Sebastian Faulks asks...Why France?

I sometimes think the real France - the one that people love - exists only in the imagination. In reality, you can sometimes find glimpses of it, but even those are harder to come by these days.

I suppose we all have a similar idea of what that "real" country is. It's something you find in the pages of Proust and Flaubert, in the paintings of Millet and Monet, in the smell of the Métro and in the landscape of the Auvergne. You can see it in the tight lips of the patronne of the hotel in the town square with its flowered wallpaper, failed plumbing and rattling china-lozenge door handles. It's in the plane-flanked avenues of the routes nationales; it's in the family inns of Burgundian villages; it's in the old Michelin Red Guides with their crossed-out dog's heads.

Modern technology came late to this sparsely populated country, and after 10 minutes down a D road you were back in a way of life that had disappeared from England decades before. As close as Normandy and as recently as 1975, you could effectively travel back to a pre-war, prelapsarian world, where Jacques Tati was your postman. You were through the looking-glass all right, in a world where even the village cafe cooked food better than you'd ever tasted at home; but something about it seemed mysteriously insubstantial. It had a dreamlike quality.

Critics of the country - and it has never lacked for them - will say that this sense of otherworldliness is caused simply by the fact that France has, over the centuries, failed to take sufficient interest in the lives and cultures of other countries. Believing itself to have the greatest thinkers, soldiers and scientists, as well as the most naturally blessed landscape in the world, France developed a sense of profoundly contented self-reliance that made it a world apart. "

Heureux comme Dieu en France", they said: as happy as God in France. Therein lay its glamour and its charm; therein, also, lay a danger.

If you look at France today, you see a troubled country. Most people feel crushed between the Anglo-Saxons on one hand, with their free-marketeering, awful films and foreign invasions; and, on the other, by the unstemmable tide of North African/Arab immigration that has started setting fire to the cities.

It is also fair to say that French literature and art is at such a low level that even a professional francophile such as Edmund White, long a resident of Paris, could claim in his recent book, The Flâneur, that France has only one artist and no writers of note. And the cuisine, once the brightest feather in the cockerel's plumage, has, I think any objective traveller would admit, been eclipsed by the cooking of California, Italy and New York.

So it is an unhappy period, certainly, though in my opinion it is only that: a period, or phase, because one thing you learn from French history - from the terrible carnage of Verdun, the humiliations of Sedan and Vichy - is that this is a people of great resilience.

And one should not forget, either, the scale of what one might call the French Project: what this country is trying to do is to preserve the sense of itself as nothing less than the pre-eminent world civilisation. Such grands projets will always have their wobbles.

The bases of France's claim to pre-eminence remain heroically intact. First, there is the land itself. From Cape Finistère to the Riviera, via the Alps, the Dordogne and Provence... There is no more beautiful or more varied landscape in the world. I remember once driving from Avignon to Sarlat across the foothills of the Massif Central in late summer, and my companion and I had to stop regularly to reassure one another that this was not a dream. Then think of Proust's train puffing to Balbec: another paradise of a completely different, northerly, kind. It is unfair on the competition because it is at least six countries in one.

Nor does the artistic legacy grow dim; if anything, it looks richer by the year. I remember going to the Musée d'Orsay soon after it had opened in, I think, 1987. One room after another gave visions of such talent, such mastery, that you began to wonder if it were some sort of optical illusion. Millet, Courbet, Degas, Cézanne... On and on... Hundreds and hundreds of these serene works so deeply connected to the country that had produced them. Afterwards, I sat outside on the quay, staring into the waters of the Seine, and I had that feeling that people call "humbled" - by which I think they really mean "proud". To think that such genius had been concentrated in one place over such a short period...

Within the countryside and depictions of it, there are the buildings. I suppose their appeal is more open to question than that of the landscape and the art; but I have to admit that I have always loved those small northern towns: the hôtel de ville with its black slate roof, the cobbled square, narrow shuttered streets - all somehow suggestive of intrigue and clandestine romance. Anyone can admire Versailles, the Sacré Coeur, or the great Provençal farmhouses with their turquoise-blue shutters. But I think if France is in your blood you really have to love those undistinguished little northern towns best.

To be less fanciful: the planners have done an almost universally good job on the main city centres. Try Rennes or Troyes or Limoges - places you wouldn't necessarily visit as a tourist - as well as the more famously protected centres of Toulouse, Bordeaux and Paris. All are preserved without having been pickled or themed or made twee. (If only the planners had been as strict with the ribbon developments on the way in; and I fear there is something about the Cartesian intellect that has yet to master the function of the roundabout...)

Landscape, art and architecture... Clean bill of health. And the wine, of course - though much more severely challenged than most Frenchmen will ever know or dream - remains the world's best. Some New World pinot noir is more satisfying than a thin burgundy, but surely no cabernet has ever bettered that produced by those elegantly curtained chateaux on the banks of the Gironde estuary, a place of profoundly mysterious charms.

So what, as they say, is not to like? Granted, the restaurants are in temporary eclipse, but even here I see signs of hope. A couple of years ago, I was having dinner with three friends in a typically pompous Michelin-starred place. There were no other diners, and the waiters began to get the giggles. After a bit, we persuaded them that laughter was fine: they could behave like real people, bring the food sensibly and have a chat and a cigarette. It was wonderful; it felt like the beginning of the end for that school of joyless pretension.

And in the village in the Lot where we have been for the past five summers there are three good restaurants within 15 minutes: one smart, one middling and one cafe where you can ring ahead and order lunch for 25, including 15 children, and it's ready when you get there, with truffle or cep omelettes, fried potatoes, green beans in garlic, green salad and carafes of rosé.

The other natural resource of France, of course, is its people. They can be proud, they can be shy, they are almost always private and hard to get to know, but I have never laughed as much or found greater friendship or greater generosity of spirit than in France. This extends from official ceremonies at Notre Dame in Paris to family gatherings in Brittany to dawn bike rides down Mont Ventoux with the local football team.

I used to have a book called French Leave by Richard Binns, which was a self-published, dotty, obsessive, but largely dependable guide to half-hidden France. Binns knows his stuff and it would be great to have a 21st-century revision. Michelin is still a good gazetteer for town hotels and garages, but, by its dogged promotion of 1970s oopsi-la cuisine, stands charged with causing a potential new generation of chefs (to say nothing of diners) to lose interest. The descriptions in Gault-Millau are attractive, but too often turn out to be wishful thinking. Petit Futé: Best of France, which I used over the New Year, appears to have been translated by the late Sir Edward Heath.

So, in the absence, as far as I am aware, of good guidebooks, here are some places worth visiting. Clermont-Ferrand and Vichy are fascinating. Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, where the Germans set fire to the inhabitants in 1944. The Jura district in the east. Belle Isle, Vannes and Auray, in Brittany. Saint Antonin, near Montauban. Beaugency, on the Loire. Mercurey in Burgundy. Arras, near the battlefields of the first world war.

And here, to end with, are some answers to questions from readers. 1 If in doubt, Côtes du Rhone. 2 Juliette Binoche or Sophie Marceau: either would be an excellent choice. 3 Tenez la droite. 4 Reculer pour mieux sauter is not an instruction for frying potatoes. 5 La morue aux truffes at the Dome in Paris or Le tout agneau at the Hôtel Terminus in Cahors. 6 Château Léoville Barton, but Château d'Angludet is better value. 7 Les Enfants du Paradis. 8 Proust, obviously. 9 Cédez le passage, plouc! 10 Bon voyage.