temptation, to be carried away by the crowd.

It has often been observed that Paris is a city that rewards those who take the time to explore it on foot. In his 2001 book, The Flâneur, the American expatriate author Edmund White writes, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail.” In fact, walking in Paris has become such a culturally imbedded pursuit that the French have invented a word for it: flânerie.

In Paris, flânerie can become a compulsive addiction. The pace of walking, its contemplative rhythm, offers an invigorating compromise between steady motion and aimless idleness. And the urban landscape of Paris is particularly suited to the haphazard wanderings of the flâneur. Although the Baron Haussmann’s urban renovation destroyed the narrow, winding streets of medieval Paris, the modern city that came of age at the turn of the twentieth century gave new life to the urban wanderer. Indeed, the superficial uniformity of Haussmann’s Paris—with its broad boulevards lined with five-story limestone residences with narrow iron balconies, its sidewalks punctuated regularly by plane trees and identical benches and lampposts—compels the modern flâneur to walk on and on and on, endlessly.

Despite the unparalleled efficiency and reach of the Parisian metro system, with stops that are never more than a five minutes’ walk away (with the exception of a number of “trous noirs,” or black holes, on the outskirts of the city), the flâneur obstinately travels on foot, drawn to a quaint steeple peeking over the next row of tiled roofs, a shady square at the next intersection, or an antique bookstore just around the next corner, where dusty pages whisper secrets of a bygone era. This city invites the flâneur to wander until he’s hungry and exhausted and half-lost in some far-flung corner of the city he never intended to visit. Another block, another monument, another world. Descending into the underground labyrinth of the metro to take the next train home almost feels like a quiet defeat.

Flânerie, or the art of walking aimlessly, is a time-honored French tradition. Perhaps the first French flâneur was the eighteenth-century writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose Tableau de Paris (Panorama of Paris), a twelve-volume, twenty-eight-hundred-page collection of Parisian sketches, captures the essence of the capital city on the eve of the French Revolution of 1789. Mercier was famously wrong about the prospects of the impending revolution, writing that: “The Parisian’s instinct seems to have taught him that the little more liberty he might obtain is not worth fighting for. . . . Any such struggle would imply long effort and stern thinking. He has a short memory for trouble, chalks up no score of his miseries, and has confidence enough in his own strength not to dread too absolute a despotism.”

Despite compulsively cataloguing the everyday behaviors and customs of the common people he encountered while wandering the streets of Paris, Mercier’s magnified perspective on Parisian life paradoxically blinded him to the revolution that rumbled just over the next horizon. Mercier’s miscalculation is a prescient reminder that even the most careful and committed observers of society can gravely misinterpret the instinct of the crowd, magnifying anecdotal evidence into broad ideological narratives. (Of course I am thinking of the 2016 American presidential election. How could I not? When am I not?)

Edmund White has written that flânerie is the wanderer’s way of imposing “a personal vision on the palimpsest of Paris,” of carving out his own individual narrative in a city with infinite layers of sedimented history. The inherent aimlessness of the flâneur’s path, determined by sheer curiosity rather than preexisting narratives or guidebook itineraries, means that every true wanderer will come away with his own personal interpretation of the urban landscape. The perspective of the observer always frames his perception of the observed.

It is significant, in this regard, that the prototypical models of the French flâneur—from Mercier to Charles Baudelaire and even the American Edmund White—have all been men. In French, a gendered language, the masculine noun flâneur reflects the gender traditionally associated with the role. The feminine substantive flâneuse does exist in French, but most literary accounts of flânerie nevertheless adopt a male perspective. The flâneur, by definition, is an individual uninhibited by domestic responsibilities and with enough financial independence to spend his days wandering aimlessly about the city with no apparent objective or destination. Historically speaking, this individual is a white man. Or, as the American writer Lauren Elkin observes in her recent book on the female flâneuse, published just this year, it is as if “a penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.”

Edmund White, a gay man and elite Parisian socialite, exemplifies the pernicious gender-ignorance of most literary accounts of flânerie. In The Flâneur, for example, he blithely writes: “Whereas the word cruise is part of only the gay vocabulary in English, its French equivalent, draguer, is also heterosexual. Straight people cruise one another in Paris; unlike Americans, who feel menaced or insulted by lingering looks on the street, French women—and men!—consider la séduction to be one of the arts of living and an amorous glance their natural due.”

As an acculturated American woman who has been living in France on and off for the better part of a decade, I call bullshit. To be alone in public, to pass imperceptibly, to wander aimlessly on the streets of Paris oblivious of those invisible frontiers where gentrified neighborhoods turn suddenly into seedy slums, remains the privileged purview of white men. What, then, is the experience of the female flâneuse? And where does she wander?

Let me begin with the American journalist Elaine Sciolino, who has lived in Paris with her family for a decade and a half. I first learned of Mercier’s street reporting in Sciolino’s The Only Street in Paris, a loving biography of sorts of the author’s adopted street, the Rue des Martyrs, a kilometer stretch of cultural and culinary paradise just south of Montmartre. Sciolino is an adept female flâneuse in her own right; her meticulously researched account of life on the Rue des Martyrs is a testament to her keen observation, journalistic tact, and narrative wit.

The content of Sciolino’s book deserves its own post, but for now I want to focus on an innocuous, throwaway sentence from Sciolino’s book that rattled my nerves when I came across it. In her chapter on flânerie, Sciolino writes: “I have a complicated relationship with Mercier, as he was the subject of a doctoral dissertation I long ago started and failed to finish.”

Why this honesty? Why this willingness to admit defeat in the middle of a text that unambiguously attests to the author’s competence, discretion, and expertise? I suspect that Sciolino’s cast-off confession is symptomatic of the condition of the female flâneuse writ large. Contrary to the male flâneur, the female flâneuse feels compelled to justify her own position as a purveyor of knowledge while also constantly acknowledging her own positionality. As a woman, the female flâneuse cannot assume a detached objectivity with regards to her surroundings. And her surroundings, as I have previously written, often pose an imminent threat to her sense of safety.

There is a sexual politics of public space of which every female flâneuse is acutely aware. I cannot remember a day that I have not been harassed—either verbally or physically, with varying degrees of sexual intent—while walking alone in Paris or elsewhere in France. Granted, I currently live and work in an up-and-coming, blue-collar neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondissement, where gender politics may be more fluid (I am being generous here) than in the stuffy, aristocratic neighborhoods of Paris. Yet my experience underscores another aspect of flânerie to which my white, male interlocutors often choose to remain blissfully ignorant: to wander aimlessly without inhibition or repercussion is as much a function of gender as it is of race and class.

(I opened this post by stating that the sidewalk is the most democratic space in the modern city. But democracy isn’t always fair, and it certainly isn’t blind to gender or class or race.)

Another female flâneuse comes to mind: the French filmmaker Agnès Varda, who poignantly articulates the precarious condition of the female flâneuse in her 1961 film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cleo from 5 to 7.). (“Comes to mind” is too facile a phrase; it took considerable wandering in my Sherlockian mind-palace to come across upon a suitable example.) In Cléo de 5 à 7, Varda traces the title character’s transformation from an insecure shell of Western femininity—emphasized by series of fragmentary shots in the film’s opening scene of a manicured, made-up Cleo as she anxiously consults a tarot reader about an undiagnosed stomach pain—to a self-assured woman confidently strolling the streets of Paris. In the film’s pivotal scene, Cleo rips off her blonde wig and ventures out into the Parisian streets, at last unencumbered by the societal pressure of performing her gender. Cleo’s curiosity and independence blossom as she finally lays claim to the right to observe without being observed or objectified as a female body in a public space. Thus transformed into a female flâneuse, an active, observing entity, Cleo embodies the liberating androgyny that Virginia Woolf (the unparalleled female flâneuse of London) imagines in A Room of One’s Own.

Although one could certainly quibble about the feminist politics of Varda’s film (it is somewhat problematic, for example, that Cleo’s liberation only occurs after she sheds her feminine façade like last season’s skin, which one might interpret essentially as an rejection of femininity), its underlying message remains relevant. As a contemporary female flâneuse, perpetually wandering the streets of Paris, I endeavor to occupy and to document the public space of the sidewalk, with all its contradictions and sexual politics, and through writing, to claim my place amidst the crowd.