Xavier Darcos announces plans to combat stress in the workplace. Photo: Ministère: Travail, Solidarité, Ville

James Dalrymple of Grenoble Life asks why the French – despite sleeping more and living longer than everyone else – are so stressed. Apparently the French government wants to know too …

This month Labour Minister Xavier Darcos confirmed what I had already suspected – France needs to start dealing with stress, which has reached epidemic proportions. The proposed measures may be viewed by some as a knee-jerk reaction to the media storm surrounding the apparently high number of suicides at France Telecom since 2008, which – when taking into account the size of the organisation – may not be much higher than the (admittedly relatively high) national average. However, the new regulations likely to be implemented may not solve deeper issues related to national character: having lived in France for a few years now I feel qualified to say that, contrary to popular belief internationally, stress is endemic to the nation.

Ignore the latest OECD survey that says the French spend more time eating and sleeping than anyone else, a posteriori the French are an anxious lot. As a teacher I have come into contact with a broad cross section of Grenoble’s business community and I am constantly surprised by the amount of furrowed brows and hand-wringing I encounter, and this is not just because of a lack of love for learning English.

Despite the abundance of reasons to be happy in comparison to, say, British people (having quality healthcare, for example, or efficient public transport, good weather, a proliferation of delicious fresh produce, living two years longer on average, being paradoxically slim, etc. etc.) – the French strike me as a far more stressed people.

Call it what the British would refer to as the Blitz spirit (i.e., putting on a brave phizog in the face of abject misery) but we seem to deal with life’s inconveniences better than the French. Maybe our self-depreciating nature would simply not function in a society like France’s where, on the whole, there is much less to justifiably gripe about.

But tell that to the French. I realise now why the French hold that generous stereotype of the Brits as monocle-wearing stoics, bastions of calm in the midst of chaos. It was a view of the Brits that I found laughably alien when I arrived in France as a bruised and bewildered London commuter, but now I see why.

While a Londoner can somehow find it in himself to tolerate entire weekends (and bank holiday periods) of engineering work shutdown on the Underground and dreaded Thameslink, or the limbo of an NHS waiting list, or finding that every shop he knew from his childhood has turned into a Tesco-metro-mini-express … he can probably laugh it off down at the pub.

He may even indulge in that national sport, binge-drinking, but take refuge in regaling his colleagues about the quality of his hangover the next morning. According to recent press, the Frenchman will drink 10% more than his British counterpart, but by stealth – his habit of quaffing half a bottle with every meal perhaps slowly spiralling out of control.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the French work very hard. Yes, they enjoy unrivalled amounts of extra holiday time, but the only way to deliver France’s much-vaunted productivity is to slog it out at the desk. The French believe this too, they justify their stress by pointing out that they work harder than everybody else, something that might amuse American readers.

But no matter how much holiday is around the corner there is no doubt that the French feel the pressure in their highly regulated job market. Maybe it’s the coffee here – it makes people jumpy and brisk where the British workplace ceremony of making and drinking tea is a big cuddly arm of comfort around the shoulders: there there!

I was surprised to learn that the French sleep more than the international average, since the quality of my own sleep has declined since my arrival; it must be that coffee again. How to cure this? Making sport (sic) is the advice given by most Grenoblois as a cure-all for stress: whether it be slogging it up a 45 degree slope on a bike plastered in lycra or, even less logically, a gym, where the promise of more skin-tight neon and casual nakedness is hardly an attractive prospect to sooth my nerves.

The latter strikes me as particularly pointless in a city where – even if you don’t fancy tackling a near vertical ascent by bike dressed as an extra from Fame – plentiful cycle tracks make it the easiest of cities to work up even the most modest of sweats (my favourite kind!).

On a darker note, the relatively high suicide rate in the country may be representative of a more inherent inability of the French to cope with stress. In France Telcom’s case this has been blamed, by unions at least, on a never-ending drive for efficiency since its 1993 privatisation. The 40,000 jobs that have been lost in transforming France Telecom from public sector flagship to competitive multinational company are certainly not to be sniffed at, but I can’t help but wonder if this constant evolution - more characteristic of the American way of doing business – is a sometimes fatal anathema to a people for whom stability, security and prudence are cherished. How other nationals would react in similar circumstances is a moot point.

However, I find insistence by students of mine – who work at a recently internationalised French company - that in France one person does the job of three people in another country, as laughable. When French workers speak with misty-eyed nostalgia about the not-so-long-ago when they were less blighted by pressure, it is clear they are talking about a pre-globalised world. Is globalisation – France’s modern-era bogeyman – to blame for all this stress?

From a personal point of view, I suppose what I really want to know is: why is everybody in such a hurry? If I’m not being hassled off the road by drivers (often female I might add) for whom driving at the speed limit – or, in most cases, just acceptably above – is not fast enough, I am being harried in shop queues. The French are not quite the monster queue-pushers some Brits – sensitive in this matter - would like to suggest: it’s not quite like (and I’m talking from personal experience here) in India or Morocco, where queues are just for tourists, or in Italy (so the rumour has it), for fools.

Nevertheless, the French don’t like queues, and many try to expedite them, quite unsuccessfully, by standing as close as possible to the person in front of them. Most confoundingly, there are the women d’une certain age at my local primeur who have solved the age-old indignity of being next-in-line by placing their pannier by the cash-till before a desperate (and evidently stressful) snatch and grab job around the shop to fill it up - their place at the head of the queue secured.

I am often tempted to assuage the anxiety of those around me by saying hey, don’t stress: it’s France! when I realise how meaningless this would be. But again, what is there to be stressed about? In Britain, we have surely one of the most hysterical televisual news formats in the world, dramatised by the strokes of Big Ben: BONG! Feral youth on the rampage … BONG!! Knife crime escalation blamed on diet of Fanta and Turkey Twizzlers … BONG!!! Nuclear apocalypse beacons … etc.

How we manage to take this constant diet of failure and self-flagellation in the UK is a mystery, whereas in France the news is suspiciously neutral: 500 cars were set on fire in Paris last night but this is not representative of a wider malaise in French society and you needn’t worry your pretty little head about it.

My conclusion: maybe in Britain we are always being told that life is much worse than it really is and therefore are pleasantly surprised when we can laugh it off. In France, government promises (disseminated almost unchallenged by the television news) that the social state can cure all, can create a gap between the ideal and the reality. Anxiety may lie in between. Careful, it might be contagious!

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