France

France receives around 100 million international visitors a year, more than any other country on Earth, and manages to be simultaneously the most over-visited place in Europe and one of the most under-explored. Nearly everyone goes to Paris, Provence and the Riviera. Almost nobody goes to the Auvergne, the Jura, the Cévennes or the Lot, and those are where the country still behaves like itself.

It helps to understand the scale. France is the largest country in the EU — 551,695 km² in Europe alone, plus overseas territories that put French sovereign land in the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific and South America. It runs from the Channel to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Alps, and it can produce almost every landscape Europe has except desert and fjord.

What makes it worth the crowds is a stubborn national insistence that ordinary life should be good. Lunch is an hour, not fifteen minutes. Bread is bought daily. The state pays for a village of 400 people to keep a boulangerie. There are 1,200 or so cheeses, several hundred protected wine appellations, and a legal framework defending both. That is not a marketing story; it is a set of priorities you can feel within a day of arriving.

The France that irritates visitors — the bureaucracy, the strikes, the shopkeeper who will not serve you at 12:05 — comes from the same place. It is a country that has decided some things are not negotiable, and that includes the shopkeeper's lunch.

The French call their own country l'Hexagone as often as they call it France, because on a map metropolitan France is a rough six-sided shape — a habit of thinking that shows how much the physical outline matters to national self-image. The name France itself comes from the Franks, the Germanic confederation who took the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century.

France's landscape variety is the reason it can absorb a hundred million visitors without feeling uniformly full. It has Europe's highest mountain, its largest forest of maritime pine, the second-longest Atlantic coast, and a Mediterranean shore that could be a different country entirely — and all of it fits inside a day's train travel from Paris.

Paris sits well north of centre; almost everywhere else is a radial spoke from it, which is exactly how the French rail and motorway networks were built. Getting between two provincial cities often means going through Paris, and that is a genuine planning constraint.

France has been a recognisable political entity for longer than almost anywhere in Europe, and the continuity shows: Roman roads under motorways, medieval market days still held on the same day of the week, and a centralised state that Louis XIV would recognise instantly.

Since 1789 France has had five republics, two empires, three monarchies and one collaborationist state. The current constitution dates from 1958. This is a country that has genuinely changed its system of government roughly every generation, and it makes the French relationship with authority quite different from the German or British one.

Paris is small. That is the first useful thing to know: the city proper is 105 km² with 2.1 million people, and you can walk across it in three hours. The metropolitan area holds 12 million, but the Paris people come to see fits inside a ring road you could cycle around in an afternoon.

Versailles is not really a palace. It is an argument, built at enormous cost, that the French nobility should live where the king could watch them — and it worked so well that it eventually helped destroy the monarchy that built it.

For roughly a century — from the 1860s to the 1940s — Paris was where Western art happened, and France has kept most of it. But the best art experiences in the country are increasingly not in Paris.

France has 68.4 million people, a fifth of them in the Paris region, and a national culture that is genuinely different from its neighbours in ways that go beyond food. The two things most likely to trip up a visitor are formality and the meaning of directness.

French is spoken by around 300 million people across five continents and is co-official in 29 countries. In France itself it is treated as a matter of state: the Académie française has been ruling on it since 1635, and the 1994 Toubon law requires French in advertising, workplaces and public services.

The single French concept most often misunderstood abroad. Laïcité is not the separation of church and state in the American sense, which protects religion from government. It is the removal of religion from public space, which protects the state and its citizens from religion — and it is genuinely different.

Three hundred kilometres of river between Sully and Chalonnes, UNESCO-listed as a cultural landscape, with something over 300 châteaux along it. This was where the French court spent the sixteenth century when Paris was unhealthy and Italy had just taught France what a palace could look like.

The Atlantic north: apples instead of grapes, butter instead of oil, cider and calvados instead of wine, and a coastline that carries both the country's most photographed abbey and its most consequential beaches.

The Roman province, and the part of France that looks most like the postcard sold abroad. It is also badly over-visited in July and August, which is exactly when the lavender is out — so the choice is between the flowers and the room to see them.

The Riviera invented the modern seaside holiday, first as a winter resort for tubercular English aristocrats and then, from the 1920s, as the summer playground it still is. It is expensive, crowded and, in the right places, still exactly as good as its reputation.

The most contested piece of ground in modern European history — French, then German in 1871, French in 1918, German in 1940, French since 1945 — and the reason the European Parliament sits in Strasbourg. It does not look or eat like the rest of France, and that is the point of going.

France has the largest connected ski terrain on Earth and the highest mountain in western Europe, and in summer both ranges empty out and become the best hiking in the country at a fraction of the winter price.

UNESCO listed the gastronomic meal of the French as intangible heritage in 2010 — not any particular dish, but the ritual: aperitif, starter, main, cheese, dessert, wine matched to each, and several hours. That is the Sunday version. The weekday version is a €16 lunch formule in a bistro, and it is one of the best-value meals in Europe.

Two things France protects by law that most countries leave to the market. The result is that a village of 600 people can still support a baker, and that a supermarket cheese counter in France is better than a specialist shop in most of Europe.

France produces around 45 million hectolitres a year — vying with Italy for first place — across roughly 360 protected appellations. The French label by place rather than grape because the underlying belief is that the ground matters more than the variety, and that belief has a name: terroir.

Tasting without embarrassing yourself

The café is not a coffee shop. It is a licensed public room where you may sit for two hours over one drink, and the price of that drink is legally required to be posted and is higher at a table than at the bar. Understanding this makes France far easier to navigate.

The eurozone's second-largest economy, and one built on a relationship between state and market that neither Anglo-Saxon nor Nordic models quite explain. The state owns or part-owns the railways, the electricity company and much of the aerospace industry, and nobody in France finds this remarkable.

Four climates in one country: oceanic in the west, continental in the east and centre, Mediterranean in the south, and alpine in the mountains. That means there is almost always somewhere in France with good weather, and it is rarely the place everyone else is going.

Easy, cheap and close. Prague to Paris is a 2-hour flight or a comfortable day by train, both countries are in the EU and Schengen, France uses the euro, and there is no time difference — France and Czechia are in the same zone.

France has the best rail network in Europe outside Switzerland and Japan, and using it is almost always better than driving or flying domestically. The one structural flaw is that everything radiates from Paris.

France is mid-priced for western Europe and much cheaper than it looks if you eat and travel the way the French do. Paris and the Riviera in season are the two genuine outliers.

France is a safe country with a specific and well-known pickpocketing problem in a handful of tourist locations. Violent crime against visitors is rare; theft in the Paris metro is not.

A short gallery of the France that fits on a postcard — with the honest note that these are illustrations rather than documentary photographs, and the captions say where they diverge from the real thing.

A Provençal hill village

The village perché, built high for defence and now for the view. Gordes, Roussillon and Ménerbes are the famous ones; there are dozens more with no coach park.

Lavender at sunset

The Valensole plateau in the first three weeks of July. The colour here is pushed well past what the eye sees, but the rows, the ridge and the farmhouse are the real geometry of the place.

A château on the water

Slate roofs, dormers and a moat — the Loire idiom. Azay-le-Rideau and Chenonceau are the two that genuinely sit in water.

The mistake almost everyone makes with France is to treat it as a list. Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Versailles, a château, a lavender field, a beach. You can do all of that in ten days, photograph it competently, and come home having spent your entire trip in the company of other people doing exactly the same thing.

The France worth the journey is smaller and slower. It is a Tuesday market in a town you had not heard of, where the man selling goat cheese asks how ripe you want it and then argues with your answer. It is a two-hour lunch on a Thursday in a bistro with eleven tables and no English menu, for twenty euros including wine. It is a village church, unlocked, empty, cold, with a Romanesque tympanum over the door that nobody has come to see.

Two pieces of advice. First, say bonjour. Every time, first, before anything else. Nine tenths of the French rudeness that visitors report is a response to being addressed as if the person in front of them were a vending machine. Second, go one region further. Whatever the guidebook recommends, look at the map and take the next valley. The Drôme instead of the Luberon, the Aveyron instead of the Dordogne, the Jura instead of the Alps.

And eat lunch properly. Not a sandwich at a monument — a real lunch, sitting down, for an hour, in the middle of the day, at the moment when the rest of the country is doing exactly the same thing. It costs less than dinner, it is the meal French cooking is actually built around, and it will tell you more about the place than any museum on the list.

— Radim Kaufmann