On the walk to Arpege, the Michelin three-star restaurant situated on Paris’s Left Bank, I pass a striking sculpture of Charles de Gaulle parading outside the Grand Palais. A quotation from the general is emblazoned on the base below: “There is a pact 20 centuries old between the grandeur of France and the liberty of the world.”

I am still musing on de Gaulle’s vision of French universalism as I enter the surprisingly stark but elegant restaurant. Few people are better qualified to interpret France than my guest, Theodore Zeldin, the British historian, philosopher and business lecturer, who has spent his life marinating in French history and culture.

Zeldin is widely regarded as France’s favourite Englishman. He “knows us better than we know ourselves”, gushed one reviewer of The French, his quirky biography of a nation. He certainly knows how to choose a restaurant, I reflect, as I savour the sensational amuse-bouches and contemplate the multicoloured gourd sitting under a bell jar on my table. The Arpege is one of Paris’s most innovative – and expensive – restaurants. It specialises in doing clever things with vegetables.

Sporting distinctive professorial hair, the spry septuagenarian Zeldin soon arrives and immediately asks me how and why I became a journalist, “that most privileged of professions”. He proves a master interrogator, coaxing me into self-revelation. But we both quickly realise the flow of the conversation is the wrong way round and that I should be asking – rather than answering – the questions.

First, though, the menu. It seems only right to opt for the day’s special, the eight-course “Pleine Terre, Pleine Mer”, which the waitress tells us contains an additional “surprise” of marcassin, baby wild boar from north Africa, the only meat on offer. Zeldin sticks to water while I order a glass of rather disappointing Riesling.

As we await the culinary extravaganza, he recounts the milestones in his professional life. As a young historian at Oxford University, he rejected the chance to comb through Lord Salisbury’s papers. Instead, he indulged his own intellectual interests and spent 20 years researching and writing his five-volume History of French Passions, a work he describes as an investigation of the art of living.

“In that book I looked at every aspect of life. What does it mean to dance? What does it mean to commit a crime? What does it mean to be anxious? What does it mean to tell a joke? The great thing about the French is that they have thought about these subjects in a great variety of ways and are a very articulate people.”

“I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a theory. I just did it. But that book opened up an enormous number of doors for me. It was an amazing success, above all in France.”

Such was his notoriety, Zeldin says, that policemen saluted him in the street. Train conductors upgraded him from second class to first. He was invited to talk to people from every section of French society. He spent a year shadowing Jack Lang, the flamboyant Socialist culture minister. Retaining his reputation as a candid friend of France, Zeldin was last year invited to join the Attali commission, a high-profile advisory group set up by President Nicolas Sarkozy, to which we’ll return later.

With his boundless curiosity, Zeldin discovered he could often learn more from listening to ordinary people than reading about extraordinary people in libraries. He plunged deeper into the interior lives of individuals. A series of books followed: Happiness, The French, An Intimate History of Humanity and Conversation.

“What the hell am I doing? That is the question that really interests me,” he says. “There is no satisfactory answer now, but there was in the past: you were preparing to go to heaven. Most people said the purpose of life is death. But we don’t think that now. In Britain we spend 29 per cent of the national health budget in the last year of life, avoiding death. We don’t know how to die, or how to live.”

Well, we aren’t doing a bad job of living at Arpege. A convoy of scintillating vegetable dishes is whisked to our table. Each one is celebrated by Zeldin in his clipped English and accented French. “It is very nice, this homage paid to the humble vegetable … This chap is clever … C’est genial.”

In his quest to understand other people, Zeldin has spent much time studying the world of work. He has developed strong – and refreshingly unconventional – views on business. Now an associate fellow of the Said Business School in Oxford, he is much in demand on the international lecture circuit.

Zeldin dismisses much of what is taught at business schools by lecturers who have a vested interest in perpetuating their traditional specialisms. He suggests that the hierarchical century-old US-style corporation has outlived its time. Many professions – medical, legal, architectural – are in crisis. The world of work must be revolutionised to put people – rather than things – at the centre of all endeavours. “I remember talking to some CEOs in London. One of them said: “We can no longer select people, they select us.” If we want the best people and we want to attract them, we have to say: “What do you want in your job?”

He recalls a visit to an Indian factory making electrical equipment, where he saw “rows and rows of Indian women fiddling around with bits and pieces”. The manager said he wanted to turn these employees into entrepreneurs. After talking to the women, Zeldin replied that it would be impossible if they spent eight hours a day performing boring tasks. The manager vowed to mechanise some of their routine functions and devote two hours a day to educating his workers. “That’s the kind of revolution that interests me,” he says. “You need to make a profit to survive. But business today has to be a cultural and educational institution.”

Zeldin has created his own idiosyncratic educational institution, the Oxford Muse, which attempts to forge links between people from different backgrounds, cultures and nationalities by means of verbal self-portraits and structured conversations, designed to reveal an individual’s particularities and priorities. “To me, the great adventure of this coming century is to discover who inhabits the world,” he says, chewing contemplatively on a scallop from Brittany’s Emerald Coast.

He has also written a syllabus for an MCA (what you need after your MBA). “The C stands for many different things – it’s a bit of a joke – for creativity and culture and conversation and catalysis,” he says. “The more education you do, the less you are capable of doing. The MCA says that now you’re a specialist you’ve got to become a generalist. You have to learn about all the other ways of thinking apart from your own.

“How do scientists think? How do spiritual people think? What are the most important advanced new ideas? There are many bright people doing research in fields you’ve never heard of, having brilliant thoughts. How can you understand the world if you don’t know this?”

But he admits ruefully that he has found it difficult to find anybody to fund this venture.

I ask him about the Attali commission, chaired by Jacques Attali, the socialist intellectual and former head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which last month submitted 316 recommendations to reform France to Sarkozy. Zeldin had particular responsibility for changing mentalities, which he says will be vital in pursuing fundamental reform.

He is enthusiastic about the possibilities for change but expresses frustration with the commission’s intensely technical discussions of subjects and the cobwebs of laws and regulations preventing new initiatives. “The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions,” he says.

His solutions are far more radical: founding new towns with affordable housing near the coast that can draw food, energy and water from the sea; posting school teachers to foreign countries for a year to experience different cultures; inviting the world’s 100 richest people to the Elysee Palace and asking them to create a global university.

In reforming France, or any other country, Zeldin argues it is vital to avoid, rather than provoke, confrontation. It is better to allow old problems to wither while encouraging new possibilities to emerge alongside. “You have to accept that traditions exist, that people don’t change their minds very quickly, that people are scared,” he says.

“Sarkozy has to say: ‘Here’s a new vision, this is what we’ve got to do, let’s go and do it. In the 17th-century people said let’s go to America and establish Pennsylvania. I’m saying let’s go to south-west France and establish the equivalent of Pennsylvania.”

What does he make of Sarkozy?

Zeldin says he cannot claim to understand the man having met him only twice, but sees him very much in the tradition of de Gaulle. Reading Sarkozy’s writings, Zeldin is struck by the importance the president attaches to his formative years, growing up in an immigrant family, being deserted by his father, being desperate for friendship and affection. “He is very devoted to France but he also says that the mission of France is to be a reconciler of cultures. Abroad, he wants to make France the kind of country it was in the 18th century, when its originality was that it made a declaration of rights for all humanity,” he says.

“That, I think, is the strong point of France, which makes it an important country. France is an idea. It is not a territory. It is offering a dream that is different from the American dream. There is no harm in having several different dreams in the world.’’

A chocolate souffle completes our meal.

“It has been a lesson in gastronomy, hasn’t it?” Zeldin concludes cheerfully.

Indeed it has, I muse, as well as being a three-hour tutorial about a lot more besides.

John Thornhill is the FT’s Europe editor

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Arpege, 84 rue de Varenne, Paris
Tasting Menu
‘Pleine Terre, Pleine Mer’
2 x vegetable veloute with speck-flavoured whipped cream
2 x beetroot cooked in a Guerande grey sea-salt crust
2 x aromatic kitchen garden medley
2 x celeriac with ground Orleans mustard
2 x ‘Arlequin’ vegetable salad with argan oil semolina
2 x Breton scallops
2 x baby wild boar
2 x autumnal dessert and macaroons
1 x glass of Riesling
1 x mineral water
Total: €295