vitality gives way to look navel

       PARIS: Versailles was still alive, to haute couture week, the designers presented their creations, let them eat cake, hand sewn with gold embroidery and fur trimmed innocent - frousfrous no real women can wear and can afford a few.

On Friday evening, Christian Lacroix presented his tribute to Elsa Schiaparelli, but also haute couture in Paris could not lift it out of its depression. "Libert, equality, morosit"

Exhilaration important to consider navel. The French are so busy indulging in their existential alienation - a state of mind Camus as "Should I kill myself, or a cup of coffee" described - you do not even have the energy to rude. And now they smoke electronic cigarettes, boredom is not so cool. This is not, because they have lost the belief in the own superiority. They have lost faith that the rest of the world sees the whole country, in the words of Catherine Deneuve crazy blue moods, June spider ceiling -. a spider on the ceiling.

In the Place Vendome, Christian Lacroix has been sent models crape silk chiffon peplum skirt - whoever they are - all on Avenue Hoche, the dentist Lacroix lamented mourning the City of Lights. Holding a cigarette in a waiting room full of Picasso print cushions, Dr. Gerard Armandou as his patients said always inclined to pessimism, still full of suffering, as they now sit in his chair looking at all issues including "do not go on holiday in Egypt. "

"Cocteau said that the French Italians are in a bad mood, but now there are more sluggish," he said. "We connect with nostalgia. What is longing? Where this is not in agreement with the hope that you have in the past."

He said he widens abysses between the sectors of the society French - young and old, locals and the course Immigrated, "smokers and Non smoking, homo Sexually and not homo Sexually."

"Enter conflict where there was none," he said. "The French people, maybe they think too much., The happy stupid not to see the problem." People with joy, after all, are simply not paying attention.

"This is not the end of the world", Armandou said with a Gallic shrug shoulders. "This is the end of the world."

The French have higher rates of antidepressants and suicide than most other Europeans. And while arguing about how to forward, they feel trapped in the past, burdened by high unemployment and low expectations, the onerous taxes, Gerard Depardieu led to conflicts with immigrants fleeing, political scandals, Holland fatigue, such as Germany, economic stagnation, hyperelitist a system of education, and the cold and wet weather, the famous Paris spring ruined. Instead of confronting the issues at hand - such as globalization and competition with the Chinese adapt - the French mourning their lost stature and glorious past, from the Colonial Empire, the Enlightenment, Revolution, Napoleon, and the authors of the Jazz Age and artists. They are shown in a as strong as in Woody Allen's romantic time warp, stuck "Midnight in Paris".

"In 1945, France was on the losing side, but the reality has long been obscured by the political speeches of General de Gaulle and Mitterrand: both held in their own way, the idea that it promised a large an extraordinary power of fate "said the historian Prochasson Le Monde. "After he left office, the French continue to live in this faith." Today, he added, this illusion is gradually "disappear France is a country in mourning." What is missing today in France, he said, is music history, "the ability to imagine a better future."

It does not help, because they come to the end of their dashed illusions of grandeur, the French discover that their own government and America through the lens. "Uncle Sam presented very, very bad" (Uncle Sam is very, very bad act), Le Monde rumbled in a front page editorial on Monday.

"I know we can be unbearable, but not to the point where you have the right microphones with us," said Philippe Manire, managing partner of the consulting firm footprint.

A BVA-Gallup poll was conducted in 2011 in 51 countries, found that the French were more pessimistic than the Afghans and Iraqis. As the sociologist Dubet told Le Monde: "If France does not get any Olympic medals and all the Nobel Prize, the French, that it is hopeless."

Manire complains such as Disneyland, the Champs-lysis was "disgusting", with hordes of young tourists taking pictures in front of the Ladure macaroon shop, and photos of French without "s" you want. "

"The intersection of globalization and the French spirit is particularly painful," he said. "We believe that what we were accustomed to death and what we offered is not as good." The French given up the francs, but not want to give up something else engagement in a insipid global society.

"The French are very conceptually, very cerebral", Manire said. "We need more food and television. In America, it is not a betrayal of the ideal if you want to watch TV all day, while in France."

It is a measure of their desperation that the French have it. Binding on studies of happiness in the United States Claudia Senik, a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the Sorbonne, the darling of the media on the subject of his research was in French malaise. Life in France with his inflexible decisions about talent and locked the labor market, reducing the likelihood that 20 percent happy, she said.

While all the other herds here to be blinded, the French are less satisfied than the European average. She calls it "a cultural trait" linked not only to the circumstances, but the values, beliefs and behavior from generation to generation and exacerbated by the insanely competitive schools that hard on self-esteem. Stood other words, increased the misfortune in the French bones. When French citizens emigrate, she said, they take with them their grief.

"Our happiness is based on a small shortage," she said in Espresso Le Rostand, opposite the Jardin du Luxembourg. "It's really in the French genome."