The tradition is typically French.
At the stroke of midnight on January 1st, it is customary to wish each other good wishes and say the famous phrase “Happy New Year and good health”. This consensual and intergenerational tradition would be typically French. For example, Belgians and Poles wish each other wealth and good fortune, while Brazilians wish each other to find love. But why is France the only country to associate the new year with good health?
“The French are very traditional and for them health is seen as the main requirement to be happy, ahead of love and having children.“, sheds light on an Ifop survey conducted by the communications agency Capital Image. Behind the wording “good health”, they wish themselves the fact of feeling good in their heads, of having good morale, of feeling good in their body and have energy all year round.Today, health is opposed to disease. But we must not forget that for centuries, health meant being healthy in body and mind, and we are healthy when we find ourselves in a situation of happiness, well-being, material comfort and physical“, confirms the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini interviewed by TF1 Info.
Religiously, it has long been the custom to do “every day wishes and prayers for the health and prosperity of the King“, we can read in Furetière’s Universal Dictionary of 1690. The expression “good health” would thus have remained in the traditions and used today as a “secular wish”, a sort of social and formal ritual which adapts to current means of communication (via a small paper box in the 20th century, via an SMS or a voice message today).
More generally, “the month of January is the month of reconciliation, concord, harmony and kindness. For a long time, we were talking about the “confectioners’ truce” (which designated the period of calm between the monarchists, the republicans and the Bonapartists at the end of December 1874, during the heated debates on the Constitution of the 3rd Republic, editor’s note), explains François Morel among others, essayist and naturalist writer, in the Dictionary Lover of the Useless (ed. Pion).
In absolute terms, “wishing a happy new year and good health is of no use. A reliable statistic ensures that 100% of people who die in excruciating suffering, from a long illness or from natural death received, during January, several exemplary, good wishes guaranteed to be sincere Yet it would be such a mark of impoliteness, indifference and rudeness not to present your good wishes at the start of the year.“, he quips. There is also and above all an element of superstition from which it can be difficult to free oneself…