'A climate of pain and a feeling of despondency reign, which block any self-projection into a better future. It's the compost in which a possible social explosion is fermenting. Attention is called to the difficulty elected officials are having in creating a sense of proportion and inspiring confidence. This climate of pessimism and defiance is feeding extremist arguments about the impotence of the authorities."

The above paragraph doesn't come from some foreign journalistic Chicken Little reveling in (or reeling through) a tough, despairing moment for the eternally contrary (or is it the gifted and ingenious) French. Rather, it is a message extracted last month from an Interior Ministry report on the mood of the nation, dispatched to high officials in the government and leaked at the ministry's displeasure to Le Figaro.


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France's President Francois Hollande Reuters


Arguing against the assessment's realism is fruitless. Not a whole lot less difficult is assuming France can burst out of its self-inflicted grief with enough of a self-critical whoop to convince Europe and world that it has the determination to merit being heard again as a leader.

Apart from the country's admirable willingness to put its military at risk against al Qaeda and Syria, and to call out the Obama administration on its softened approach to Iran, the task involves a long, steep trudge.

As things stand:

• Seventy-four percent of the French think France is on the decline and 83% think that President François Hollande's blurry reform policies are "ineffectual," according to reputable polling organizations. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, says "French competitiveness remains insufficient and strengthening public finances can no longer rely on tax increases."

• As an illustration of severe tensions between Muslims and the native white population, contrasting discrimination against Arabs and a developing sense among the French of their loss of identity, another 74% see Islam as intolerant and incompatible with French society.

• With an estimated growth rate of 0.2% this year, unemployment in France, now at 11%, is projected by the European Commission to rise to 11.2% in 2014.

This plays into newsmagazine covers like one that portrayed Sigmund Freud staring at President Hollande across the page with a headline reading: "Hollande, as Shrinks See Him—Can He Change?"; or another with a picture of a troubled-looking Mr. Hollande and the accompanying line, "At the Edge of Chaos: From A to Z, the Inventory of His Failures."

A year and a half into the president's five-year term, you don't have to be a Jacques Lacan, the country's late hero of psychiatry, to understand that the French regard Mr. Hollande, who ran for president calling himself a "normal guy," as lacking in authority. Maybe more interesting is Mr. Hollande's apparent analysis of the French themselves: too uncomfortable with change, too risk-averse, too volatile to challenge with the reforms needed to still the country's rage and return it to competitiveness.

Their enactment would signal French readiness to reject years of immobility and to dismantle France's cozy conceits—a "rupture" promised by Nicolas Sarkozy and never delivered. But those hard reforms are also ones which would equal an official admission of the depth of the Hollande government's responsibility for France's troubles.

Take the 35-hour workweek. It has been an institutionalized drag on the economy since its adoption by Socialists in 2000, but Mr. Sarkozy ran from attempting its abolition, fearing confrontation in the streets with labor unions. Now, its provisions, as if chiseled by a left-wing Michelangelo into a Sacred Monument to Entitlements, stand out as a gauge of cranky French exceptionalism in a European Union where no other member country has created a similar law.

Ditching the 35-hour week could be the first part of a big bang course-correction that might help rid the president of his reputation for indecision and serve as a bona fide for a less ideological France's hopes of reclaiming its share, alongside Germany, of European leadership.

There is a second area calling for high-visibility change. It involves the Socialist Party's traditional distance from anything like a national affirmative-action program—another unrealized Sarkozy campaign promise—out of concern for losing the votes of working class whites. Yet reality says the alternative is more frustrating, politically correct debate, a strengthening of extremist politics, and greater animosity between the majority population and the Arab immigrant community.

With the French presidency's extremely broad powers, and some nerve, Mr. Hollande's government could systematically open new areas of employment and education to Muslims and link this to specific requirements for new, more wholehearted assimilation into French society.

That's a lot of walking the walk, and all uphill.

But Mr. Hollande is described as increasingly energized. He is said to see France, through its positions on Iran and Syria and interventions in Mali and the Central African Republic, now playing the role of the only credible and active political and military force in Europe.

In a striking report last week, Le Monde wrote that Mr. Hollande's current objectives were "to smash the image of an all-powerful Germany facing a France that is 'Europe's sick country,' " and "to halt, as they say at the Élysée Palace, 'transforming economic dynamism into political domination.' "

With such big ambitions, a lot more French economic dynamism wouldn't hurt. The rules for winning respect and recognition haven't changed. They're to be seized at home with vast decisions touching on society, real growth and descending unemployment.

The truth is, against France's difficulties in accepting pain and abandoning its enshrined fibs and fantasies, what it may hope for as positive flickers on 2014's horizon are nowhere close to being victories.


Mr. Vinocur is former executive editor of the International Herald Tribune.