When the British buy a holiday home abroad, especially in France, most do it as much for the peaceful way of life as for the sunshine. While Britain seems to be run by gangs of teenage youths, rural France is a haven. You expect to be able to leave your car in the street without fear of having its tyres slashed, and to come back from dinner to find your idyllic home still standing, preferably with all your belongings still in it. So it’s a bit of a shock to discover that la belle France has its own hooligan element.

Those of us who live in France were shocked by events in Brittany last year, when estate agents were attacked and anti-British slogans daubed on properties. Now, it seems, the unrest has spread.

In the Basque region, near the Spanish border, one British woman came home recently to find a burning tyre stuffed with hay in her house. Another English family received a telephone call from Interpol, telling them that their ancient stone mill had been gutted by an arson attack. In the worst unrest since the 1980s, bombs have been detonated at banks and estate agencies, with graffiti declaring that “The Basque country is not for sale” scrawled on the properties the extremists attack.

Not that the violence is directed only at Britons. During one week last month, more than 100 cars that didn’t carry the local département number on their plates had their tyres slashed. For the Basque militant separatists, the French are foreigners too.

In Brittany, meanwhile, the attacks are continuing. In July, a couple from Scarborough were woken up in the middle of the night by smoke and fumes. Their car was on fire. It was parked outside the restaurant they run in Callac, in western Brittany. They found the charred remains of a rag stuffed into the fuel cap.

Cars, in particular, seem to inspire anger. I have experienced only two anti-British incidents in my seven years in France, both involving a British-registered car lent to me by a friend with a holiday home here. Admittedly, both involved parking – so the passion aroused may have had more to do with my inability to reverse than with my nationality.

In the first, I was waiting for a parking space on a busy Saturday morning in town. According to the Frenchwoman behind me, I didn’t move fast enough once the space became available. “F*** off back to England,” she shouted as she drove past me, waving her fist.

In the second, there were lots of parking spaces. So many, in fact, that to avoid any risk to the paintwork, I took up two.

“Is this how you park in England?” asked a furious Frenchman who happened to be walking past.

“No,” I should have said. “There’s never enough room. Yet another good reason to live in France.” But instead I mumbled an apology.

I don’t know why the Brits in France are always apologising. If someone is rude to me in England, I don’t apologise. And I don’t see the French who have colonised South Kensington acting all meek and mild, either.

And then there are other ways in which this distrust of foreigners manifests itself. A house in a village close to where I live has been languishing on the market for some time because the owner has refused point-blank to sell it to a British buyer.

The disappointed buyer is the son of a friend of mine. He was born in France, only a few miles away from the village the house is in, and is married to a Frenchwoman, but this, apparently, does not make him French enough for the man selling the house. I asked the buyer if he planned to take any action. “Yes, to find another house,” he said.

As in parts of rural Britain, the locals in many of these areas are fed up with outsiders pushing up house prices. One butcher told me, meat cleaver raised, that I was the reason his children couldn’t afford to live in the region. As is the British habit when faced with rudeness, I meekly apologised, paid for my beef and walked away. “The fault is not mine,” I should have told him. “The fault lies with those French people who inflate the prices of their properties when they know the buyer is British.”

While I have always found the locals in the Languedoc, where I live, extremely welcoming, I have seen them turn against others. I know some people who are trying to turn a ruined chateau and the surrounding vineyards into a hotel and golf course. They are struggling to get planning permission and, as an interim measure, have put up an office in the grounds. The other day, this was broken into. All the contents were stolen and unpleasant anti-British slogans sprayed on the walls.

Worried by this, I took a straw poll among my French friends to find out what they think of Britons living here.

“Marvellous,” said Jean-Claude – but then he is a wine-maker.

“They don’t bother me,” agreed Caroline. But then she is about to move to South Africa.

“They only buy the houses we don’t want,” claimed Laurent, a businessman.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, promised to crack down on the violence after the latest incidents in the Basque region. He even visited the area. Let’s hope he is serious.

This antipathy towards outsiders does not surprise me. French rural communities are notorious for being closed to anyone who has not lived there all their lives, preferably in the same house as their great-great-grandparents.

Consider this passage from Irène Némirovsky’s novel Fire in the Blood, about French country life, written in the 1940s. The narrator is a Frenchman who left his village in Burgundy as a young man and has returned to a hostile reception.

“They use it against anyone who isn’t from the area, or who’s left,” the narrator observes. “They didn’t like me either. I’d abandoned my heritage. I’d preferred other places to where I’d been born. As a result, everything I wished to buy automatically doubled in price; everything I wanted to sell was undervalued. Even in the smallest things I was aware of a malicious intent that was extraordinarily vigilant, always ready to pounce, calculated to make my life unbearable and force me out.”

A Russian Jew who was deported to Auschwitz shortly after writing the book, Némirovsky knew all about being unwelcome. More than 60 years later, the dislike for outsiders she describes in her book still appears to prevail in some parts of France.

Buyer beware.

helena@sunday-times.co.uk

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