France has never had it so good, or been so miserable  

The French are richer, taller, more free, better educated, better fed and healthier than ever before. They are also enjoying sex more than ever.

Why, then, are they, taken en masse, so miserable and so pessimistic about the future? This week sees an important, biennial event in French life: the publication of a new edition of Francoscopie, an eloquent and infinitely detailed psycho-analysis of France by the sociologist Gérard Mermet.

Francoscopie 2003 (Larousse, €32) is the tenth, two-yearly edition and Mr Mermet includes a retrospective of all that has changed in France in the 20 years since he began his exercise in social analysis and statistic-crunching.

As Mr Mermet points out, almost all the leading indicators of physical and spiritual well-being have pointed consistently upwards during that period.

The only exceptions are the boom in unemployment in the 1990s and the steady rise in the crime rate.

Overall, the country has a higher disposable real income and longer life expectancy than in the early 1980s; it eats better and drinks much less. Individually, French men and women have one of the highest declared rates of personal happiness in the EU at more than 90 per cent.

And yet, taken as a whole, the country is "ill at ease, dissatisfied and frustrated". Contempt for politicians and cynicism about institutions has soared. Anxiety about the future is at record levels. The breakthrough of the ultra-right National Front in the first round of the presidential election in April was a scream of unhappiness by a "great number of French people, who see a world full of threats, rather than opportunities".

France's most read sociologist offers a number of explanations. Some are specific to France. Mr Mermet says the "French mentality" is one of ingratitude. As soon as one set of demands is satisfied, another batch is formulated.

He also suggests the collapse of Catholic faith – 78 per cent say they believe but only 7 per cent go to church – has left an "existential vacuum ... a great emptiness" in France. But Mr Mermet also offers an explanation which might apply equally in Britain and any other developed country. Collapse in faith in Christianity has been matched by a collapse in faith in the most "modern" of religions: the belief in "progress" and the superiority of "modernity" in itself.

He divides the French into three categories, which cut across the normal left-right divides: the mutants, the mutins (mutineers) and the moutons (sheep).

The mutants are young, educated, urban and predominantly male. They believe in technology, internationalism and freedom. They think the nation state is doomed. They think that everyone should invent his or her own identity. The mutineers feel menaced by the pace of change. They want to hold on to nationalism, tradition, familiarity and identity. They detest globalism, McDonald's and the Disney Corporation. The sheep do not know what to think, if they think at all. They consume the global culture avidly but also feel threatened by physical and spiritual "insecurity" of the modern world. It is these people, Mr Mermet says, who vote for the far right or, increasingly, fail to vote at all. They represent a "real threat" that the "old demons of populism", which have torn France apart in the past, could be reawakened by demagoguery in the future.

Mr Mermet's book demolishes one or two received ideas about the French. More than 90 per cent of French people now say they find sex to be "agreeable", which is a modest increase. And French spouses no longer have more affairs than those in other countries. Only 36 per cent of married French men and women admit having had sex outside marriage, compared to 50 per cent in the US and 42 per cent in Britain.