France — don’t you just love it? Or, to put it another way, don’t you just hate it? No other country, not even Germany, elicits such strong and contradictory sentiments, often from within the same breast.

We may, for instance, spend half the summer soaking up the Dordogne sun or hiking the hills around Annecy, but then we’ll be gratified beyond measure when, as happened recently, France XV gets a thumping from the All Blacks. A thousand years of enmity takes some digesting, and we’re not there yet.

But — and here’s the point — we can’t keep out of their country. More people visit France than anywhere else on earth — 75m in 2003, against 53m to Spain, 41m to America — and the British and Irish are the keenest of all. Between us, we account for 20% of the total, slightly ahead of the Germans and the Dutch. Perhaps our inability to shake off the old cross-Channel aggravation is less to do with Gallic lateness, laziness or lavatorial laxness than pure and simple envy — for the brute fact is that whatever we think of them, the good Lord clearly favoured the French.

Theirs is the most diverse landscape in Europe, ranging from the mightiest mountains to the loveliest coastline, with just about everything else in between. Great rivers flow all over the place. Forests still cover a quarter of the country — and when surveying the Cévennes or the Landes, you’d say it was much more. There are vast marshlands, lakes and gorges, plains and hills, wondrous islands. The French were given a superb geographical hand, and they’ve played it well.

Of course, there are spots along the Riviera where the Gallic genius for stacking apartment blocks in beauty spots has spiralled way out of hand. But everyone makes mistakes, and the French have mostly got things right. For a start, they have filled their land with the planet’s finest food and wines. Whatever the recent counterclaims from the Pacific Rim and fusion-food departments, nobody feeds you better right up and down the price scale.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their manic drive towards civic centralisation, they’ve also maintained a splendid fabric of real regional identities. The Bretons eat crêpes, go fishing and play harps. Some of their old women still wear lacy headgear under which you could hide a lighthouse. The Alsaciens brew beer and keep getting taken over by Germany. Basques play rugby like wild animals, spell their names like match-winning Scrabble scores and sing in male-voice choirs. These things run deeper than you’d think.

By the same token, the French have kept proper villages, and country towns where shops are shops and not faceless outposts of international chains. They’ve managed to improve their landscape continually, from the cave art in the southwest, by way of the Loire chateaux to the magnificent Millau viaduct, opened last month (you soar over it when you drive south from Clermont- Ferrand on the A75). And they’ve balanced the business of central government with a low-level laissez-aller that sees bulls on village streets, festivals ending at dawn and nothing at all wrong with whiling away the day — or indeed the week — on a sunny cafe terrace.

It’s a world-beating mix, which admittedly lost a little lustre last year, when visitor numbers dipped. Americans stayed away, sulking about Iraq; Britons eyed the rising euro and cleared off to Croatia and beyond.

The French responded by commissioning a report, which essentially urged France to wake up and be “more welcoming”. Sound advice — and yet one more reason for going to France this year ... to see if the natives really are being extra nice. Not a chance, of course. Nobody pays the slightest attention to government commissions, least of all the French. No matter. You’ll still have Europe’s most fascinating country before you. And you’ll still return home hoping they get stuffed at rugby.

Package prices are per person, based on two sharing, and where flights are included, they are from London. Contact the operator for details of UK regional and Irish departures. For independent travel to France, see Getting around