Getting to mainland Europe from Britain used to be an adventure. We called it ‘the Continent’ or ‘abroad’ and when I first went there as a schoolboy in the Fifties I felt part of a privileged minority of Britons. Most people I knew who had travelled overseas had done so in the uniform of the army, the navy and the air force. Money was scarce and cheap package holidays to beaches in Spain had still to be invented; but perhaps the greatest inhibition was the time it took. When my school organized a trip to Bavaria, the journey lasted from Monday to Wednesday. First, a train from Scotland to London, then another from London to Dover, where we stayed the night in a small hotel. The next afternoon a steamer took us across the Channel to Ostend, where we boarded an overnight express to Munich. A slow passenger train got us to our destination near the Austrian border around noon, by which time we’d eaten en route three breakfasts, one afternoon tea, two lunches and two dinners — eight meals in a journey of about a thousand miles — some of which had been regurgitated during a sea passage that was surprisingly rough.

Now I can leave my house in London after breakfast and, even allowing for the fact that European time is one hour ahead, be in Paris or Brussels for lunch. I can do this without taking a plane or stepping into a taxi. Eurostar trains from the wonderfully refurbished Victorian terminus at St Pancras reach Paris through the Channel tunnel in around two hours fifteen minutes, Brussels in even less. My next-door neighbour actually commutes to Brussels by train, out in the morning, back in the evening, three days a week. That other languages, landscapes and cultures are now so easily reachable is a thought that always thrills me. Despite the embrace of the European Union on this side of the Channel and the inexorable spread of the English language and Anglo-American culture on the other, Britain and Europe remain different places.

When I first went, half a century ago, Europe seemed less modern than Britain. In Switzerland, the railway carriages had wooden seats and in the lavatory you could peer down the pipe and see the track flashing past beneath: exciting but crude. In Paris, you were advised never to drink the tap water, the telephones were unreliable, the Metro stank of garlic and the seats nearest the doors were labelled ‘for those who were wounded by The War’. By the Seventies, the relationship had changed. Britain was now economically and socially ‘the sick man of Europe’ while France, Holland and Germany were powering ahead. By the Eighties, many anti-Thatcherites in Britain looked enviously at the countries of mainland Europe as model societies: their citizens paid more tax but they were more equal, less turbulent, and enjoyed superior national health systems and public transport — for many of us they seemed better places to live in. Then globalization changed the balance once again. Large parts of the European economy — France’s in particular — ossified. Many thousands of French people came to work in London, which boasted that it was the world’s financial capital and where there was no end to jobs in banks. Britons could travel to Europe and, encouraged by the pound’s strength against the euro, believe that they had found the key to a more prosperous future.

That remains more or less the state of play now, even though President Sarkozy is more enamoured of Anglo-American capitalism than his predecessors, even though Anglo-American capitalism itself is gripped by its deepest crisis since the Great Depression. London compares favourably to Paris as what’s called a ‘world city’. It rivals New York in its multi-culturalism — on my London bus I can hear people speaking a dozen languages into their mobiles. The average standard of its restaurants is higher than Paris — where, contrary to centuries of publicity, it’s very easy to eat badly. Its museums and galleries are free — unlike Paris. Theatre is incomparably better. There are more and lovelier parks. It seems more attuned to popular culture. Wealth and youth migrate to it from everywhere. Take a boat down the Thames at night and you look up at tall buildings lit like Manhattan, where only 20 years ago there were old warehouses and docks. Among the downsides is a population that has become the rudest in the world — ruder (and often angrier) even than in Paris and New York, cities once fabled for snarling taxi-drivers and residents who treated visitors like bumpkins.

Paris is a quiet town by comparison. One evening last month, another writer and I arrived from London at the Gare du Nord and took a taxi to a bookshop near Notre Dame (the bookshop is called Shakespeare and Company and any visitor to Paris who’s interested in books should go there). The streets were fairly empty; the day’s bright blue sky was beginning to fade and waiters were laying starched white tablecloths and arranging cutlery on the outdoor terraces of cafés and brasseries. Sometimes you could see a carafe of red wine glowing like a big ruby against the bright white. “Ah, Paris!” we said, as though these sights were eternal. Then, thinking of the London mayhem we’d left behind, I added, “It seems almost provincial.”

“But provincial in a good way,” my companion replied. She meant that Paris has retained its beauty and its character, against the considerable odds of mass tourism, fast-food chains and international property speculation that have made so many cities similar to so many others. Paris isn’t immune to these influences, but civic chauvinism and planning laws have kept them in check. In its architecture, central Paris is much the same as it was a hundred years ago. It has no tower blocks and supermarkets are hard to find. Bookstalls still line the Seine’s left bank. Every side street seems to contain a small baker’s or butcher’s or grocer’s shop with a window display that looks to have been designed by someone with a PhD in the presentation of eatables. ‘French style’ and ‘French chic’ may be worn-out clichés, but the habits of centuries die hard.

Courtesy of Shakespeare and Company, I went to a party a few nights later in the École des Beaux Arts, a collection of buildings from various centuries, including the remnants of a few châteaux that were moved to Paris after the Revolution. The party was in an old stone courtyard with a fountain in the middle. A quiet band played, champagne was poured and various foods arrived on plates. Little frozen discs of gazpacho soup came on sticks, like lollipops, and tiny sandwiches, the length and width of a forefinger, were stacked inside a container that was itself a great square crust of bread, baked specially for the purpose. Who could not be happy here? Marie Antoinette herself would have been content. And yet it was all achieved without pretension or fuss, as though frozen soup on lollipop sticks was both amusing and the most natural thing in the world.

Can it last? I don’t mean the luxury, which lasts everywhere, but France’s sense of itself as an exceptional country that zealously defends its own way of life, sometimes at a cost to its prosperity. At the party, I met an old friend whose husband works as a senior correspondent on Le Monde, which is France’s best newspaper. How was Le Monde? Not good, she said. The paper was badly in debt. Its sales and revenues were falling and the management wanted to sack a fifth of the editorial staff. In Britain — in many countries — similar things have happened without making news. But Le Monde, like the country it serves, is exceptional. It was almost a national crisis. Journalists were going on strike, and as Le Monde’s journalists run their own paper, appointing its editor and directors, you might argue that they were striking against themselves.

I asked how much a Le Monde reporter could expect to earn. The answer was the equivalent of about £30,000 a year. A writer on a London paper might earn twice as much. What he wouldn’t have, however, is France’s legally enforceable 35-hour week, or Le Monde’s holiday arrangements of twelve weeks in every year. To anyone in London (never mind Calcutta), those hours and holidays seem acts of impossible, almost suicidal, generosity. But France values them. Maybe, by making a good life a higher priority than economic growth, it is right to. You can see the long-term wisdom as well as the short-term attractions in this philosophy, and I hope I don’t traduce Calcutta when I say that certain sections of the bhadralok followed it for years.

The one certain thing is that France’s old way of living, of getting and spending, goes against the tenets of globalization to which nearly all of the rest of the world subscribes. Sarkozy’s administration may change that, but the prospects are uncertain.

When I first went to Europe I thought I was looking at the past. Later, it changed and became the future. Now, with France, I feel I may be looking at the past again. I feel it sadly and I hope I am wrong. The French way of life may be doomed, but there is a lot to be said for it.