(From top) Sophie Marceau and Audrey Tautou: Pouty-lipped French beauties. A scene from Paris Je T’aime

There was an opinion poll a few years back in which men from different European countries were asked which nationalities they would most like to sleep with. French women topped the list, naturellement. A little later, the men were asked which women they had already slept with — and British women won by a mile. There’s the difference, and our source of envy. If immediate and unrestrained sexual accessibility was the only thing we wanted from women, then British men would be more than happy with what they’ve got.

But clearly, it isn’t; they want still more. They want accessibility-plus. Shimmering elegance, perfumed mystery — even, God forbid, romance. They want the woman they are with to succumb because she has been borne aloft on the extraordinary passion of the moment and there is no escape, rather than because it’s Friday night and she’s out of her skull on vodka and Red Bull. They want a feverish mew of long-fought-for acquiescence in a scented garret in the seventh arrondissement, rather than a porcine grunt in the doorway of JJB Sports as she at last drops her noisome kebab to the floor. They want style.

The notion that Parisian women possess such style, such sexual sophistication, a winning hauteur or even froideur that we all know can easily be shattered or thawed has been with us for a long time — according to one writer, since the Sun King, Louis XIV, who dragged a recalcitrant France into the modern age.

As Joan DeJean puts it in her book The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour: “A national personality was the product of the type of elaborate and deliberate image-making of which Hollywood or Madison Avenue would be proud… France had acquired a sort of monopoly on culture, style and luxury living, a position that it has occupied ever since.” DeJean might have included in that long list of French achievements “a tendency to overstate the case somewhat” — her own book is guilty of that.

And the real answer may be simpler: language. French was the language of the European ruling classes, from St Petersburg to London, before the authoritarian aesthetics of Louis XIV; the language of high-born civility. Today it is merely the language of France — and maybe Cote d’Ivoire and Guadeloupe — a language in decline. These days, more people speak Malay than French; but the perception remains, among the French, that theirs is a superior language, an intellectual’s language, more subtle and nuanced than the guttural ejaculations of English and its Germanic and Scandinavian cousins. The idea that language might structure or even determine how we behave, and its relationship with something called “style”, is itself a very French notion — you can plough your way through Jacques Derrida or Jacques Lacan for confirmation of this, or just take my word for it.

But the idea extends to sex itself, which, 20 miles across the Channel, is perceived as primarily an intellectual pursuit. Over here it might be better described as an exhausting recreational activity, rather like throwing yourself over and over again at a Velcro-clad wall. There is no commonly used derogatory term in French for the act of making love: I could give you about 50 from the English language.

But the French simply don’t see it that way. And therefore, while French women are undoubtedly perceived by men as sex objects, the idea of what is meant by “sex object” has a rather higher status in Paris. In Britain, our sex symbols — pop stars, movie actresses, models — get hitched to dumb, beautiful footballers. In France they shack up with intellectuals and academics. Juliette Greco and the tiresome Edith Piaf were the pin-ups of the existentialists; more recently, the pouting moppet from Miami Vice, Arielle Dombasle, teamed up with France’s most prominent intellectual, Bernard-Henri Levy.

This is, from a British perspective, almost inconceivable. What on earth would they have to talk about? But in France pin-ups cannot be idolised unless they can hold their own intellectually, talk about the meaning of life and offer up a decent critique of Nicolas Sarkozy’s latest speech. And so we have a succession of pouty-lipped, kitten-faced French actresses who, on the subject of politics, become astonishingly confident, gobby and shrill. From Brigitte Bardot on the right, with her profound love of animals and her profound dislike of black people, to Emmanuelle Beart on the left, forever marching angrily against one thing or another. And these are the role models from which less gilded French women take their cue.

So the elegance of the Parisiennes is not about fashion, as we use the term, at all, but about independence and confidence. For sure, there is a certain French look that we all recognise and are perhaps overfamiliar with: the perfect make-up, the hat, the simple black dress, the short, neat hair, the lustrous pearls — the very photograph, in fact, that adorns the cover of the book Parisiennes. But flick through the book and you see that this image of the Paris female is drawn almost exclusively from the years 1920-55; it is not much in evidence today. Instead, if you stroll around the Left Bank, you will see elegance of a very different kind. What is immediately noticeable in the little bars and bistros off the Boulevard Saint-Germain is the complete and utter lack of what we know as “fashion”. The younger women seem to favour that distressed rock’’roll chic, last seen in Britain in about 1978. Ripped jeans, leather jacket, unkempt hair, sardonic expression.

It works; it suits them. But you also see this: a profusion of public groping, petting, snogging, stroking. Sex — romance — is not simply an agonising intellectual pursuit, but one to be displayed for the world to see. The writer Catherine Millet puts it thus: “Being in love doesn’t just mean giving yourself to another, it means putting on an accomplished show for passers-by.” Millet, of course, has put on a bit of a show herself for passers-by with her book The Sexual Life of Catherine M, which detailed, with some candour, her remarkable list of sexual activities. In Britain she’d be regarded, I suspect, as a bit of an old slapper. In France she has the intellectual kudos we might bestow on the likes of Bertrand Russell. In France, pornography and high art merge all too easily.

And then there’s this from Andre Breton: “What is a kiss? A shift off course. Everything capsizes.” This idea, of a kiss being immediately dislocating, of possessing an importance way beyond its initial physical effect, is crucial.

It is at the very core of France’s overwrought and perhaps overintellectualised relationship with sex and love, from the interminable musings of that charlatan Georges Bataille in the 1930s (“Man constantly goes in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him”) to the present-day brilliance of the exiled writer Michel Houellebecq. And every French film in between that takes as its synopsis “people having sex and not being very happy about it”. If you elevate the importance of sex and its mysteries, you elevate the importance of the sex object, too. You confer upon the woman an exalted status.

Feminists of the old school might claim, with some justification, that the idea of Parisienne elegance and sophistication is simply a rather more subtle than usual, but no less deluded and unjust, image confected by men primarily for the benefit of men. A clever con trick and one still perpetrated with great enthusiasm today. Still, it looks good on them, for all that.

Extract from Parisiennes: A Celebration of French Women, to be published in November