John Lichfield: Our Man in Paris

France is a happy country, confident about the future. It is a dynamic, rapidly changing country, where old social certainties are being allowed to disappear with little more than a Gallic shrug.

Pardon? By their statistics you shall know them. An avalanche of official numbers has poured into the French public domain in recent days. Taken together ­ and added to a rather startling statistic of my own ­ they defy the standard image of France as a country basking in gloom and resistant to change.

Here are a few of the numbers:

2: the average number of babies born to women of child-bearing age in France last year. France now has the highest fertility rate in the European Union, overtaking Ireland.

84, 77.1: years of life-expectancy in France last year for women and men. Taken together, this is the highest in Europe, equal with Spain.

51 per cent: proportion of people in France, the "oldest daughter of the Roman Catholic Church", who say that they are Catholic (down from 62 per cent four years ago).

50 per cent: proportion of children born out of wedlock in France.

135,000: The number of divorces in France last year (double the figure of 25 years ago).

24: The number of children with divorced parents in my 12-year-old daughter's class of 30 children in a Catholic school in a bourgeois quartier of Paris.

Rising life-expectancy and a high birth-rate are taken by sociologists as leading indicators of a content and confident society.

The French, when questioned by pollsters, predict a calamitous future for their nation, threatened by globalisation, a bigger Europe, immigration, taxes, ultra-capitalism, climate change and singer Johnny Hallyday's departure to Switzerland.

They are far more positive when asked to talk about their own lives. The bébé boom in France has been gathering pace for 14 years. It is partly explained by generous state provision for child care. More than half of French children under three attend publicly funded crèches. To be a working mother may never be easy ­ but it is easier in France. This is not new. The baby boom is.

Young French couples may say that they are miserable but they are staking a claim in the future, not just the selfish present. Compare the Italians, Germans, and Spanish, whose fertility rate hovers around a disastrous 1.3 babies for each woman of child-bearing age. Britain is stuck on an unsatisfactory 1.66.

The odious far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen suggests that France is being subjected to an avalanche of brown and black babies: a "substitution of population". This is typical Le Pen nonsense. The baby boom applies fairly evenly across all social and racial groups.

Half of these French babies are born outside marriage but relatively few are born to single mamans. The French are forming couples but simply not bothering to get married ­ a symptom of the collapse of influence of the Catholic Church.

Another symptom is the soaring divorce rate, which is still behind Britain's but climbing rapidly. One in two French marriages now ends in divorce.

The two principal candidates in the presidential election this spring are, therefore, typical, modern French personalities. Ségolòne Royal, the Socialist candidate, has four children. She has been with the same partner for 25 years but, by her choice, never got married. Nicolas Sarkozy, the main centre-right candidate, has two sons from his first, dissolved, marriage and one from his on-off-on second.

If elected, Mme Royal would be the first woman president and the first unmarried president of France; M. Sarkozy would be the first divorced president. A few years ago, neither prospect would have been thinkable.

In terms of social attitudes, France is not such an immobile country. Economically and politically, many French people ­ not all ­ remain stubbornly resistant to change.

Thus France is, perversely, more conservative on the left than on the right. France is perverse in another way. It doubts its future while busily creating (or procreating) one.

Demography is power. If fertility rates continue as they are, France will grow to a country of 75 million by the mid-century and then start to sprint ahead of Britain and Germany. Could the future of Europe be French?