"I think we've finally reached the point where even a French "man" has stronger property rights than an American."
You have, really long ago. The problem is the US legal system. Here are all the ways that it leaves you helpless:
(1) There is no right to privacy in the US.
There is an explicit right to privacy in France.
This makes a difference across the board, including the degree to which someone can defame you by collecting and publishing your private, personal information.
(2) There is "civil discovery" in the US legal system, which allows your enemy in a lawsuit to demand all of YOUR papers and e-mails so that he can go through them all and look for a way to use your own words to convict you.
There is no discovery in France.
(3) There is the power to seize property in America and hand it over to wealthier persons, corporations and developers, to do with it as they please.
In France, the government can take property for government purposes, but must pay fair value for it.
(4) In the United States, criminals can only be prosecuted by a public prosecutor who is an elected official. If you are attacked, but he does not - for political reasons - choose to bring the case against him, your attacker goes free.
In France, an individual can sue another person in criminal law if he has been criminally attacked, and the state prosecutor must cooperate to the extent of providing such evidence as the state has collected to each side.
(5) In America, judges have the power to "interpret" the US Constitution so as to overturn acts of the US legislature.
In France, judges do not have the power to overturn acts of Parliament. There is a special constitutional court which can review laws that are being discussed in Parliament and determine their constitutionality before they are passed. This court does nothing but rule on such constitutional matters. Other judges do not have the power to make constitutional rulings, and no judge has the right to overrule acts of Parliament. Parliament is elected by the People. It is the final source of law, through the democracy. Judges rise through the civil service. They are not elected and not removable, except for crimes, and as such they should not, and do not, have the power to override the decisions of the democracy. Ever.
The totality of these differences comes to bear in the case today.
On my property in France, I can do as I please so long as I do not cause some sort of terrible nuisance to my neighbors (I cannot keep pigs in an apartment in the middle of Paris, for example).
On my property in America, this is also theoretically true.
On my property in France, if I am famous and someone sticks a camera through the hedges and photographs me and my family having dinner in our garden and publishes it, he has committed a crime against my privacy.
In the United States, he has the unlimited freedom to print whatever intrusion onto my privacy and private property he chooses.
In France, if the government wants to build a bridge, it can take my property and it must pay the fair price of the property, as though I had sold it to another particular.
If the wealthy man next door desires to buy my property to expand his golf green, and I do not wish to sell it, there is nothing to be said.
In American, if the government wants to build a bridge, it can take property and it must pay a price for the property. And if the wealthy man next door desires my property for his golf green and he is well connected and can show that my property attached to his will cause more tax revenues to the community, the city will take my property, pay some value for it, and sell it to my neighbor at whatever deal it works out with him.
My property in France is much more protected from political taking by the law than it is in America.
In America, judges have the greatest political power, but they are not elected nor even must they go to judge school and move their ways up the ranks through experience.
It is a dramatically bad system, the American legal system, and it is the thing which seems to make Americans more angry than anything else in their whole government.
It is surprising that they never do anything about it.
Interesting.