FRANCE basked in sunshine yesterday, but a sense of gloom descended on the nation as the end of the long summer holidays magnified a belief that disaster lurks around the corner.

La rentrée, the traditional week when France returns to work, strike or school and the media take the national pulse, was proclaimed to be the most fraught for years.

Soaring petrol prices and fear of crashing aircraft and bird flu compounded Gallic anguish over 10 per cent unemployment and falling real incomes. Nothing, say returning vacanciers, seems to halt the decline that has afflicted the country for more than a decade. While better-off Britons and other foreigners crowded France’s envied holiday spots, the natives moaned about “la crise” around café tables and camp sites. “La rentrée has never been so morose,” France Soir reported yesterday over four pages on why “the French are Worried”.

“The French went on holiday with their morale already at rock bottom,” the tabloid newspaper said. “They were crushed by the insolent success of the British, their eternal rivals. Growth, consumption, unemployment, Olympic Games — they had everything and we had nothing. Tony Blair was making fun of Jacques Chirac at European summits and the ideas of France and its social model were no longer worth tuppence.”

Now things were only worse, it added. Le Parisien offered two pages of tips on “How to escape the September depression”. One of them was not “how to make a fast getaway” because the Government added to the gloom at the weekend by announcing a possible cut in the national speed limit from 130km/h (81mph) to 115km/h (72mph) to curb fuel consumption. Le Monde which prefers understatement, noted on its front page: “High unemployment, weak growth, rising petrol prices: the economic outlook is grey at the moment that the French go back to work.”

Ouest-France reported that only 30 per cent of the French were optimistic about their future, compared with 59 per cent a year ago. The figure was by far the lowest since the poll began in 1995 — the year that President Chirac won office promising to cut unemployment and revive the sagging economy. Growth and unemployment are the same now as then. Bad news over the past month has sharpened what commentators and psychologists are calling a “state of fear” that is paralysing France. The spate of August air disasters — two involving French aircraft or mainly French nationals — have put the wind up travellers. Hundreds of airline passengers have mutinied in the past two weeks, refusing to board foreign charter aircraft that frightened them.

Two dozen went home from a Paris airport on Sunday rather than continue on a back-up airliner sent by their Turkish airline after all the passengers balked at the first aircraft. The Government yesterday announced a blacklist of five banned airlines, which was immediately attacked as insufficient.

National decline has been a favourite theme of books for the past three years as experts have catalogued the country’s sense of losing its soul and prosperity to “Anglo-Saxon” globalisation. Fear is now replacing decline as the diagnosis. Christophe Lambert, the chief of the Publicis advertising giant, has made a splash in recent days with La Société de la peur (The Fearful Society). His book that says that France is petrified with “fear of the future, fear of losing, fear of others, fear of taking a risk, fear of solitude, fear of growing old”.

He said yesterday: “Our society is depressed, listless, turned towards the past and negative.”

The rejection in May of the European constitution referendum was a perfect illustration, symbolised by the fear of “the Bolkestein directive”, he said. This was the draft EU law on services that France feared would trigger an invasion of Polish plumbers.

According to Nicolas Baverez, author of “La France qui tombe,” the first of the “declinist” books, agreed with M Lambert. “Confronted with (globalisation), France is the only developed democracy that has been carried away by uncontrolled individual and collective fear.”

M Lambert and most other “fear theorists” are modernisers who blame political leaders of both the left and right who have lacked the courage to tell France that its paternalist state cannot survive the free world market. M Chirac has governed by fanning fear rather than by promoting real reform, M Lambert said. The only French politician aiming to wake up the country was Nicolas Sarkozy, star Cabinet minister and leader of M Chirac’s Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP), he said. M Sarkozy, a friend of M Lambert, is running to succeed M Chirac in 2007.

M Chirac is blamed by the left-wing opposition for failing to shore up the protective state against globalisation. At beginning-of-term party conferences over the weekend, Socialists, Communists and Trotskyites searched for a saviour to lead France out of its crisis. Among the Communists and the Trotskyites, an informal consensus settled on a potential leader: José Bové, the sheep farmer whose 1999 attack on a McDonald’s restaurant turned him into a hero of the left.

Zut! Existential and not-so-existential reasons to be miserable...

• Unemployment has stood at more than 10 per cent for most of the past decade
  
  
• Economic growth is persistently weak and average purchasing power has declined
  
  
• Housing prices and rent have rocketed upwards for the past five years. Britons have forced up property prices, pushing out locals in rural areas
  
  
• Soaring petrol prices
  
  
• Declining public services as cost-saving reforms take effect on pensions and health care. Schools are also in decline as France falls in the world education league table
  
  
• France is losing out economically and politically to a world dominated by the United States and its “Anglo-Saxon” allies (the Olympic Games are a typical Anglo “stitch-up” )
  
  
• Neither President Chirac nor the Socialist Opposition has a plausible answer to France’s plight
  
• Islamic terrorism and unrest in French estates
  
  
• The EU has lost its Gallic soul and wants Turkey as a member. Polish plumbers are about to invade France
  
  
• French Caribbeans were victims of Venezula crash and Air France jumbo Airbus was wrecked in a casualty-free landing accident in Toronto

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