For the first time this year, the residence where I live encouraged us to celebrate Halloween - face-painting workshops for the children, cardboard pumpkins to hang on the door handles of volunteer residents, decorations in the communal areas... At the supermarket, I found other people like me discovering the candy aisles where they had never set foot, not sure how many to take or what the children liked. For some time now, Black Friday has also become a well-known event in France, almost as important as the traditional sales periods, encouraging early Christmas shopping at knock-down prices. These two festive and commercial traditions, imported from the USA, are now firmly established in our lifestyles - not to mention baby showers, gender reveal ceremonies and scripted marriage proposals - while another tradition, Thanksgiving, has not taken root at all.
This may be due to a discrepancy in the way we express our feelings - Europeans and the French being less inclined than North Americans to open up about their emotional ties and feelings. The English expression I appreciate has no real equivalent: this way of expressing thanks by turning towards oneself is not natural to us. In French, our way of expressing gratitude is directed more towards our interlocutor than towards ourselves.
Gratitude can also be understood by analyzing its negative counterpart. In fact, it's precisely in the United States that I've most often heard talk of ingratitude. Trump regularly denounces the ingratitude of Ukraine and most other partners who have received American aid, and these complaints remind me of one of his compatriots, an American mother who felt that her last au pair had not been very grateful when they had taken her on vacation with them.
Eugène Labiche also denounces men's inability to recognize the good done to them in Les Aventures de Monsieur Perrichon (1860). A well-to-do pensioner seeking to marry off his daughter, Perrichon becomes attached not to the first suitor, Armand, who saved his life, but to the second, Daniel, to whom he believes he saved it, uttering the cult line "You owe me everything, everything... I'll never forget it!". Perrichon congratulates himself on having leverage over one man when he can't tolerate owing his life to another, and Labiche sums up the moral of his story as follows: "A fool is incapable of bearing the crushing burden of recognition for long". In Florian Zeller's The Son (2022), Hugh Jackman plays a father unable to grasp his son's existential distress. He repeats to him the same phrases he himself heard as a teenager: "when I was your age, I was already working" or the famous "after all I've done for you".
This is the problem with gratitude, as it is often put by those who complain of not receiving it. Rousseau saw it perfectly in Emile. Gratitude," he wrote, "cannot be commanded: it is formed alone, in silence. To express it is to destroy it. If you remind a child of what you've done for him, he'll never see it again. If you demand a return, he'll only feel indebted. Rousseau's advice to those who wish to educate a child is a call to humility: "to boast of your services is to make them unbearable; to forget them is to make them remember them", before concluding with a phrase that every parent and every person likely one day to claim thanks should ponder: "never a true benefactor made an ungrateful one".
In other words, as soon as gratitude is transformed into an explicit debt, it ceases to be a feeling and becomes an account to be settled. By mixing thank you and formal notice, we end up not really knowing who owes what to whom.
This shift from gratitude to debt is not limited to personal relationships. It highlights profound cultural differences that extend far beyond the family sphere or interpersonal relationships. They even explain, in part, why Europeans and Americans do not thank in the same way, nor expect the same kind of thanks.
In the United States, where social assistance is largely based on individual initiative, philanthropy and charities, every donation is a morally situated gift. The sector carries considerable weight here: nearly 2% of US GDP, over 2.5 million non-profit organizations, and around $500 billion donated each year by households, businesses and foundations (Giving USA report, 2023-2024). In such a system, the gesture of support has a face, an intention, sometimes an ideology. And since it comes from an identifiable individual or group, it naturally calls for a return: a speech of gratitude, a symbolic gesture, an explicit acknowledgement. Solidarity creates personal, visible and sometimes asserted debts.
In France, and more broadly in Europe, the welfare state was built precisely to avoid this: to avoid personal debt, to avoid dependence on someone. The social protection system that emerged after the Second World War was conceived not as a gift, but as a right. It is based on an impressive collective architecture: 32% of GDP is devoted to social protection in France (and an average of 27% in the European Union, compared with less than 20% in the United States - OECD, US Census Bureau, 2022), with benefits financed by mutualization rather than individual generosity. Solidarity is delegated to an abstract, neutral, impersonal institution; the result of a fundamental political choice to 'depersonalize' aid, so that it creates neither a moral debt nor an obligation to a benefactor.
Perhaps this explains why we don't think of saying 'thank you' to the state in the same way as we thank a person. We expect it to function, sometimes we challenge it, and we may congratulate ourselves on the efficiency of its public services, but gratitude doesn't play the same role. It's not coldness: it's a different relationship to debt, seen as collective, recognizable in the system itself, and managed by the efficiency of an organization rather than the generosity of individuals. Perhaps this is why Thanksgiving is so strange in France. Not because we're indifferent to turkey, nor because the date is too close to Christmas, but because this public, ritualized dimension of gratitude is less familiar to us.
And yet, the idea is gaining ground: personal development practices now encourage us to keep a gratitude diary, listing, for example, every evening three things for which we feel grateful, be they personal relationships, everyday successes, or the joys offered by nature. While this may seem trivial or a little naïve, it is perhaps the sign of a shift: the idea that gratitude can be cultivated, worked on, that it is not just a reflex emotion but a disposition to be broadened. Jacques Attali, in Philosophie de la gratitude (2025), recounts how for a long time he was indifferent to nature: he loved what bore the mark of man, the garden more than the forest, human construction more than the untamed power of the living. It was only later, he writes, 'through reason', that he began to understand the sophistication of a swarm of bees, a grass, a butterfly, the fragility of a landscape, and to feel gratitude before a sunset or a starry sky. For him, recognition comes first through knowledge: seeing and understanding, then experiencing.
We should probably take a leaf out of their book: the most difficult gratitude, and perhaps the most urgent, is that which we owe to the Earth itself. For the past fifteen years, the Stockholm Resilience Center has been reminding us that the conditions that make the planet habitable (stable climate, balanced oceans, robust biodiversity, undisturbed water, phosphorus and nitrogen cycles) make up an extraordinarily fine system, now pushed to its limits. Six of the nine planetary limits have now been exceeded, and with them the confidence we once had in the stability of our environment.
We can love the ocean for its mystery, its poetic power and the call to freedom it seems to send us, expressed by Baudelaire in a famous line that also calls for a form of gratitude: 'Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer'. We can also feel gratitude for the ocean in a less direct, more scientific way, by understanding all that the ocean makes possible. It absorbs 30% of the CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere, captures 90% of excess heat, thus regulating the climate. The ocean is home to immense biodiversity and feeds billions of human beings. As many sensitive motives as rational reasons therefore lead us to express our gratitude to this blue immensity that makes up more of our planet, with 70% of its surface occupied by water, than the earth itself.
In concrete terms, however, the most urgent form of gratitude requires resources commensurate with what is at stake. In the case of the oceans, experts estimate that around $175 billion a year would be needed to achieve preservation objectives. Since 2010, it is estimated that around 22 billion euros in official development assistance, funding from public development banks and leveraged private capital have been directed towards building a sustainable and regenerative ocean economy: a real effort, but not commensurate with annual needs (OECD, 2025).
In such a landscape, public authorities can no longer do everything. Preserving life now requires the commitment of everyone: individuals, philanthropists, companies and investors. It's not a matter of adding something extra to our souls: it's an imperative for survival. If everyone, at their own level, agrees to give, invest and support, then gratitude for living things ceases to be a passive feeling and becomes a concrete lever for transformation.
So perhaps Thanksgiving could become an invitation to look differently at what surrounds us: not an imported celebration, but an occasion to remember that gratitude is only meaningful if it broadens its purpose. Even in love and friendship, declarations are worth little if words are not matched by deeds. Gratitude is also less a formula than a way of being in the world. To be grateful, you first have to know. And once you've understood what you're receiving, whether from another person, a landscape or a living system, action comes almost naturally. Perhaps this is the only gratitude that counts: a form of attention that eventually becomes a form of responsibility.
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