Two young French entrepreneurs are celebrating their triumph in exporting a very Gallic and un-American product to the United States: an internet forum for wallowing in self-pity.

They have been surprised by the way that Americans are flocking to an English-language version of VieDeMerde.fr (which translates as s***ty life), a popular website on which the French tell hard-luck stories and lament their misfortunes with black humour.

The US version of VDM, called F***MyLife (fmylife.com), opened in January. A million people a day are now visiting to read about other people's disasters or recount their own, Guillaume Passaglia, the co-founder, told The Times. Most log in from New York and Los Angeles. “This sort of humour is quite specifically French but nevertheless it has worked in the US straight away,” he said.

VDM has become one of France's top ten sites since its launch in January 2008 by Mr Passaglia and Maxime Valette. It has spawned half a dozen others. The latest of the haunts for “des serial losers”, as they are known, opened to instant success on Monday under the name RaterSaVie.com (FailYourLife). The spur was a remark last month by Jacques Seguela, a veteran advertising man and friend of President Sarkozy, that anyone who did not have a Rolex watch by the age of 50 had “failed his life”. Mr Sarkozy is often criticised for his Rolex taste.

With their sardonic despair, the hard-luck sites reflect the pessimistic streak in the French character, as well as illustrating Voltaire's remark that “the misfortunes of some make for the happiness of others”. Some have described the sites as Twitter - a social networking forum - for losers.

The idea of VDM and FML, the American offshoot, is simple: losers tell their sob story in a few words, the darker and bleaker the better. It must start “Aujourd'hui/Today” and end with the curse VDM - or FML in English.

For example: “Today my boss fired me via text message. I don't have a text messaging plan. I paid $0.25 to get fired. FML.” Or, from VDM: “Today, I received two text messages from my girlfriend. The first to tell me that it was all over. The second to tell me that she had sent it to the wrong person. VDM.”

Mr Passaglia, whose site produced the material for a book last December, said that his team rejected the great majority of the 20,000 stories they received every day and published only the best. They had been helped by the economic crisis. “That favours this type of mentality. You have even more need to distance yourself from the difficulties of the world by laughing at your daily problems.”

The phenomenon of the self-pity sites, which include Jaipasdechance.com (I've no luck) and jobdemerde.com (s***ty job), is drawing attention from mental health analysts, who see an unhealthy side of sharing the little and big disasters of life. Pierre Mannoni, a sociologist who wrote a book called Social Bad Luck, said that there was a danger in falling victim to what is known in French as le misérablisme. “Even if it's done with humour, it can be dangerous to describe oneself endlessly as a loser,” he said. “It can prevent you from succeeding.”

Danielle Rapoport, a psychologist, said that the sites reflected a very French mixture of defiance and anxiety. “The French are champions of depression and pessimism because they have a culture of comfortable status quo and live in fear of losing something,” she said. “At the same time they have a sense of rebellion which pushes them to act.”