Stevenson, who wrote a bestseller about travelling with a donkey in the remote mountains of the Cévennes. By and large, though, his fellow countrymen stuck to regions familiar to the contemporaries of their parents and grandparents.

Nor did the French themselves wander far afield: a writer just before the first world war asserted that for Parisians, some rural départements were hardly better known then than in 1820. In 1882, the Cornhill Magazine pointed out the bargains to be had in the great number of country houses up for sale. It cited a lovely house near Neuilly, with an 18-acre park, that had recently been sold by its British owner for £36,000.

JEC Bodley, a prominent member of the British community in Paris and a highly regarded writer, went househunting with his wife in the 1890s. They visited a dozen or more properties dotted about France, but none would do; very often, they were hopelessly dilapidated. Their French friends told them not to bother with the country, saying they would do much better to stick to the Paris region.

The car also made less difference than might have been expected, even though the main roads in France were frequently better and much less crowded than those in Britain. Provence, disdained in the 19th century — too many bedbugs was one reason — gained in popularity, but essentially because it was readily accessible from the Riviera. The resorts of the Channel coast prospered, with giant hotels opening in such places as Le Touquet. Racetracks and casinos flourished.

Regular services by air played an important role, even though there was, of course, nothing to compare with the network of local airfields that now exists. These days, the airport at Bergerac, in the Dordogne, caters for 200,000 passengers a year; in the 1920s, the town was described by one British motorist as a “dirty-looking place” and by another as “unendurably smelly”.

Indeed, much of rural France in the 1920s and 1930s was uninviting. Agriculture was in decline, as was the population. Huge numbers of young Frenchmen had been killed in the first world war. A friend of mine who grew up in Lot-et-

Garonne at that time cycled all over the département. It was, he told me, a desert.

In the mid-1920s, John Gibbons, from London, walked almost all the 600 miles from Mont St-Michel to Lourdes. In his book Tramping to Lourdes, he describes arriving at one village where, he claimed, he must have been the first Englishman to visit since the Middle Ages. During the trip, Gibbons met one other Londoner — and he turned out to be a French businessman from Gascony who happened to work in Britain.

That, of course, is old history. Much of provincial France has been transformed in recent years by British, Dutch and other foreigners, inspired perhaps by Peter Mayle’s book A Year in Provence, as well as by a few French fleeing the cities. Most of the ruined farm buildings — still to be seen everywhere back in the early 1970s, when we bought our property — have been turned into comfortable homes, and villages have grown inexorably.

As the economic crisis deepens on both sides of the Channel, however, there are some sombre parallels with the past, especially the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from the quality of the food and wine, one of the traditional attractions of French life has been the lower cost of living. In the 19th century, it was not so much that prices there were lower than in Britain — indeed, sometimes they were higher — but that Britons who crossed the Channel were able to get away with a more modest lifestyle.

In the 1920s, we had it both ways: the franc, which had been at 25 to the pound in 1914, had tumbled to 152 by 1926. Five years later, however, the pound came off the gold standard and plunged against the franc. In 1931, 50,000 Britons lived full-time in France (against 100,000 today), but by 1936, thanks to the depression and devaluation, that figure had dropped to 30,000. The deteriorating political situation in Europe following the rise of Hitler also played a part.

With the collapse this year of the pound — which, as I write, is edging close to parity with the euro — there is no mistaking the parallel. The French equivalent of council tax is high, while the cost of services such as electricity and plumbing is not negligible. Food, which in recent years was less expensive than at home, now costs more.

The only consolation for those who own property is that its value, at least when translated back into pounds, will have gone up. But that is of little immediate benefit, especially when you consider that the market has been stagnant all year (even if it hasn’t fallen quite as far or fast as the British one). For full-time residents dependent on pensions, annuities or investment from home, this has not been a happy holiday season.

The British in France: Visitors and Residents Since the Revolution by Peter Thorold is published by Continuum at £30. To buy it for £27, including p&p, call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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