On a sleepy morning in the middle of Marseille, halfway down a pretty little side street called Rue Venture, Lionel Tonini ambles out into the sunshine. As the owner of the only rugby bar in town, Tonini looks up and down the empty street in wry resignation. The rest of the city, at the end of a vacation that seems to have swallowed the whole of August in a giant yawn, slumbers on. Marseille, a key World Cup venue, appears blissfully unaware that the world's greatest rugby tournament begins this Friday in Paris.

"At the moment they can't even imagine it," Tonini shrugs. "You say 'Rugby World Cup' and they go 'Huh?' This is normal for me because I'm avant garde. I'm ahead of the crowd. But a day before New Zealand play Italy in Marseille [this Saturday] they are going to wake up: 'Wow! Les Blacks in Marseille! The World Cup! Wow-Wow!'" Tonini whips off his shirt in amusement. "That's when I say, 'Welcome to the party'."

Pulling on his Les Bleus replica jersey, and draping an England flag around him to counter any accusation of French bias, Tonini wipes the blackboard clean of an old advert for the Rugby League Challenge Cup final between St Helens and Catalans Dragons, played nine days ago at Wembley. He chalks up his new main attraction - France v Argentina in a fascinating opening to the 2007 World Cup. As he steps back to admire the lettering, his mobile phone emits a sound even more eerie than the ravenous cry of a seagull circling overhead. Tonini holds up his phone so that its ring-tone, a rumbling All Black haka, can be clearly heard. "Marseille's first haka!" he grins.

Yet a normally seething port is in thrall to a football club rather than world rugby. Olympique Marseille defines the identity of an entire city, which is the symbolic home of footballers as different as Eric Cantona and Zinédine Zidane. Cantona's famously cryptic saying, "When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea", could only have been made by a footballing philosopher from Marseille.

François Thomazeau, a writer and rugby fan, who is also a patron of Tonini's bar, explains that the huge gulls around Marseille's dock are "called gabians, which means, like the city itself, they fear no one. We believe the gulls welcome foreigners and see off Parisians. Half of Marseille is Italian, the other half is north African. We think of Marseille first, our family's country of origin second and France third. That's why people are crazy about Olympique Marseille but not the French football team.

"The football team might have players from Paris St-Germain or Lyon ahead of our own guys. But there are no rugby players from Marseille and so, weirdly, we support France when they play at Olympique's Stade Vélodrome. Maybe that's why France look invincible when they play rugby here. Ask England! At the same time rugby is becoming fashionable in Marseille. It's much cooler than football."

Tonini is a key figure in this sporting shift. He used to play in the same football team as Zidane's older brother, Farid, and founded Olympique Marseille's leading supporters club, the Yankees, who run the north curve of the throbbing Vélodrome. "I am still the chairman of the Yankees," Tonini says, "but I love rugby now. Rugby suits Marseille and we prove it at this World Cup."

The original name of his bar, La 3ème Mi-Temps (The Third Half), might seem more evocative but Tonini now calls it Little Canterbury. He knows that, following the All Blacks' arrival yesterday, hordes of New Zealanders will descend on the city. Cédric Dufoix, Marseille's director of the World Cup, suggests that "Tonini is one of the toughest guys at the Vélodrome, but he is a smart businessman who sees a huge future for rugby here. Tonini is a trend-setter."

Dufoix is a cultural trend-setter himself. In 1998, on the night France won the football World Cup with a side built around Zidane and a multi-racial group of players, Dufoix beamed their faces on to the Arc de Triomphe. While more than a million people on the Champs-Elysées cheered deliriously, France's fractured identity was temporarily healed as Zidane, Marcel Desailly and Lilian Thuram lit up the venerable Arc. "I was communications director for Adidas," Dufoix remembers, "and I took the decision to project their images. There was no authorisation to do that but I knew it was very powerful symbolism."

Dufoix, who now also works as the director of development at Olympique Marseille, is uniquely qualified to compare that tournament with the rugby World Cup. "If Zidane was the face of 1998, this French rugby team has no stars at all. But they have great collective unity." He is disarmingly frank when asked whether Marseille will be agog with patriotism during the World Cup. "I don't have this feeling. For Marseille it is more important to welcome New Zealand. The Blacks are number one in the world. The Blacks are stars. The Blacks are exciting and exotic. Of course Marseille will support France if we make the final - but everything else is reserved for Les Blacks.

Marseille is currently devoid of World Cup paraphernalia. "It's amazing," Dufoix agrees. "You can't see the World Cup anywhere. But last week we gave space to the Cantona brothers as they helped Marseille win the bid for the 2008 world beach soccer championships. Now we concentrate on rugby." Tonini, who plans to turn Rue Venture into "The Street of Rugby" for the next seven weeks, cackles in delight. "Cantona and beach soccer or Les Blacks and World Cup rugby? Only in Marseille! When the tournament starts we wake up and improvise. Don't worry - it will work out great."

During the 90-minute journey on the fast train from Marseille to Montpellier it is hard to forget François Thomazeau's warning that "we live on different planets. Montpellier is in the south-west, where they turn towards Spain, while Marseille and the south-east look to Italy. Some rivalry has also emerged between Marseille and Montpellier. Japanese and American companies such as Dell are investing there rather than here. We have the vibrant culture while Montpellier is bland. So you see why businessmen prefer them. Montpellier even claims to have better-looking women. It's the only time they might be right."

The women of Montpellier are certainly more eye-catching than the wellmeaning World Cup posters that line the streets in honour of the four matches the city will host this month. Australia and South Africa are on their way - along with Samoa, Tonga, Fiji and the United States - and photographs of ordinary Frenchmen and women wearing different national colours flutter unobtrusively next to the hanging-baskets. The real spectacle is found in the spanking new rugby stadium, which underpins a long yearning to turn Montpellier into a rugby powerhouse. John Daniell, a New Zealand lock who played professionally in France for 10 years while moving from Racing in Paris to Perpignan to Montpellier, provides some incisive insights into a changing landscape.

"Montpellier is quite bourgeois," he concedes, "but it's also dynamic. Twenty years ago it was the 25th biggest town in France. It's now the sixth largest. The ex-mayor leads the whole region and he is a benevolent dictator obsessed with creating one of France's top rugby clubs in Montpellier. He's a socialist who believes in that French saying, 'The school of rugby is the school of life.' So, after 30 years, he has generated real enthusiasm for rugby. Montpellier are now in the Top 14 league of the French championship and they've just opened this impressive stadium."

It offers a colourful welcome to Australia who will use the stadium as their World Cup training base - while the actual matches will be played at the nearby football ground. For Daniell's former teammate, the now retired Scotland stand-off , Gregor Townsend, "Montpellier is the new face of French rugby. They are leading the way, followed by Lyon and Bordeaux, in challenging the status quo - and the stadium is central to their feeling that rugby adds a huge amount to a town. It explains why French rugby is at such an interesting crossroads with power slipping away from some old towns to places like Montpellier."

Having just written a riveting book, Inside French Rugby, Daniell argues that, in their bid to win the 2007 World Cup, the hosts might have also changed some infamous traditions: "It's partly to do with the fact that almost 40% of the players in the club championship are foreign - but also because [France's coach] Bernard Laporte has banged away about discipline. Of course you still get it but the days of head-butting, testicle-crunching, eye-gouging and blatant violence are fading. France are much more disciplined and, last month in Marseille, England gave away twice as many penalties."

Daniell, freed from the shackles of patriotism, does not need to resort to bluster when he still doubts that even a rigorous France can stop the All Blacks winning their first World Cup in 20 years. "Even at home," he says, "I struggle to see France beating New Zealand." An hour later, at the bistro around the corner from Daniell's apartment, with the sun setting on a sultry evening in Montpellier, it hardly matters who might win the World Cup. There are more important French pleasures in which to indulge, namely eating and drinking, at the expense of a potentially epic rugby tournament.

In Toulouse, 2½ hours west of Montpellier, rugby matters so much that it can leave an ache at the heart of a town that has long symbolised the French game. "This place lives and breathes rugby," says Ian Moriarty, an Irish writer based in Toulouse. "It stretches back generations and links the town to an ancient culture. But for some reason, probably to do with money, Toulouse have only been given four World Cup games. Two of those are low-key affairs: Japan v Fiji and Romania v Portugal. They've also set up Ireland's tournament base in Bordeaux rather than Toulouse. It's a terrible shame and Toulouse is hurting."

Toulouse has still made more of a World Cup effort than Marseille. In the park at Jardin des Plantes, an ornate bank of flowers has been arranged into decorative - including floral impressions of the Australian Wallaby and South African Springbok. But the Silver Fern, representing the All Blacks, is actually green. It might be the colour of envy but, in Toulouse, a more defiant pride remains. In an annexe to the main town square a rugby exhibition is dedicated to the glory of Stade Toulousain in the club's centenary year. But, in contrast to the sun-filled skies of Marseille and Montpellier, Toulouse is covered by heavy cloud.

Even inside the swanky home of Stade Toulousian, where the sumptuous facilities make perfect sense of the club's claims to be the Real Madrid of European rugby , the overcast mood persists. "We are disappointed," admits Jean-Michel Rancule who, as a player, helped Toulouse win the French championship on three occasions in the 1980s. Now, as the club's director of recruitment, Rancule has just signed Byron Kelleher, the All Black scrum-half who will join Toulouse after the World Cup. That coup, however, cannot conceal the pain. "In 1998 we had the soccer World Cup and Toulouse had big games and a festival for three weeks. It was beautiful but we are a rugby town. So there is disillusion now. We expected to have more games because we are in the south where French rugby exists. The north only has Paris."

Rancule smiles quietly when asked if, for many of Stade Toulousian's supporters, winning this season's French championship might mean more than the fantasy of Les Bleus parading the World Cup in Paris on October 20. "You are right. Some choose the championship." Stade Toulousain, with 10 players, supply exactly a third of France's World Cup squad - and on their last day off before they reunite with the national squad a few of them drop by the stadium brasserie. While Rancule waves to Yannick Nyanga, the exuberant young flanker, he reveals that "I saw Fabien Pelous and Yannick Jauzion this morning. They are big Stade Toulousain players for France and Jauzion is going to be very important in this World Cup. We all love Jauzion. He says the team is high in confidence. They believe anything is possible. We will miss the World Cup here - but we also hope our boys might do great things in Paris."

By the fourth day of this revealing jaunt it is plain that one of the most enduring clichés of French rugby is no longer sacrosanct. It might still be vaguely poetic to apportion the "heart and soul" of the game to Toulouse but rugby now pulses most strongly and vividly in Paris. In Marseille burgeoning hopes of creating a new Top 14 elite rugby team in a football-mad city are pinned on the powerbrokers in Paris who might just have the verve and the money to back them. Rugby people in the south-west, meanwhile, mutter darkly that descriptions of Paris as the driving force in French rugby is a plot dreamed up by L'Equipe journalists working in the shadow of Stade Français - the national champions who have already staged four club matches before crowds of 80,000 at the Stade de France. But arriving in Paris before a World Cup opening is to feel the real dynamism of French rugby.

"The power has switched totally to Paris," Claude Atcher, the head of the World Cup organi sing committee, stresses. "The World Cup will explode into life in Paris on Friday and it will culminate in a giant celebration when we stage the two semis and the final at Stade de France. I am aware of Toulouse's disillusion - but they and the other venues have a very important role to play. But we also have to begin and end in Paris." Atcher admits candidly that, after the World Cup, he will invest personally in the creation of a new club in Marseille: "I made this promise to a strong friend of mine in Marseille. Pascal Toche died one week after we made this agreement and I will not let him down. Some in the French system are trying to block us because they will lose power - but they won't be able to stop it."

When playing for Racing, Atcher was equally adept at challenging French rugby convention with Parisian impudence. "In October 1986 the French Rugby president dismissed us a 'beach rugby team'. We decide if we make it to the semi-final we will wear pink bow-ties. We got there and played Stade Toulousain in front of 35,000. Only 300 came from Paris and Racing. We wore the pink bow-ties for 80 minutes and won the game and did the same in the final.

"Another time, because one of our players was black and had suffered racism, we painted our faces. When we ran down the tunnel our coach Robert Paparemborde couldn't believe his eyes. Our faces were black and we were playing a very important game. He just said 'Merde!' At half-time, on the pitch, we drank champagne served to us by a man wearing a tuxedo jacket and a kilt. I know rugby is very professional now, but this same French spirit could make the most special World Cup we have ever seen."

Jean-Pierre Rives, the great flaxen-haired flanker of French rugby, and Atcher's fellow back-row star at Racing, now works as a sculptor. His latest work, Les Rebonds de la Mémoire, created specifically for the World Cup, will be signed this week by all the team captains when it is unveiled at the Musée du Quai Branly in central Paris.

"For Racing and France," Rives remembers, "I always pass the ball to the magicians. That's what the All Blacks still do. Even when they are falling they still pass the ball. The team that wins this World Cup will be the team that passes best." Logically, that must mean the All Blacks? "I'm not sure about logic," the 54-year-old Rives shrugs. "I have a son now and he is only three. For the first time the other day he experiment with a rugby ball. He throw it in the air and when it bounces it spins crazily. He looks at me and says 'Papa, the ball is cuckoo!' He is right. Even in the World Cup, especially in France, the ball is cuckoo ..."

By the Eiffel Tower, at that same elegant Paris museum, the mighty All Blacks appear to disagree. At the heart of a massive exhibition, entitled La Melée des Cultures (The Scrum of Cultures), each member of the New Zealand squad gave some of his blood.

That All Black blood was mixed together and added to the dye used to tint a mammoth photograph of the entire squad doing the Haka. Now hanging on the chic walls of Musée du quai Branly, with their DNA embedded into the print, their art is called Bound by Blood. "Wow-wow!", as Lionel Tonini exclaims whenever his Haka ring-tone resounds in Marseille, would appear to be the only appropriate reaction.

And yet, wandering up to the very top of the museum, which is high enough to make you feel as if you could stretch out and touch the Eiffel Tower, it is even easier to fall for France all over again. The panoramic view of Paris from the roof of the museum offers a gorgeous spectacle on a sparkling day. But there is something even more unforgettable about the artificial rugby pitch that has been created on that rooftop terrace. Two full-size sets of white rugby posts soar towards the blue sky, with La Tour Eiffel climbing still higher behind them. As that surreal yet beguiling image suggests, the next seven weeks of a singularly French World Cup could be as cuckoo as they are simply magical.