An Irish fairytale from France

It is Friday evening at the College des Irlandais in Paris, and a mostly French, trendylefty-scruffy middle-aged crowd with children have turned up to celebrate the publication of Deux Vagabonds en Irlande, by Pierre Josse and Bernard Pouchele The book is an outpouring of Hibernophilia and an incitement to drink, so it is not surprising that Bord Failte and Guinness France are hosting the party.

But wait a minute - perhaps it is surprising that an arm of the Irish Government and a respectable brewery have let slip past them such political crassness. Only a small percentage of Two Vagabonds is political, but had the party guests been anyone other than Frenchmen, they would surely have raised an eyebrow at its pre-ceasefire, unreconstructed pro-republican tone. The French have always had a romantic, unanuanced view of the struggle of northern Catholics - a fact Josse readily acknowledges.

His affection for Ireland began in August 1970, when he lived with "militants republicans" in Derry. The book opens with a poem to Bobby Sands, and is sprinkled with anti-British jibes. It suggests Margaret Thatcher is a terrorist, and at one point refers to Orangemen as goose-stepping Fascists. The single sentence devoted to the Belfast Agreement alludes only to the possible "disappearance of the artificial and unbearable border separating Northern Ireland from Southern Ireland".

Josse, now 53, says he loves Ireland so much he has purchased a plot at Glendalough cemetery. "This book is the culmination of a 28-year-old love story," he tells the audience. He took all the photos and wrote part of the text, a change from his normal work writing guidebooks. Over the past 25 years, Josse has built up France's most successful guidebook company, the Guide du Routard, which sells 1.8 million copies every year. Of the 82 countries he has visited and written about, Ireland is his favourite.

Pouchele, 67, who co-authored the book, wanders through the crowd with a pint of Guinness in his hand. He is a bear of a man with wild grey hair, lamb-chop whiskers and a paunch, and he wears socks and sandals on his feet. "I went to Ireland as a vagabond 20 years ago, with a rucksack and without a penny," he recounts. "I wanted every Frenchman to know this country." He asks in the book what the world would be without Ireland, which he credits with; saving the Roman Catholic Church, psychoanalysis (through James Joyce), the US (through John Fitzgerald Kennedy), Communism (because the Great Famine provided Karl Marx with the basis of his analysis), Hollywood (through John Ford et al) not to mention literature - through contributions too numerous to mention.

In Ireland, and in "this fight for the total independence of their country", Josse writes, he found "all the qualities and aspirations that seemed to be missing so sorely in France: a fairly weak sense of power and money, friendship held above material contingencies, generosity, conviviality, a deep and rich relationship with music. Ireland seemed to possess the quality of relations between people that we dreamt of."

His love of Ireland is deliberately blinkered. "I never set foot in Knock, the Irish Lourdes," he writes, "as if it was another Ireland, a sort of incongruous thing, an accident of history. In the same way, the big fundamental questions of contraception, abortion, divorce etc I kept for serious discussions with militants . . . Perhaps we were conscious that because Catholicism plays a powerful role of identity in the national question, we had to accept its most backward aspects for the time being. The main thing being the struggle against the British occupation!"

Similarly, Josse says he now prefers to turn a blind eye to the portable phones in the streets of Dublin, yuppies and the proliferation of tourist-gouging bed and breakfasts. Like many Hibernophile Frenchmen, he insists "my Ireland will never let itself be corrupted".

His Ireland, as portrayed in dozens of black and white photographs taken over nearly three decades, is Ireland as the French imagine it. There are sheep grazing under rain-washed skies, stone walls meandering higgledypiggledy through Kerry and the Aran Islands, medieval abbeys and Celtic crosses, pub tables laden with Guinness, toothless old peasants and freckled girls with wavy hair.

Pouchele and Josse weave brief history lessons into their paean to Irish women, pubs and nature. The ostracism of Captain Boycott in Mayo in 1880 is recounted in the tone of a fairy tale. So is the ill-fated 1798 adventure of General Humbert, to whom the book is dedicated. Until his death 25 years later, Humbert dreamed of returning to help the Irish republicans, "proof that if one brings souvenirs back from most countries, it's a bit of yourself that you leave in Ireland."

The two Frenchmen were amazed by the hospitality of the Irish, by the Connemara shepherd who placed a basket filled with tea, warm homemade bread, milk and jam in their path, by the farmer who turned down their request to sleep in his barn but insisted on giving them a heated bedroom. One of the most intriguing encounters is the evening more than 10 years ago that Pouchele spent in front of a peat fire drinking stout with a certain Father Finnegan from Donegal. Eventually, the priest predicted, for economic reasons Ulster would see its interests lie not with Britain, but with the Republic and full participation in Europe. "Where the IRA failed, the Brussels Commission will succeed."