I’m bullish about France, but few agree

France is a country where the wolf, in the shape of the far right, has been howling at the door for 50 years. At first he was an ugly but powerless creature. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party was too extreme to get elected. But in 2011 his daughter Marine took over and began rebranding the wolf from predator to protector. The wolf thrived. The upcoming parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, called by President Emmanuel Macron, are the far right’s best ever chance to enter a democratic French government — for the wolf to walk into the house and take possession. That’s because more French people than ever think, “Give the wolf a chance.”

The wolf tells a better story than Macron, but it’s an untrue one. Le Pen depicts a France that’s in “generalised collapse”. It’s a place where acts of violence are “exploding in villages”, driven largely, she implies, by unassimilable non-white men. She warns that the country could soon descend into civil war. In a poll in 2021, 45 per cent of respondents agreed. Economically, she calls France “the world champion” of debt, unemployment and poverty. It’s a neoliberal wasteland, in which Macron has shut the factories and cruelly raised the pension age to an inhuman 64.

Gloom sells in France. In a poll last October by Ipsos-Sopra Steria, 82 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that “France is in decline”. I often feel I’m the only person living here who is bullish about the country. That’s probably because I’m an out-of-touch globalist, blind to the suffering of “real people” outside my elite Parisian bubble.

Still, here is the case for optimism. For one, France isn’t a neoliberal wasteland. In 2022, it spent 23.8 per cent of GDP on social protection, the highest in the EU. Even after Macron’s reforms, most pensioners can still expect more than 20 years of retirement. And France has finally developed a world-beating economic sector. Three of the EU’s five largest corporations by market value are French luxury companies. The biggest, LVMH, is worth about five times as much as Germany’s most valuable carmaker, Mercedes. France, in short, has become the Silicon Valley of luxury. This industry, like French tourism, cannot be offshored to somewhere like Vietnam, because it’s selling the brand of France.

True, France underperformed during the eras of industrialisation and then tech. But it looks better placed for the green transition. Thanks to its nuclear power stations, France produces electricity with the lowest carbon intensity of any large economy, calculates energy think-tank Ember. That appeals to companies under pressure to cut their carbon emissions. Danish obesity-drugmaker Novo Nordisk cited green energy as a reason to open an insulin factory in the French cathedral city of Chartres. Admittedly, re-industrialisation may create disappointingly few human jobs. But it should help keep the economy ticking. French unemployment is 7.5 per cent, near its lowest level since 1982.

Most French towns have lost their reason to exist. If they weren’t already there, nobody would now build them

Another factual retort to Le Pen is that French streets have got safer. The country’s murder rate has halved since 1993, reports the interior ministry. The fall was even steeper in the chief immigration region, Greater Paris. In fact, France looks like a safe haven in our scary new world. It has nice neighbours and faces less risk from climate change than hotter southern Europe or the inauspiciously named Low Countries. France also has the EU’s highest birth rate, largely because state crèches and nursery schools allow parents to raise kids without going nuts, as I can testify.

Why, then, so much discontent? An underlying issue is that France has western Europe’s largest territory. Millennia of small farming ended here in a few confusing decades. Today LVMH exports more than all of French agriculture.

The consequence: most French towns and villages outside tourist hotspots have lost their reason to exist. If they weren’t already there, nobody would now build them. They are shedding shops, schools and doctors. Places without post offices and train stations are statistically more likely to vote far right, because residents feel abandoned by the Republic. Workers have moved to cities, especially Paris. The EU’s biggest international metropolis is another French asset, but inside France it stands for arrogance and wealth, embodied by Macron.

There’s an obvious solution: encourage hybrid working, which would let people leave cities for France’s plethora of cheap charming places near TGV stations. De-urbanisation is feasible. But low trust in French workplaces has helped curb remote work. Many bosses think: if employees aren’t here, they’ll goof off.

Meanwhile, the wolf is turning the doorknob.

Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com

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