She sent an e-mail to her father to say that the keys to her flat were in her handbag on the desk and to ask him to feed Frimousse, her cat, and Zébulon, her rabbit. “I’m sorry that you have to receive this sort of message but I’m more than lost,” wrote Stéphanie, who was 32. “Je t’aime, papa”. By the time he read the e-mail she was dead, having thrown herself out of the window on the fourth floor of her office in the latest example of a phenomenon that is often airbrushed out of the clichéd image of France.

Sure, this is le beau pays, the country of wine and gastronomy, of leisurely lunches and stunning scenery, number one for the fourth year running in a recent international quality-of-life survey. But it is also a nation of doubt and anguish, consuming more antidepressants than any other and suffering from one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world.

The reason that Stephanie’s death shone light on to the dark side of the French psyche is that she worked for France Télécom — and that 22 other employees of the telecommunications group have killed themselves over the past 18 months. Most had gone unnoticed outside their home towns. Stéphanie did not. That she was young woman, that she had killed herself in Paris, and that the list of suicides at the company was growing by the month transformed the personal tragedies into a national drama.

Unions accused the company of driving its staff to despair. President Sarkozy demanded action. And Didier Lombard, the chief executive, was forced to apologise for describing the deaths among his personnel as a “fashion”. But amid a frenzied debate, the more thoughtful commentators pointed out that the suicide rate among France Télécom’s 102,000 French employees was 15.3 a year — alarmingly high, but not significantly higher than the national rate of 14.7 for 100,000 people. It is France, not just France Télécom, that is gripped by morbid thoughts.

The French, for instance, are 1.9 times more likely to take their own lives than the Dutch, 2.8 times more likely than the Italians and 2.4 times more likely than the Spanish or the British. There are nations with worse rates — Finland, for example, where the practice is widely blamed on alcoholism, or Japan, which has historically been tolerant of suicide. But in wealthy Western Europe, France stands out, with at least 10,500 people ending their own lives last year.

How did they come to this point in what International Living, the US consultancy, described as “the world’s best country”? There are several possible factors — a sombre strain in French culture; high alcohol consumption; the absence of an organisation as efficient as the Samaritans is in the UK. But the explanation that is most widely voiced concerns the 6,000 people in the 30-to-60 age range who kill themselves every year and focuses on the Gallic relationship with work.

The French may sometimes be portrayed as shirkers, always happy to quit the office or the factory for an apéritif in the garden, but this is to miss an essential component of modern France, according to Christian Baudelot, professor of sociology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris: “The truth is that we are very attached to our jobs. More than almost anywhere else, people define themselves by their professions.” Ask an English builder to describe himself and he might well say that he is a Liverpudlian or a Geordie or a Manchester United supporter, according to Baudelot. “Here, he will say that he is a builder.”

Le travail is the cornerstone of modern France in other ways, too, Baudelot says. “In Italy and Spain, people rely on the family for solidarity. In the UK, there is both a cult of individualism where you are taught to get by on your own and a sort of primal neighbourhood solidarity — in the pub, for instance. France is different. People are taught to get by in groups and it is in the workplace where they seek the solidarity they need. The workplace is the cement of our society.”

The cement, however, is cracking as unemployment and globalisation impose a competitive edge to the world of work. “The violence of the modern economy is the same everywhere. But it is felt much more keenly in France,” says Baudelot. “People sense that social bonds are unravelling and they are disorientated by that.”

Adrian Vodovosoff, a psychoanalyst, says that his patients have suffered from troubles related to this trend: “They complain of a loss of support from colleagues, and often feel that when they’ve got problems at work, there’s no one to help them.”

The malaise is exacerbated by France’s refusal to accept that changes in the world economy are irreversible, says Louis Chauvel, professor of sociology at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. “Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, the British understood in the 1980s that the blessed period of prosperity, growth, stability and good pensions was over. France did not.”

Instead, the French cling to the illusion that a return to Les Trente Glorieuses, as the 30-year postwar boom became known, is possible. The result, says Chauvel, is frustration — the gap between aspirations and the possibility of fulfilling them, in sociological language — and depression.

Most pull through with the aid of friends, family and pills; the average French person takes 29 antidepressants a year, compared with 28 in the UK, 21 in Spain, 17 in Germany and 14 in Italy. “But when problems at work are accompanied by problems at home after, say, a divorce, people can become suicidal,” says Professor Michel Debout, chairman of the French National Union for the Prevention of Suicide.

Statistical evidence to back the theory can be found in a comparison between the suicide and unemployment rates, which follow each other more closely in France than in any other country, according to Chauvel. Both rose sharply after the oil crisis of the 1970s and then at the beginning of the 1990s. “But it is not necessarily the unemployed who kill themselves during these periods,” says Chauvel. “It is all those who feel that their jobs are threatened, who are afraid of losing something essential.”

In this, the spate of suicides at France Télécom is indicative of le mal français.More than 60 per cent of its workers are civil servants who joined the company when it was a state monopoly in the belief “that they would be carrying out a noble mission to serve the public,” according to Debout. But since its privatisation in 2004, they have found themselves in a competitive business driven by productivity and cutting-edge technology, with human resource programmes called — in English — “Next” and “It’s time to move”.

Fabrice Sahut, an employee since 1989, put it this way: “We have earphones on our heads all the time now. All the camaraderie is gone. All that’s left of the public service we once knew is nostalgia.”

Stéphanie, too, felt isolated at work, said her father. Psychologically fragile by the death of her mother in 1996, she did not speak to her colleagues much, rarely ate lunch with them and detested her line manager. Her mood improved after she was moved to a customer service department at Orange, the group’s mobile telephone business, in June. The work was interesting and her manager more likeable. Then, this month, she was told that her old boss, the one she hated, was taking over the new department. “I’d rather die,” she wrote in her last e-mail. “I’m taking my organ donor card with me, one never knows . . .”