That is the title of a post published on CNN: ‘Why France is best place to live in world’. Bindi Dupouy is Australian, she lives in Paris and she’s married to a French man. Most of the Sama Team members live in Paris and we were very happy to read that France was voted the best place in the world to live for the fifth year in a row by International Living magazine.

Let’s find out the reasons exposed in CNN’s article by Daniela Deane:

Dupouy, a 28-year-old lawyer, got almost five months paid maternity leave from her company for the birth. She can take another seven months off beyond that — a year total — unpaid, if she wants, with her job guaranteed under French law […] One of the reasons France keeps winning the ranking is its world-class health care system, which Dupouy just experienced first-hand […] France scores high marks across the board in the survey, which is done every January, from health care (100 points) to infrastructure (92 points) to safety and risk (100 points). “No surprise,” said the magazine in its report. “Its (France’s) tiresome bureaucracy and high taxes are outweighed by an unsurpassable quality of life, including the world’s best health care.” “The bread, the cheese, the wine,” Dan Prescher, special projects editor at the magazine, told CNN, when asked why France just keeps on winning year after year. “That weighs pretty heavily in quality of life.”

We agree on “The bread, the cheese, the wine,” but everything is not that perfect in the ‘the best place in the world to live’:

Of course, France too has its problems. The country suffers from high youth unemployment, particularly among the disaffected young people who live in its equivalent of the projects, known as les banlieues. Late last year, the French government opened a national discussion about national identity, which has evolved into debates over whether immigrants, and particularly Muslim immigrants, are French enough. The country has the highest Muslim population of any European country, with an estimated six million living in the country. But for the most part, French people enjoy a good lifestyle. International Living says that during their large chunk of leisure time, the French enjoy visiting the country’s many beaches and Alpine ski resorts.

As Premium members of the Sama Epicurean Fraternal Society, we fully enjoy everything France offers as was mentioned previously: the bread, the cheese, the wine. French health care system is amazing and it’s a privilege some people have fought for for decades (Read: Senator Edward Kennedy died at 77) but it’s also very expensive and hardly sustainable. Paris is a beautiful city and the survey noted that “romantic Paris offers the best of everything, but services don’t fall away in Alsace’s wine villages, in wild and lovely Corsica, in lavender-scented Provence.” That’s for the scenery of postcard. Like any other country, France is facing numerous difficulties: high youth unemployment, economic crisis and the national discussion about national identity created quite a bad atmosphere in the country, revealing sweeping and fallacious (if not racist) generalizations about immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants…

So yes, France is a great country on many aspects, as French citizens we shouldn’t complain if we look at what other people are living in devastated countries. But the truth is the quality of life for the middle class is not good enough to enjoy the lovely postcard description which is made. There are many working poor and low-income workers, and all the good bread, the cheese and the wine won’t change that. So yes, France is a beautiful country and a great place to live but the other side of the coin is much less shiny and we should not avoid it when we describe France. On the other hand, it’s difficult if not impossible to summarize the living in France in a few words. French people are well known for complaining a lot, sometimes for nothing important, but some other times, they have good reasons to complain.

We are happy France is presented as being ‘the best place in the world to live’ by International Living magazine. We wish this feeling could be shared by more French citizens.