It still feels that way if you’re a writer. “You’re going to feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven,” a novelist friend of mine, unconsciously echoing Roth, knowingly murmured in 2007, when one of my books came out in a French translation. I soon saw what he meant. In the United States, there is one nationally broadcast radio program that has significant coverage of books — NPR’s “Fresh Air,” which book publicists fight over like pi-dogs over a picked bone. In Paris, I soon lost count of how many in-depth radio and TV shows, some as long as an hour, I taped or broadcast live at the circular, weirdly sci-fi-looking Maison de la Radio. I happened to be in France in September, during the rentrée littéraire — the opening of the literary season, when publishers release their big books — and the frenzy was palpable. And not just among the soi-disant elite, either. Lost in a strange neighborhood late one night, I approached a group of club kids for directions, only to overhear them arguing heatedly about which of the new crop of books would be that year’s “The Kindly Ones,” the Holocaust blockbuster that had come out the year before.

The fact is that a unique glamour, a cachet for which no other country has an equivalent, has attached to intellectual activity in France for nearly a millennium — from the 12th century, when the city’s newly founded university began attracting fervently opinionated scholars, into the 20th, when the City of Light drew its famous literary expatriates: Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and Samuel Beckett. This may be because, whereas Anglo-Saxons prefer to segregate the life of the mind from that of other organs, French intellectual passion has often overflowed into, and become indistinguishable from, other kinds of passion. There’s an unbroken line from the medieval theologian and philosopher Abélard and his brainy ladylove, Héloïse — their illicit love affair, chronicled in (what else?) an extensive series of beautifully wrought letters, resulted in premarital pregnancy, castration and a son called Astrolabe — to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, in the middle of the last century, would sit at the Café de Flore from 9 a.m. to well into the night, conducting their intellectual, social and romantic business in public.

Whatever the cultural reasons, books in France are indeed an “essential good” — the designation coined by the French government that served to justify the very concrete steps it has taken over the years to protect its precious literary culture. The most prominent of these are laws outlawing the advantages (deep discounting combined with free shipping) that big chains and Amazon enjoy over independent booksellers in the United States and other countries. These help explain a phenomenon that inevitably strikes American visitors to France today: As even big chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble have faltered here, every block in central Paris seems to sprout at least two small, intelligently stocked bookshops.

As well they should. On average, a Frenchman reads 25 percent more books per year than an American does. (The shocked outcry over the French culture minister’s admission that she hasn’t read a book in two years only proves how anomalous she is.) Other statistics are equally striking. In 2008, for instance, 14 percent of books published in France were translations from other languages: a key indicator of a nation’s intellectual curiosity and awareness. In the United States, the figure scrapes along at 3 percent.

Such realities reflect deep cultural values that can’t be Band-Aided over. Should we declare books “an essential good”? Sure, declare away. But saying so won’t make it so.