If there were anything to make 'Allo 'Allo! look like cinéma vérité, then it has to be the version of France that periodically appears at the top of the British media's Faraway Tree. It swings by each time a story about political shagging emanates from our neighbours across the channel, and it's up there right now – a wondrous land where French women don't get fat, or take the slightest interest in gossip, or mind if their husbands are at it with someone else.

Have you travelled to this place? Just reading about it brings me to the profoundly unsettling realisation that, contrary to what I imagined all those times I've got on the Eurostar or ferries or planes, I've never actually visited France at all. It's a bit like being in a bafflingly complex thriller where everything you thought you knew was wrong. I'm both terrified and intrigued as to where exactly I was on those occasions: a sort of vast, Truman Show-style soundstage constructed entirely for my personal benefit to deceive me as to the real France – populated by size six women, with immaculately behaved children, who want their husbands to have mistresses so they are freed up for the ministrations of a beautician. Just like in La Haine.

If you had to alight on something more innately appealing than the journalistic Royal We then it would surely be the journalistic Royal They, as applied to The French – and most specifically, French Women. You could certainly read some fascinating things about the real France this week.

"We have muffin tops too," revealed a French author, "but we can't show them because we are French." "The French are scandalised by a president's affair," explained someone. "The French are admirably relaxed about sex," explained someone else. A Daily Mail columnist simply couldn't understand Valérie Trierweiler's "absurd look-at-me-ism" in having been admitted to hospital, because, as she'd just explained to readers, French women are fine with their other halves cheating on them as it "allows time for hair appointments and other such private endeavours which the presence of a man would only impair".

Are the French the last group for whom it is not only acceptable for the British media to stereotype in terms of national character, but imperative? Is it possible for a single detail to emerge from the country without commentators instantly deciding whether it is "SO French" or "SO not French"? Instinct suggests you couldn't get away with resorting to this level of cliche with the Germans or the Japanese, and the fact that The French are merely a few miles away from our shores makes the insistence on their alternatively wired consciousness even more amusing.

But then, it must be said that this France is not an entirely British confection – a number of French women seem to have realised there is money in it. Books such as French Women Don't Get Fat have spawned a rapidly proliferating publishing genre. You'll be aware that French Children Don't Throw Food, while you can also buy French Women Don't Get Facelifts; French Women's Secrets to Feeling Beautiful Every Day; French Women's Secrets For Ageing With Style and Grace; How Those Chic French Women Eat All That Rich Food and Still Stay Slim; A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl; French Women Don't Sleep Alone; What French Women Know: About Love, Sex and Other Matters of Heart and Mind … and on it goes.

The John Fowles estate is really missing a sales trick by not tweaking the title of one of his works, given that The French Woman's Lieutenant would surely bring in this whole lifestyle market. Do let's hope it isn't long before bookshops bow to the inevitable, and ditch their Mind Body Spirit shelves in favour of a section dedicated to the canon of French Women-helmed personal growth.

Indeed, at the current rate of expansion this sector will soon account for at least 30% of the French economy that François Hollande spoke so electrifyingly about on Tuesday, in that press conference whose stonewalling our own parliamentary hacks declared would simply never have been permitted in this country. And yet, perhaps we can live without the holier-than-vous posturing of the Westminster lobby, who spent years not reporting Charles Kennedy's drinking problem, say – just as we can probably all get by without this idea that the French have a reflexive respect for privacy, given that the Hollande affair issue of Closer magazine was an instant sellout, and that the first place to publish pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge topless was France.

Alas, it seems that the France Of The Media and Actual France have been living separate lives for some time now – though of course they're typically discreet about it. As for how quite how much French Women have to do with French women … well, there are plenty who maintain that so-called Swinging London was actually limited to 17 people and Mick Jagger, and one can't help but sense that, were one to click one's fingers and teleport right now to a regional French high street, to say nothing of one of the HLM housing projects in which one in six people in the country lives, it would become clear that the France of the proverbial French Women actually involves 23 Parisians. And at least half of those are being economical with the actualité of how they truly live.

Twitter: @MarinaHyde