Les miserables? Actually the French insist they are happier than ever

Nearly 80% say they are content with life, yet the right is intent on pushing a nation of decline

Turn on the radio or television in France, and it is gloom and doom from the first morning headline to the last late bulletin. France is in terminal decline, we are told, mostly by rightwing presidential hopefuls engaged in a competition over who can utter the darkest, direst warnings of a future in which they are not voted into the Elysee palace next April.

Declinism is a la mode; bleak is the new black. These purveyors of nostalgia and what the French call morosite are driving the country into one of its periodic existential crises with a rallying cry plagiarised from Donald Trump that only they can make France great again".