Le good life

Press them further and they talk enthusiastically about rediscovering a world of family values, sound education based on learning and discipline; about escaping the workaholic bandwagon, a slower pace of life, good manners and 'proper' Sundays.

They talk, too, about a sense of personal safety - unlocked houses and their children playing outside. They will tell the story of an unlocked car with a mobile phone on the front seat that wasn't stolen.

They admire the French determination to acknowledge others' existence with a handshake and a bonjour, and their robust defence of a culture which values such standards.

Yet look again at these answers - manners, education, time for the family, a sense of a culture - and it is immediately evident that we are not talking about peculiarly French traditions here.

These are British values, too. Or at least they were. And this, indeed, is a sentiment you hear again and again: 'It's like going back to Britain as it was 50 years ago.'

To a time in Britain when you sent your children to school confident that they would emerge literate and numerate; a time when you could live decently on one salary, when you did not have to worry that you were too old to qualify for NHS treatment, when people shook hands when they met and stopped work for the weekend - and, yes, when the hedgerows were stuffed with primroses.

So are these ex-pats a reactionary, curmudgeonly lot then, a bunch of Victor Meldrews dreaming of some backward Britain of doffed caps and clips around the ear?

Certainly, it has become fashionable to sneer at these emigrating Britons, off in search of a halcyon past which exists only in their own rosetinted imaginations.

Of course, the Paris suburbs are as grim as any part of inner city Britain. Of course, emigrating Brits bury themselves in pretty parts of the countryside and are to some extent - either by lack of language or lack of interest - isolated from France's political and social problems.

But it is too simplistic to dismiss them as a vacuous lot interested only in cheap farmhouses and sunshine. The rewards they have found are very specific and clearly recognisable to any Briton, whether they have holidayed in a gite or not.

Take, for example, 37-year-old Richard Creighton, who moved to Normandy 18 months ago with his wife and three children under 12. Richard was the manager of an estate agents in Buckingham with a good salary, company car and enviable house.

'My wife and I come from big Irish families,' he said, 'and we believe that the family takes priority. It is not everybody's choice, but ours was that I should work while my wife looked after the children.

'But it is virtually impossible to maintain a decent life in Britain with one breadwinner.

'However big a salary I earned, the outgoings always rose to match it so that work took over my life.

'I worked long hours every weekday, most Saturdays and often on Sundays. How can family be a priority with these hours?'

The Creightons sold their Seventies semi for £157,000 and bought a six bedroom farmhouse with more than an acre of garden for less than £20,000. They spent £10,000 making it habitable and will spend a further £50,000 to make it perfect.

On average, reckons Creighton, a nice house in France costs less than half of its British equivalent.

'Now I work as an estate agent in France - learning French as I go. I take an hour or two off at lunchtime - everywhere closes for lunch here - to go home and eat with my family and the agency wouldn't dream of opening at the weekend.

'Work is part of my life, not my whole life, and yet, perversely, I would say that the French agency is more efficient and successful than my old company in Britain.'

The dual - unbearable - millstones round the necks of the British middle classes are crazy mortgage repayments and, as often as not, equally unrealistic school fees. It's not simple greed that sends families to France in order to be rid of them.

Certainly, without these burdens you will save yourself thousands of pounds a year. But, more importantly, you get your life back.

This is what the nostalgia is really about. A nostalgia, even if it's a false perception, for the days when people had time - time to enjoy life today rather than always tomorrow, time for each other, time to be polite, time to eat together, walk together, laugh together. A work/life balance, in other words.

Another example is Tracy Seacombe, 45. In Oxfordshire, she was working full-time in computers, as was her husband Peter, to pay for her two younger children's private education. But the youngsters were fed up with never seeing their parents.

Now living in Provence, she says that her children are getting as good an education in French state schools, if not better, than they were at their British private schools, and they can speak French into the bargain.

She has been able to give up work because the family is no longer paying school fees, which means she also has time to spend with her family as well as helping out with English lessons at the children's school.

The family had £100,000 left over when they swopped their Oxfordshire farmhouse for a bigger home, with more land, in a much sought after corner of Provence.

'It's far easier to get the work/life balance right here,' says Nicola Nairn, who moved to the Charente from the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, with her husband Robin, a building contractor, and their three primary aged children two years ago.

'We were on holiday in France and Robin was on his mobile up to eight hours a day dealing with work issues from home. That made us wonder what we were doing with our lives. When we decided to move to France, Robin was offered a £30,000 a year pay rise not to leave his old job in Britain but turned it down.'

Since housing is so much cheaper than in Britain, many families are able, like the Nairns, to ignore such inducements.

Moving abroad is a daunting prospect. It is not easy to leave friends and family behind and to make new ones through a new language in a foreign country.

But the British are renowned for going to extraordinary lengths to give their children the best possible start, and if the increasing numbers of young families moving to France reflects anything, it is Tony Blair's failure to deliver on 'education, education, education'.

'French education is like going back in time - it's education as I remember it,' says Nicola.

She means the work ethos, the three Rs and learning by heart - times tables and poems, tests and dictations. She means the support given to strict teachers who insist on discipline and neat presentation, and the fact that children who don't progress don't go up a class at the end of the year, nor do they leave primary school illiterate.

And guess what? The children love it, too. They like being made to behave well, take pride in their tidy work and get excited about praise because it has been earned rather than handed out as a panacea for delinquent behaviour.

As estate agent Richard Creighton puts it: 'The teachers aren't paralysed by political correctness and so worried about saying the wrong thing that they are afraid to get on with teaching.'

The same could be said for France as a whole. We like to think of the French as arrogant, nationalistic, xenophobic, even. And the French are famous for thinking themselves rather special.

Whether they are or not is beside the point; the fact is that they believe they have a language, a culture and a way of life worth hanging on to and, call it arrogance, patriotism, what you will, they are robust in their defence of it.

They are not afraid of naming what is good about their country, what they value - a prerequisite, surely, to hanging on to it?

How different from Britain today. My husband, brought up in the Soviet Union, was a lifelong admirer of what he had learnt were British values of common sense, fair play, pride, tolerance, and a sense of history and continuity.

He was shocked when we moved from Russia to Britain to discover a country which had become embarrassed by its own heritage, of the very qualities for which we are admired by others.

He says he found a country tied up in knots trying not to offend anybody, dismantling its own culture for fear of being told that it is inappropriate or old-fashioned.

The French know their priorities. Of course, they like their cars and their houses, their foreign holidays and DVD players as much as the next nation.

But not at any cost. Call it bloody minded, but no French worker is going to hurry their lunch, work through the weekend or give up their holiday to become an automaton on a 24-hour treadmill.

They will not, be they the President, the butcher or the bin man, allow you to do business with them until you have shaken hands and exchanged greetings.

They know that family, manners, respect - good food even - are not worth sacrificing in order to become part of a trendy new world that despises tradition.

Far from being born adventurers or natural emigrants, the British who have come here to France are ordinary men and women who simply started worrying about education, health services, working conditions and the deterioration of the standard of life in Britain.

'The biggest settlement since the Hundred Years' War,' beamed Jack Straw recently, referring to the number of Britons in France in his speech to mark the 100th anniversary of the entente cordiale. Proof, as he saw it, that Europe is working.

But hasn't he missed the point? Is it not proof, rather, that Britain isn't?