The symbol of France in Delacroix’s 1830 ‘Liberty Leading the People’ is ‘a true paragon of the French woman: accessorised, political and passionate, composed in the company of men – and topless’

The Secret Life of France
By Lucy Wadham
Faber £12.99, 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Affairs of the Heart
By Debra Ollivier
Piatkus £10.99, 256 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Détour de France: An Englishman in Search of a Continental Education
By Michael Simkins
Ebury £10.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £8.79

Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette
By John Dummer
Summersdale £7.99, 320 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

The Anglo-Saxons, as we English-speakers are somewhat inaccurately known by the French, have long regarded their Gallic neighbours with a mix of amusement and horror. The intensity of that regard, however, has rarely faltered.

France is the country we love to hate, hate to love, and cannot get enough of. We vacation and migrate there in prodigious numbers (dimmed briefly by recession), turn French foibles into jokes and television series, and write books about why the French are so exasperatingly different.

Lots of books. Though the French begin at Calais, only a few miles away from England, they tend to be depicted in English prose as an especially exotic species of fauna with customs and folkways that require elaborate explanation. Shakespeare, Dickens, Orwell, Waugh, Wodehouse and countless other observers have given the French a going-over that the Italians and Belgians, for instance, rarely enjoy, despite being every bit as foreign.

Britain’s awed incomprehension of the French is embodied in Instructions for British Servicemen in France, a 1944 manual reprinted three years ago to wide amusement. “If you should happen to imagine that the first pretty French girl who smiles at you intends to dance the can-can or take you to bed,” goes one of the manual’s warnings, “you will risk stirring up a lot of trouble for yourself – and for our relations with the French.” Relations remain stirred; we Anglo-Saxons remain fascinated.

One explanation for our seemingly endless need to decode France is the rigid sense of privacy that shields French politics, business and personal morality from the relentless attention common in the Anglo-Saxon world. But what really makes us obsess over the French is that they evidently do not much care what we think of them. Though our books about the “Frogs” are legion, theirs about les rosbifs are rare. True, there are works such as Agnès Poirier’s 2005 Les Nouveaux Anglais and 2006 Touché: A French Woman’s Take on the English. But there exist hardly any French equivalents of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, a sunny reminiscence of the former London advertising executive’s attempts to renovate a house in a southern French village.

Mayle’s 1989 bestseller propelled busloads of Brits southward and inspired some of them to write their own accounts of refurbishing a château/monastery/lemon farm while interacting with unreliable tradesmen and wily peasants. (It is, apparently, easier for an expat in France to find a publisher than a job.) Just as Americans have their ideal of individual prosperity, there is the British Dream of the good life amid sun-kissed vineyards in the Dordogne.

Even books about the bad side of the good life, such as Stephen Clarke’s darkly comic 2004 semi-autobiographical novel A Year in the Merde, find a ready-made audience. And long-term expats, many with French spouses, produce inside accounts of their adopted land while conceding, as the title of Mark Greenside’s 2008 entry puts it, that I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do).

A new batch of Frog-centric books has just hit the British market. Though the lavender-scented lyricism has largely faded, most of them are labours of like, if not love.

Perhaps the clearest eye belongs to Lucy Wadham, a London-born writer who married a Frenchman, raised four children in France and has lived there (currently in the Cevennes) for a quarter of a century. In The Secret Life of France, she draws on her experiences to explain the unwritten rules of French table manners, civic ceremonies, breastfeeding habits, race relations and other behaviour.

Many of her revelations will be familiar to readers of contemporary books about France by foreigners: its schools suppress originality and force children to fit in; its culture values abstraction over experience; its idea of feminism is shockingly nude models on billboard ads.

No book of this sort would be complete without several such unfair generalisations, but Wadham takes them further still. That penchant for abstraction and fitting in, she says, has deprived the French of irony and, indeed, decent comedians – except for a few immigrants and other misfits. The feminism gap has much to do with the country’s amicable gender relations, which allow girls to be girls without fear of letting the side down. “In France,” she writes, “the war between the sexes simply never got off the ground.”

As for sex, Wadham says, the French wall off their transgressions in a jardin secret (secret garden) that saves face all around. “We don’t do divorce in this family,” Wadham is told after confronting her cuckolded mother-in-law. When a colleague of her husband Laurent invites Wadham to become his mistress, she informs her husband – who could care less. She rejects the invitation but divorces Laurent.

Yet Wadham would never divorce France – a policy that she shares with nearly all authors of the genre: irritating as the place can be, they stay. “Like the long-suffering spouse who realises, after all those years, that in spite of everything, there is no one in the world she would rather be with,” she confesses, “I adore and despise this country in equal measure.”

Debra Ollivier approaches her piece of the French puzzle mostly with adoration. In What French Women Know, Ollivier asks why the typical française “seems to know more about giving and receiving pleasure, which means that she’s probably having more guilt-free sex than we are and eating a lot more pastry, too.” The answer, essentially, is that she has less guilt – a paradox in that broadly Catholic country. Those secret gardens come in handy.

In addition, Ollivier says, Frenchwomen do not give a figue about what others think, and they behave like raving beauties even when they are not. That message must be seductive to British and American women, preoccupied with body image and having it all. Instead, says Ollivier, French women are raised to believe that the person one becomes is more important than the wealth and accomplishments one accumulates.

Like Wadham, Ollivier is a writer who lived in France for 10 years, married a Frenchman and raised children there. But instead of juicy examples from her life, Ollivier offers vapid generalities and ideas found in books. Some of those findings are entertaining, nevertheless. Marianne, the female symbol of the French republic who first appeared in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting “Liberty Leading the People”, is, according to Ollivier, “a true paragon of the French woman: first, she’s accessorised (check out that Phrygian bonnet and that braided belt!). Second, she’s composed and comfortable in the company of men. Third, she’s political and passionate. Fourth, she’s topless.” French women, Ollivier says, know how to get attention.

Which makes one wonder why Michael Simkins’s wife let him wander around France by himself for two months, as he puts it, “in search of a continental education”. In his book Détour de France, the British stage and TV actor assuages any misgivings that his wife, actress Julia Deakin, might have had. Unless he too maintains a secret garden, the author encounters hardly a whiff of sex, and certainly does not look for it.

Instead, he sets out to answer another question common to such books: why are the French are so suavely French? Two months is hardly sufficient time to develop the typical stock of unfair generalities, but Simkins makes the most of it. He talks his way into a circus troupe in Normandy, a folk festival in Brittany, a bull-racing competition in the Camargue, a nudist camp in Agde and a fashion show in Paris. The only low moment comes in Vichy, home to the second world war collaborationist regime, when he tries unsuccessfully to engage people on the subject of the war.

Simkins is greeted at all other stops with warmth and generosity – even in famously unfriendly Paris – which makes him forget his quest for suavity. He ends up envying the French their “sense of things being done properly rather than being shoved in a metaphorical bap, smothered in tomato ketchup and gobbled down on the move while you’re thinking of something else”.

Simkins’s light-hearted account is aimed more at the tourist than the serious Francophile. But he is an agreeable travelling companion, and his France is a congenial place to spend a couple of months. Just don’t mention the war.

As English-speakers continue to flock to live in France, the publishing world has hastened to meet the demand. Peter Mayle’s Provence has spun off sequels, a TV series and a feature film. Stephen Clarke’s Merde has grown to a four-book series. And now one British publisher, Summersdale, has developed a sideline dedicated to let’s-move-to-France books. Its catalogue includes A Château of One’s Own: Restoration Misadventures in France and Tout Sweet: Hanging Up My High Heels for a New Life in France.

This year Summersdale has a more sober entry. Musician John Dummer stopped drinking a decade ago and moved with his wife to the Chalosse, a sleepy region east of Bordeaux, to set up as antiques dealers. He is taken under the wing of a fellow brocanteur called, he swears, Serge Bastarde. In Serge Bastarde Ate My Baguette, Dummer describes a very different France from that of Simkins, Wheeler and the rest – a land of dirt and poverty, alienation and thievery. Bastarde certainly lives up to his surname, cruising the countryside in his battered van trying to cheat clueless peasants out of their heirlooms.

But Bastarde grows on you, with his imaginative lies and unexpected generosity. Little happens in Dummer’s account; no insights gained or truths learned – except this: “I had noticed the French tend to work hard, starting the day at ridiculously early hours and continuing until quite late. The art was to make it look like you were really enjoying yourself and not working hard at all.” Which, as readers of the genre know, is what truly distinguishes the French.

That view seems to be congealing into the reigning cliché about the French. Older clichés focused on perceived arrogance, a weak work ethic, flawed personal hygiene, loose sexual morality and dog-fouled sidewalks. The emerging stereotype portrays France as a bulwark against globalisation, technological dehumanisation and other regrettable modern tendencies – a land where people take their time and enjoy life.

Nonsense. Anyone who has resided in France for more than a few years (going on seven for me) knows that contemporary English books about the place tend to get it wrong. Outside the glossy tourist villages of Paris, Avignon and the like, France is a gritty, desolate, penury-blighted landscape of rusting cars, cheerless hypermarket chains and anxious, over-worked, increasingly overweight people struggling against unseen economic forces.

What ennobles them is the patience and goodwill they show their ruddy-cheeked neighbours to the north, who crowd their museums, colonise their villages, drive up property prices and complain about the temperature of the beer. That remarkable grace, in the face of a foreign literary industry that reduces the French to comic walk-on parts in the larger Anglo-Saxon narrative, deserves a few books of its own.

Donald Morrison’s book ‘The Death of French Culture’ will be published by Polity in spring 2010