Au Revoir to All That - FT.com
The French call it déclinisme, the national propensity for measuring, discussing and wallowing in the country’s seemingly perpetual decline. Books, newspaper columns and television chat shows dwell obsessively on the downhill direction of French society, democracy, work habits, civility and culture. Conferences and colloquies on such subjects are more numerous than Paris strip shows, as Theodore Zeldin, Oxford historian of France, once observed.
