BOTH relief and tears will greet the results of France’s school-leaving baccalauréat exam on July 5th. With breathtaking efficiency, the entire country’s exam papers are corrected and marked within just two weeks. Founded in 1808 by Napoleon, the bac is an entry ticket to university as well as a yearly national ritual, which opens with a gruelling compulsory four-hour philosophy general paper that even scientists have to sit. This year the papers seem particularly revealing of how French youngsters are taught to view the world.

“What do we owe to the state?” was one essay option in the philosophy exam. In the economics and social science paper, pupils were asked to comment on a wealth-distribution table, showing that 10% of French households owned 48% of the country’s wealth, and then told to “demonstrate that social conflict can be a factor behind social cohesion”. We still have the mentality of the class struggle, says Nicolas Lecaussin, of the Institute of Fiscal and Economic Research (IREF), a think-tank, and author of a report on economics textbooks.

France excels at producing top-rate academic economists. But high-school teaching of economics is uneven. The IREF study last year showed that, in one tome’s 382 pages, only 18 were devoted to business. “Entrepreneurs and business leaders are almost absent,” noted the report, and “globalisation and free trade are treated with distrust.”

The national syllabus has been somewhat revised since 2011. Basic economic concepts, including supply and demand, have been reinforced. Economics and sociology, the two component parts of the combined paper, have been partly separated. The portrayal of companies has become more neutral. With government backing, Béatrice Couairon of the Institute of Enterprise, a think-tank, runs a programme to bring together business leaders and lycée economics teachers in order, she says, “to close the gap”.

Yet the curriculum remains heavily tilted towards social conflict. The analysis of social structure starts with Marx. One textbook’s subheadings move depressingly from “More and more suicides at work”, to “More and more insecure jobs”. In another textbook, a chapter on “social justice” asks: “Do high revenues threaten fairness?”, and illustrates it with a 19th-century engraving of a bourgeois couple and a photo of a modern-day French demonstrator with a placard reading “Tax the rich”.

Little wonder, perhaps, that the French are consistently both champion pessimists and hostile to free markets. In 2012, according to a Globescan poll, only 4% of the French agreed that free-market capitalism works well, next to 27% of Americans and 22% of the Chinese.