Lucy Wadham’s account of her 20 years of travails living in France married to a Frenchman and bringing up two children is the latest addition to the groaning sub-genre of books about British expats grappling with the baffling French. I myself moved to France three years ago and The Secret Life of France reads like a more eloquent version of the compare-and-contrast cafe chats that my British and American girlfriends and I often engage in. All the usual suspects of cliché and complaint are here: the crazy French driving, casual acceptance of adultery, “diabolical” pop music, libidinous politicians, obsession with the upkeep of la beauté, fuming encounters with recal­citrant petty bureaucrats, strikes and demos, anti-Arab racism, and intellectual pandering to abstract philosophers. “It did not take long,” Wadham writes, “for me to realise that the French inhabit a different moral universe to ours.”

Wadham’s descriptions of the mores and tropes of the haute-bourgeois Parisian society she ­marries into are pithy, larded with anecdote and all perfectly true. But her attempts to explain French be-haviour and le norm (from irascible anti-Americanism and a post-dinner-party ménage à six to deep belief in socialist entitlement) in terms of history and social psychology often only further complicate the country’s natural nuances and contradictions. “The French paradox, then,” Wadham writes, concluding a Nietzschean explanation for rudeness in a bookshop, “lies in the attachment of its population to an apparently noble status that ultimately enslaves them.” Sounds highbrow, but what does it mean?

Throughout, Wadham is frustrated by the French and “their earnest intellectualism, their conformism, their indiscipline, their petulance, their pusillanimity and their bigotry”. Sometimes this comes across as rather relentlessly negative. But her indignation serves her well as she probes the infamous quiescence of the French press, the “moral cowardice”of the Vichy collaboration and the hypocrisy of revolutionary principles that insist on égalité, while denying Muslim girls the right to cover their hair in school. Again and again she butts her head against the Catholic (capital C; she’s explicit) lassitude that seems to prefer conformism and stasis over the individualism and imagination valued in Anglo-Saxon countries. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy (whom Wadham dubs the “sexual dwarf” after he lavishes eye contact on her at a press conference) may have presaged a desire for change, but his popularity numbers have recently plummeted. Wadham points out that Sarko has pushed through many reforms, but it’s his bling-bling style that discomfits many.

Luckily, there’s a happy ending. After 15 years, Wadham leaves her husband, marries an Englishman and moves to a Protestant corner in the Cévennes mountains where “they champion integrity, punctuality, rigour and hard work over beauty, charm, art and leisure”. There’s a measure of suppressed pride that her French children have grown up and begun to discover quirky British humour and an independent streak. Along the way she’s fallen in and out of love with France several times, proving that nations and their inhabitants defy generalisations. I ended up concluding that Wadham hadn’t, after all, married into the wrong country, just into the wrong milieu with the wrong guy.

The Secret Life of France by Lucy Wadham
Faber £12.99 pp266

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist