There are any number of good reasons for going over to Longchamp to watch the Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe and, not surprisingly, bored wives and demanding girlfriends underwhelmed by the thought of another afternoon at Folkestone or Kempton Park, tend to respond with alacrity to the prospect of a sporting weekend by the Seine.

Win, lose or draw, Paris remains one of the most fabulous capital cities in the world. There's the designer chic of the Boulevard St. Germain. There are the clothes, cafés, galleries and food. Oh, the food. Those great plateaus of fruits de mer. Oysters, moules. Langoustines. The steak frites and magret de canard. The Chablis, Volnay and Margaux. Even puffing on one of those murderous old yellow paper Gitane Mais cigarettes feels a lot sexier than lighting up a Silk Cut in Regent Street.

Of course, the main event isn't that bad, either. Elegant thoroughbreds, human and equine, strolling beneath the chestnut trees in Longchamp's autumnal sunshine. The Arc field parading before the packed stands. The thrilling moment when the leaders fan out at full stretch as they power into the home straight. The sight of the winner cantering back afterwards: the victorious jockey - be it Frankie Dettori, Christophe Soumillon or Johnny Murtagh - ecstatically acknowledging the deafening cheers of the crowd.

Around 50,000 spectators will flock to Longchamp on 3 October and as usual 20,000 of them, or more, will be British with a healthy supporting cast drawn from as far away as North America, Australia and Japan. Yet on almost any other Sunday of the year those self-same tree lined walkways and spacious terraces will be virtually empty because the French, as a rule, are only moderately interested in actually going to the races.

You can always count on seeing a few ancien Toffs in curly brimmed bowlers and sophisticated women in Chanel suits. And you can count on seeing the low-life Parisian turfistes too with their crumpled Jean Paul Belmondo faces, their ready line in suggestive barracking (especially when the Aga Khan is in view) and their propensity to pelt the riders of losing favourites with empty fag packets and handfuls of gravel. The ranks of the bourgeoisie, though, despise racing and look down their Gallic noses at punters, which may explain why day-to-day French gamblers still have to put up with such a mediocre service.

Expatriate English aristos like Queen Victoria's cousin Lord Sandringham introduced organized flat racing to France in the mid 19th Century. But republican politicians decided that English style bookmakers should be outlawed back in 1881, and ever since then the only form of legal betting permitted in France has been with its Tote based system, the PMU or Pari Mutuel Urbain.

Monopoly
The PMU, which has a total handle of several billion pounds a year, is the largest Tote operator in Europe and the third largest in the world, with 8,000 off-track outlets across France and French territories as far away as the Pacific islands of Reunion and New Caledonia. Unfortunately, though, it is not renowned for its human face.

The great Scottish sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney once observed that: 'When the French take revenge for Waterloo it ravages the innocent along with the guilty. They do it principally through the murderous inefficiency with which they operate their pari-mutuel system of betting.' Any hardened veteran of Arc weekend, especially of the era before the Internet and mobile phones, will understand what McIlvanney was talking about. A Tote monopoly may have resulted in lavish prize money levels at Longchamp and unbelievably cheap admission prices (€10 on the gate, even on Arc day, giving you access to the equivalent of Ascot's Members' and Tattersalls enclosures combined) but whenever the PMU and its management are faced with a seriously increased demand for their services, they seem pathetically incapable of satisfying it. As the long queues of irate British customers annually testify.

A typical PMU operative tends to be either a formidably unsmiling female battleaxe - reminiscent of the women who gathered round the guillotine with their knitting needles during the French revolution - or an equally officious male, deaf to the linguistic problems of visiting punters and determined to process all bets at a funereal pace, even as the Abbaye or Arc runners are being loaded up. And, once that bell rings and the stalls open, the shutters come down and that's it.

There's no betting in-running and you cannot take a price when you place your bet and, with no free market and no on-course bookies to loosen up trade, it takes only a small amount of money to cause the odds of a fancied runner to fall through the floor. There's also that old PMU sting of coupling horses in the same ownership at one reduced price instead of laying the supposed second string or pacemaker at bigger odds.

In Britain the Tote deduct roughly 16% from the on-course win pool, their equivalent of the bookmakers' percentage profit over-round. In France the PMU take a fat 28% from the pool. This accounts for their administrative expenses, the share they pay to the French government and the share that goes back to French racing, leaving a miserly 72% to be paid out to punters.

Away from the racecourse, the PMU monopoly is guarded just as jealously. The cafés and bars bearing the green PMU sign offer pastis, but not football betting and are the only legitimate equivalent of our local Ladbrokes, Hills or Coral shop.

Another absurd restriction is that all off-course bets in France must be placed by 1.15pm each day but punters drop in to their local PMU cafe throughout the afternoon to see how their selections are getting on. I had tried, spectacularly unsuccessfully, to predict the first five home in a trotting race at Enghien Les Bains but I was hoping to fare better in the Prix de Calonne at Deauville in which Olivier Peslier looked an interesting booking for Criquette Head's runner Maria Bourbon. Unfortunately the race was run at a dawdle early on and then turned into a sprint in the last 300 metres. Peslier came late but too late and was just beaten in a photo finish. It seemed pretty much a case of plus ça change mais rien ne change plus (business as usual then).

Getting around the PMU
Afterwards I sat outside beneath the plane trees and, over a petit café and a calva, chatted to Jimmy, a venerable punter and Vietnamese restaurant owner who came to France from Indo China over 40 years ago. Jimmy plays the horses four or five days a week and has credit accounts with several big British bookmaking firms enabling him to bet at their odds on events like the Prix du Jockey Club, the Arc and the Breeders' Cup. He's now worried that the French government may try and go down the draconian Hong Kong-SA route and ban French citizens from betting with an offshore bookie by phone or on the net. Not that there aren't alternatives.

Jimmy reckons there are illegal sports book operators, known to big punters and, in some cases, to English bookmakers too, in all the big French towns and cities. One of the most famous was a very bon chic, bon gen Parisian called Patrice De Moutiers who was an ardent Turfiste with impeccable connections amongst the Chantilly racing set. De Moutiers, like most of the top French racehorse owners in the Sixties, didn't bet with the PMU. He had accounts with men like Joe Coral and Victor Chandler senior, using them to place commissions for himself and his clients and to lay off when his liabilities grew too big.

The technological revolution
In 1971 De Moutiers and some friends moved into more dangerous territory with an audacious attempt to fix the Tierce, the big PMU betting race of the day. De Moutiers and his crew, which included numerous jockeys, allegedly stood to win over five million French francs (£500,000) in early Seventies money. But then an indiscreet associate got drunk and talked and De Moutiers received visits from both the gendarmes and representatives of the Parisian underworld who were probably acting in concert. De Moutiers ended up committing suicide, shooting himself with a shotgun in his garden.

More than 30 years later technology has made it unnecessary for all but the most determined masochists to bet exclusively with the PMU, or the ill-advisedly romantic to tangle with the illegal bookies. The top British bookmakers will all be there anyway and, with a little discretion, it's not hard to get on. In the late Eighties, the French racing authorities attempted to 'discourage' English bookies from attending but so many French Jockey Club members were customers that the embargo didn't last long.

If you're not an account holder you can just use your mobile to access the exchanges or bet by debit or credit card. And if a suspicious looking Inspector Clouseau approaches, how is he to know you were ringing up Honest Joe as opposed to booking your table for dinner at Le Taillevent? You can be sure that plenty of French punters will be up to the same trick. Bon chance, and bon appetit!

BETTING IN FRANCE HOW IT WORKS

Being a load of Commies the French Government don't want Gallic high streets cluttered up with British betting shops.

- Gambling is illegal in France unless the Justice Ministry specifically sanctions it. Three totally state-run companies have a tri-party monopoly on a market that was worth an estimated $14 billion in 2001.

- Le Pari Mutuel Urbain (PMU) and its affiliate Le Pari Mutuel Hippodrome (PMH) control all French sports betting with roughly 20% taking place on-course and the other 80% off-course in PMU licensed cafés, kiosks and bars.

- The PMU also runs a Minitel telephone and interactive TV betting arm via the Equidia channel, which is carried by the Canal Satellite and TPS providers in France. Compared to conventional on- and off-course wagering, turnover is small but predicted to grow significantly in the next decade.

- France also has 160 state-licensed casinos, like those of the Arc sponsors, the Barrierre group, who run the famous Deauville and Trouville casinos amongst others. The casinos are seeing a great surge in slot machine gambling as opposed to traditional games and currently account for 10% of the entire French gambling market.

- Ladbrokes, who have had shops in Belgium, have attempted to challenge the PMU monopoly in the courts but without success. The European Commission have indicated that they are sympathetic and would like gambling to be regarded as a normal service industry open to competition but, so far, French national laws have obstructed them.

- A special police force, the Sous Direction des Courses et des Jeux, first established in 1892 and answerable to the Justice Department alone, covers everything from illegal betting to casino licences, doping, race fixing and selling information. According to Justice Department official Raymond Sainte-Beuve they 'strive to identify the big foreign gamblers in France' as well as 'establishments abroad where the big French gamblers are invited', i.e. casino junkets, corporate race days and so on. Sainte-Beuve claims his staff has a duty 'to take an active interest in investments carried out by French citizens.'

- In the face of this rigid supervision and state control, the one area of potential growth for outside competitors is online gambling. Online channels, presently taking only PMU odds, are expected to treble by 2005, comprising 8% of all gambling revenue spent in France. The opportunities for British firms, especially in the area of sports betting, could be huge. 'It's hard to imagine the French government trying indefinitely to stop Ladbrokes offering bets to French citizens,' believes the Magic Sign's spokesman Balthazar Fabricius. 'It's undoubtedly going to be a very interesting few years up ahead.'