IF you are prepared to overlook air traffic controllers with a penchant for summer strike action, the list of inventions and discoveries attributed to the French is long and illustrious, writes William Scholes.
They found out, for example, that frog legs and snails are edible, though presumably being French was a tremendous advantage in finding this out in the first place. Of more global appeal are the nation's wine and cheese.
France also gave the world the humble pencil sharpener and the stapler, while the Lumière brothers came up with what we now know as cinema.
The metric system was invented in 1799 in the wake of the French Revolution.
They invented the hot air balloon and, in an apparently unconnected development, the parachute.
The land of Descartes, Sartre, Voltaire and Napoleon has also given us the Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées and Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre and Notre-Dame.
And let's not forget about Zinedine Zidane and Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds? OK, maybe not Dogtanian, but I hope you take my point; we owe the French a great deal.
However, these achievements and people will all be remembered long after the car on this page is forgotten.
It's called the DS 3 Crossback, and it's French.
It's a long time since I've driven a car that I've disliked as much as the DS 3 Crossback
You may be unfamiliar with the brand DS. It's a relatively new posh spin-off from Citroen, with the same name as one of the greatest cars to come not only from France but from anywhere.
When Citroen's original DS landed in 1955 it looked like nothing else on earth. It was a genuinely revolutionary piece of automotive design and engineering.
The DS was a near-perfect expression of what the car could be, what it articulated and what it meant.
When, in 1957, the French philosopher Roland Barthes described cars as “almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object”, it was the DS he was writing about.
The DS 3 Crossback might have the name but it has none of the magic. The only part of a cathedral it might resemble, if you squint a little, is a gargoyle.
It is DS's entry in the burgeoning small, premium SUV class. That means it's a rival to cars like the Audi Q2 and the Mini Countryman, both of which have a similar air of cynicism in their conception.
However, neither the Mini nor the Q2 are as wilfully polarising as the DS. They come across as a bit gormless; the French car, meanwhile, is mad, bad and dangerous to know.
It's a long time since I've driven a car that I've disliked as much as the DS 3 Crossback.
It joins the original and the worst Vauxhall Mokka, the old SsangYong Korando and the previous Mercedes-Benz A-Class in my personal pantheon of awfulness.
Where to begin? It's hard to get past how it looks. From some angles it looks vaguely plausible, though from others it looks like a bad drawing of something that was copied from an Etch-a-Sketch - another French invention, incidentally, from around the same time as the glorious original DS.
I am all for strong, distinctive design. Too many of the new cars on our roads are amorphous and indistinguishable. Others, like most of the latest BMWs, have become parodies of themselves.
Several brands - I would highlight Mazda, Volvo and Alfa Romeo - consistently show how it should be done.
The DS 3 Crossback is incoherent, as if each part were designed by different people who never met or, if they did, disliked each other so much that they wanted to sabotage the project
I am not sure what is going on with DS. The other car it will sell you at the moment is the DS 7 Crossback which I rather like and, as family-sized SUVs go, looks rather smart. Its upcoming large saloon, the DS 9, appears to be a rather elegant piece of work.
But the DS 3 Crossback is incoherent, as if each part were designed by different people who never met or, if they did, disliked each other so much that they wanted to sabotage the project.
Let's be generous, though. The head-on view, dominated by an enormous 3D effect grille, is striking, and it looks kind of good from the back. Flush door handles which pop out when the car is unlocked are a nice touch.
However, there is all sorts of crazy going on at the side, specifically at the back door which has a large triangular piece of bodywork interrupting the window line.
A quick walk around the car confirms they have done the same thing on both sides.
Some journalistic research reveals that DS calls this affectation the ‘iconic side shark fin’.
The net effect is to give the side profile a squashed, concertina-style, appearance. It looks as if it has been driven backwards and forwards - hard, repeatedly and with extreme prejudice - between two solid walls.
From some angles it looks vaguely plausible, though from others it looks like a bad drawing of something that was copied from an Etch-a-Sketch
If you think it looks mad on the outside, wait until you open the door and climb in.
There are diamond motifs everywhere. These sometimes appear to merge into rhombuses and kites, though that could be because there are so many odd shapes going on that the dashboard could send you cross-eyed and reawaken nightmares of P7 geometry lessons. It's like sitting inside a magic eye poster.
Even if you really, really love diamond shapes, an unhappy by-product of this discombobulating approach is that almost nothing is where you think it should be.
How do you adjust the radio’s volume? Where’s the window switch? How does the heat work? What does this button do? Why are the door handles in the wrong place?
Front seat passengers enjoy plenty of space and adjustment to their seats. Pity those sat behind them, though.
My 10-year-old back seat juror complained that there “wasn’t much room” and, worse, that he couldn’t see out properly - an obvious consequence of that idiosyncratic shark fin nonsense which, for added zaniness, doesn't allow the back window to wind down very far.
There's a measure of redemption to be found in how the DS drives. It's not the most fun on four wheels but it grips and steers gamely enough while the petrol engine of the test car was a peach.
In a rare moment of sanity, DS offers the car with the excellent 1.2-litre three-cylinder ‘PureTech’ petrol engine also found in a variety of Peugeot, Citroen and Vauxhall models.
A single diesel engine is offered and the car was designed from the start to accommodate an electric drivetrain.
That model, called the E-Tense, has just reached showrooms and has a range of around 200 miles.
For all its user-unfriendliness, the DS feels very well built from plush, expensive-feeling materials. Prices start from just over £22k and rise to more than £40k.
Some people, of course, will love how the DS 3 Crossback looks. I wish them well.
And I think even I could adapt, given enough time, to the quirks of the interior layout.
However, the single biggest problem I had with the car was its headlights. These seemed, on my car at least, to have been benchmarked against a baby's nightlight and a couple of guttering candles.
I discovered just how ineffective the standard lights were on a late night run home from my in-laws in rural Fermanagh.
I know the route, as they say, like the back of my hand; how a car acquits itself on this 65 mile journey is persuasive in helping me to form the assessments you read about on these pages.
The DS 3 Crossback was the first car I can ever remember giving me cause for concern about the strength of its illumination.
But by then, I was also fed up with the car's daft dashboard and because I really didn't want anyone to see me in it in daylight, I stopped driving it altogether.
We hadn't even gone a mile before my wife asked if the headlamps were on - the switch and the tell-tale on the dashboard said they were - but by the time we had passed through Enniskillen I wasn't so sure.
A short time later, the couple of cars in front of us turned off, leaving us as the only vehicle on a part of the Tempo road; I flicked on main beam, which seemed to just about give the sort of light that one would expect on regular dipped beams.
I stopped in Fivemiletown and got out of the car to check that the lights hadn't in fact blown a bulb or some such, but they hadn't.
I stopped again on Clogher main street. This time we consulted Google and the hand book to see if they had anything to say on the matter. Neither did.
We stopped for a third check on the dual carriageway between Ballygawley and Dungannon, as much to give me a rest from constantly flicking main beam off and on as anything else.
This was exhausting, slow progress and hardly conducive to the gentle encouragement of warm familial relations...
Thereafter I decided it was less stressful to simply avoid driving the DS 3 Crossback in the dark.
But by then, I was also fed up with the car's daft dashboard and because I really didn't want anyone to see me in it in daylight, I stopped driving it altogether.
The company might like us to think that the DS 3 Crossback is bringing an air of catwalk chic and sophistication to a small SUV class where everyone else is dressed off-the-peg.
But they seem to have forgotten that haute couture doesn’t make a lot of sense in the real world.
It's a risk to make a product that you know will not be to everyone's taste, and I suppose DS is to be congratulated for its sense of adventure and its commitment to going its own way.
The DS 3 Crossback, then, is the epitome of the Marmite car - you either love it or loathe it. And I loathed it.
