Yet this apparent slice of paradise - the Vaucluse - is also a microcosm of all the French feel is wrong with France today. Beneath the gorgeous face it presents to the world, there are tensions, discontents and fears that have bred anger and resentment - emotions that will strongly influence how the locals are likely to vote in tomorrow's first round of France's presidential election.

Foreigners .... from North Africa

Rural Vaucluse is still visibly the bucolic France of Marcel Pagnol; but go into even small towns such as Carpentras, 15 miles from Avignon and about 75 minutes by road north of Marseilles, and the social revolution that has disturbed so many of the French, and caused them to want a clean break with the policies that successive governments have followed since the Second World War, is plainly visible. With some 30,000 inhabitants, Carpentras is about the size of Chippenham or Whitstable, and has a similarly rural hinterland. However, quite unlike such English towns, a considerable proportion of its population is of North African origin. The French do not publish official figures of people by ethnic origin: everyone in France is deemed to be French, and the authorities have no truck with ethnic monitoring.

However, the consensus among the indigenous French in Carpentras is that the Muslims in the town now comprise about a quarter of its population. In France as a whole, estimates of the Muslim population range from between 10 and 13 per cent, but the hinterland of Marseilles has a heavy concentration of North Africans. Unemployment is just above the national average of 10 per cent, and seems widespread among the Muslim population - some local businessmen put that community's unemployment at around 60 per cent, including illegal immigrants who do not feature in the official statistics.  Throughout the day, the benches in the neat little gardens in the town are packed with men in Maghrebian dress, simply sitting and staring into an indefinite distance.  The bourgeois who walk past seem to be making a conscious effort not to notice them, and it is reciprocated.

Disgust at way they treat women

In the 2002 election, the Front National candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, recorded his highest vote in France in the Vaucluse, at 28 per cent of those who voted. Many of the locals, whether his supporters or not, suspect that could be higher tomorrow.  He seems especially popular among women, one of whom described to me her disgust at the way in which "les Arabes" treat their women like "chattels", a sight she abhorred in 21st-century France.

Theoretically, the large numbers of Muslims here should be good news for the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal.  A campaign to get the ethnic minorities to register to vote appears to have been successful, and they are presumed to be her natural supporters.

However, at the grass roots there seems to be deep disenchantment with the Socialist Party among its supporters, despite what the Left sees as the spectre of a likely victory by Nicolas Sarkozy, whose rhetoric about national identity, immigration controls and the fight against crime is now barely different from Le Pen's.

The headquarters of the Socialist Party in Carpentras's Avenue Clemenceau has been closed all week, the iron security grille drawn across its windows suggesting a belief that there is little point doing business in these parts. A middle-class couple I met, who live in one of the surrounding villages, said they would be voting for Royal out of duty, but would rather that her defeated rival Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been on the ballot instead.  Certainly, Ségolène has not galvanised the public in the way it was predicted she would: the incoherence of her programme, with its mix of flag-waving nationalism and even higher state spending, seems obvious to almost everyone.

The French majority here seem mostly divided between Sarkozy and Le Pen.  Carpentras itself is a town of shopkeepers and small businessmen, with nothing but contempt for the way France has treated them in recent years.  To them, neither Royal nor the other leading candidate, the centrist François Bayrou, has anything to offer.

Frédéric, the proprietor of an internet café, told me Bayrou was simply "a fabrication of the media".  Albert, a veteran of the Algerian war who now runs an art shop, merely laughed when I asked him what he thought of Royal.  Josette, a greengrocer, was firmly behind Sarkozy, seeing him as the only realistic prospect France has of maintaining its identity, and of creating a climate in which regulation and high taxation do not suffocate business.

In an area dominated by agriculture, Sarkozy's firm commitment to the Common Agricultural Policy goes down well.  The great concern here, as in all of France, is unemployment.  Eric, who runs a computer business, talked to me of how hard it is for the young to get work, not least because heavy regulation makes them hard to afford, and impossible to sack.  "And when they tried to reform all this a couple of years ago," he reminds me, "all people did was go out and riot."

Political move to the right

I dropped in on the local MP, or deputy, Jean-Michel Ferrand.  An avid supporter of Sarkozy, he, too, stressed that his man would shore up French identity by his creation of a new ministry to enforce immigration laws, and that a cut in France's enormous welfare state and vast public spending - 52 per cent of GDP - would follow from his victory.  In more than 20 years in parliament, Ferrand has made a political journey similar to that of many of his constituents - to the Right.  Photographs in his office show him beaming with admiration at Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who, though now a backer of Sarkozy, was considerably to the Left of him when in office; in a warm handshake with Jacques Chirac, whose consensual political programme Sarkozy is, he claims, preparing to tear up; and finally in an embrace with Sarkozy himself.

Ferrand and Sarkozy's party, the UMP, knows it has much to fear from Le Pen's Front National.  On the day I saw Ferrand, Sarkozy gave an interview in which he pointedly reminded the French that 2,000 years of Christianity underpinned their culture. Ferrand sought, somewhat unconvincingly, to play down the support for the Front National locally. He did, though, repeatedly echo Sarkozy's rhetoric about national identity, controlled immigration and the need to come down hard on crime. "It is one of the big changes of the past five years," he told me without irony, "that we can now speak of such things honestly." It is a line the UMP's activists have been told plays well with the public in la France profonde, and they are certainly plugging away at it.

Paris establishment seen as distant and cowardly

It does not always, though, seem to be cultural clashes or France's economic woes that are at the heart of this election. A loathing of the political establishment in Paris, who are seen as distant, cowardly and completely out of touch with the realities of life for the ordinary French, seeped out of many of the Vauclusiens to whom I spoke.

Frédéric from the internet café blamed journalists for letting politicians get away with their inadequacies. "They say nothing bad about them because they are paid to keep quiet. Most of our journalists are in the pockets of some politician." It probably isn't true, but the tone of French political coverage is certainly much more reverential than we are used to in Britain, and has created highly negative perceptions among a disillusioned public. It also helps explain why Le Pen, who is as rude about the media as he is about his rivals, can so easily ally himself with the hearts and minds of the public.

Having exhausted all other ways of exciting public interest in the election, the local newspaper yesterday had as its lead story the results of a survey taken among the local astrologers and necromancers of what the outcome would be: and they decided, by a narrow margin, that Sarkozy would beat Royal in the play-off on May 6.  Given how many French are proud of the way they lie to opinion pollsters, clairvoyance may be as good a way as any of predicting what might happen. One senses, though, that it is going to take a really radical new president to make any impact at all on the way the French in this part of "paradise" feel about their country.