French ordinary flours are “soft” wheat. Good bread flour comes from “hard” wheat - and no, I’ve no idea what the difference is but I know OH grumbles about how difficult it is to get good flour for baking bread in France.
Not if you don’t want - just buy the packet, tip it in, add water, shut the lid, turn the dial. That’s how OH started, til he found sourdough baking and started doing it “properly” 
I use grand épeautre (spelt) mixed with a quarter seigle (rye), both complet, for my sourdough. An osteopath told me to avoid wheat. I often also mix in Emmer (it’s German, I don’t know what it’s called in English) or occasionally kamut.
My wife says it’s good…
I am late to the party, and I can see you have your answer already: 150 is the wholegrain bread flour, though T110 will also make you wholemeal loaf, and you can find high quality ones in any organic supermarket, Satoriz, l’eau vive, vie claire etc etc.
Following on from comments here, indeed French white flours are softer than in the UK and as the extraction of the flour goes up, so the strength of the flours. I have found that there is a big jump in strength with T80. It is much stronger and thirstier than T55/T65, and T150 thirstier still, as you’d expect for wholegrain flours.
T80 makes excellent loaves with its extra protein content. If you go into amateur bread forums, this is the French high-extraction bread flour that they swoon about.
We recently started home baking with a bread machine, and I’ve been experimenting with varying degrees of success. I use a wholemeal flour as the base, adding things like chopped fresh rosemary (nice) oregano (wife didn’t like it) fried onions and caraway (good) etc.
I have a healing burn on the back of my hand thanks to the lid falling shut while removing the loaf we did last week. 
Again - thank you everyone for offering their help and advice.
I have been very happy with flours made by “Francine”. I use their “Pain de campagne” for wholemeal, “Pain multi-cereales” and “Mon pain Maison” for white bread. I have experimented with various mixtures of all three and find their “levure” (yeast) consistently better than others available. I also buy various seeds readily available to make granary bread. All since the lockdown! but really enjoy using my excellent old Breville fan asisted Breadmaster machine bought at a vide grenier.
Francine are reliable and do what they say on the packet, and give you a serviceable loaf. However for those who like to tinker with their recipes/proportions then other flours are more versatile.
We also found french flour doesn’t have enough gluten. Resulf of french being so proud of local produce is they only use their own flour. Ironic eh? Hence bread won’t make high loaves but only baguette shaped bread. Solution? Bought 1kg gluten via Amazon. Add 1 heaped tablespoon to a 550 - 600gm wholemeal flour 150 T loaf. And add linseeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame etc to make an amazing loaf. Makes delicious toast especially. G,uten gives it bounce and strength to hold up the added grains. We had to experiment with how much gluten but finally found this amount worked. Became a gluten expert from all my Google research!
Thanks Jo - very helpful - will certainly try this.
And here am I spending 1/2 my life it aeems, trying to find GF stuff 
Interesting bread is lower here though, perhaps why less gluten intolerance here??
You can get gluten in the bio shops too 
I just look in the GF aisles
Life is a mystery…interesting thought!
“We also found french flour doesn’t have enough gluten.”
Are you sure… I’ve never had a problem with T65, even T55 gives a good rise
French Plain flour =T55 is normally 10 or 11% protein
English Plain flour= is just under 10%
I use T55 most of the time and I always get a good rise.
.
We like to use wholemeal flour and add loads of seeds so that small extra gluten helps boost the loaf to support the weight. We don’t like light fluffy bread but neither do we like it to come out as a brick! We like a bouncy sponge a bit like sourdough that you get from a long or overnight prove in the fridge. So in a bread machine this is the closest to a traditional long proven loaf. It suits us and its fun adjusting the recipes
Hi Jo, it’s not that the wholemeal flour lacks gluten, in fact, the flour has no gluten it has proteins which when mixed with a liquid (water/milk) turns into gluten the problem with wholemeal is there are lots of sharp pieces in the flour which cut the gluten strands so you adding extra protein compensates for the damaged strands.
Yes I know they call it gluten but it’s proteins mainly gliadin and glutenin. 
Thanks for that. Yes of course you are right. Makes total sense. And lovely bread!
