All the people I have met who resort to the "nothing to hide" paradigm were older than 65.these people don't have Facebook or smartphones, and they don't realize that their cars, insurance records and financial transactions are all being tracked. They do not understand the sensitivity of meta data or social graphs, nor do they care. They have their life in order, and surveillance doesn't take anything away from them. The fear of terrorism is a lot more substantial at their points in life.
I don't know about discourse in France - I can imagine that hell just broke loose after the recent attacks. Here in Germany, it's very much a generation problem. Those who care about civil rights and an active democracy are young, and young educated people are a minority. Old people are heavily catered to by the governing parties, and they all seem to love surveillance, most being lucky enough to never have experienced the downsides.
This fight feels a lot like the gay rights movement. Preconceptions are impossible to overcome, all you can do is wait for twenty years until you have a sizeable part of the population behind you, and then start an uproar. In the meantime, it doesn't help to, say, explain how small the aids propagation rate is. Nobody cares.