IRELAND is flavour of the year in France. You can see it in the rash of big spread magazine features in the spectacular success of the Imaginaire Irlandais festival in the warmth of Jacques Chirac's welcome for Mary Robinson last week and in the enthusiasm of the thousands who flock to hear The Cranberries or Sharon Shannon in concert.
About 20,000 French people visited Ireland in 1970; this year it will be 235,000. A recent Bord Failte survey here found that 73 per cent of those polled chose Ireland as the European country they would most like to visit in the next couple of years.
So what is it about Ireland that attracts the French? It seems to work on a number of levels. First there is the traditional image - assiduously promoted by Bord Failte - of a beautiful, wild, unspoilt island full of warm, friendly, approachable people.
"This particularly appeals to middle class Parisians (89 per cent of French visitors to Ireland are from the managerial, professional and white collar sectors) who are looking for a break from the formality and restrictions of their working lives.
It is an image that owes a lot to old films: The Quiet Man, Ryan's Daughter and the film of Le Taxi Mauve, the book by the romantic conservative novelist Michel Deon, who has lived for much of the last 25 years in Ireland and remains probably its most prominent French interpreter.
If most French people think of Ireland at all, they have this rather misty, romantic picture in their minds. They also know two other things common to the histories of the two countries which predispose them towards an instinctive sympathy: Catholicism and long periods of fighting against the English, although in France's case much of the Catholicism and most of the fighting ended a long time ago. The second level of attraction is what French people perceive as the quality of human relationships in Ireland. "You can get access to people's real selves more quickly in Ireland than in France. Here people are a bit blocked, especially in Paris," says Martine Denisot, a media consultant who has known Ireland for nearly 30 years and has a house in Connemara, probably the most popular Irish destination for French cognoscenti.
Lots of French people talk about the "human warmth" they find in Ireland. "That kind of warm human contact and joie de vivre - the taxi driver who wants to know where you come from, the person in the pub who breaks into song - is unusual here. It is something that Ireland must never lose," says Aine Ade's, head of Bord Failte's Paris office, a Clifden woman who has been in France for many years.
Until about 20 years ago the image of Ireland was of a country filled with elderly, or at least ageless, people, says Martine Debusit. Now, because of rock music, a new generation of films and perhaps the election of a young woman president, France is coming to see Ireland more as Ireland sees itself, as a young nation full of young people.
These first two levels usually do not involve any knowledge of Irish history or politics. In fact, these are seen as so confusing that they are best left alone, a perception confirmed by the reluctance of most southern Irish people whom visitors meet to discuss the Northern conflict.
The majority of "ordinary" French people, who are almost totally ignorant of Ireland, probably still think of the whole island as some kind of appendage of Britain, and perceive the Northern Ireland conflict as part of the continuing struggle to break that link. That is why there is usually an instinctive "gut" sympathy for Irish nationalism.
However, it is only among a small group of sophisticated "hibernophiles" that politics is ever discussed. Even then it is far more likely to be the North which is talked about than the Republic, says Sorj Chalendon, a journalist.
To the Irish observer, it is remarkable how otherwise rational, hard headed French people start becoming poetic, whimsical, even mystical, in their explanations of why they find Ireland so fascinating.
A number of Irish writers in Paris recently for readings in connection with L'Imaginaire Irlandais were scathing about this dewy eyed view. It is often connected with another stereotype, that of Irish culture as the product of the Irish pub, of which there are now an extraordinary number in Paris.
HOWEVER, Sorj Chalendon says French people are often searching for something very personal in Ireland. They love its contradictions, complexity and strangeness, and the possibility it offers of something for everyone, whether the visitor is a left wing rebel or a right wing Catholic, a young sybarite looking for wild all night craic or a seeker after oldfashioned family values.
Patrice de Plunkett, the aristocratic editor of Le Figaro Magazine, comes from the other end of the political spectrum, from Chalendon. But he agrees that much of Ireland's charm for French people lies in its contradictions.
The French, who see themselves as very rational beings, able to measure and categorise all experience, are enchanted by a country and a people which defy classification, he says.
However, de Plunkett worries that Ireland's headlong drive for modernisation, courtesy of the EU, will endanger its unique Catholic cultural heritage. It is a concern voiced in different ways by many French people who love Ireland but seem to want it to remain largely untouched by the modern world, a kind of Shangri-la of their imagination.