The Puzzling Absence of a French Luxury Car Brand

I stumbled on this beauty of a car while strolling through the Quartier Latin last Saturday. I was expecting the car to be American or Italian or German only to be surprised to discover that it’s an old Peugeot.

And this got me to think of the state of French cars and their historic contributions to the industry.
There is obviously a debate on who can lay claim on inventing the car but nobody can argue about the critical role the French played in ushering humanity into an era of locomotion that changed the course of history.
The French were at the genesis of this transformational industry. The pioneers were mostly American, German, Italian and French (late 18th to mid 19th centuries) before the German Karl Benz fine-tuned the internal combustion engine in the late 19th century.

In 1798, the American John Stevens built the first American internal combustion engine. In 1807, French engineers Nicéphore Niépce (who went on to invent photography) and Claude Niépce ran a prototype internal combustion engine, using controlled dust explosions, the Pyréolophore, which was granted a patent by Napoleon Bonaparte.
In 1854 in the UK, the Italian inventors Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci obtained the certification: "Obtaining Motive Power by the Explosion of Gases". In 1857 the Great Seal Patent Office conceded them patent No.1655 for the invention of an "Improved Apparatus for Obtaining Motive Power from Gases". Barsanti and Matteucci obtained other patents for the same invention in France, Belgium and Piedmont between 1857 and 1859.

And yet I wonder why of all the pioneering nations, the only one that seems to have lost all of its luxury car luster is the country that, ironically, leads the world in other luxury shopping.
The Americans have the Corvette, the Mustang and more recently the Tesla and Lucid luxury electric vehicles.
The Germans have BMW, Mercedes and Porsche.
the Italians lead the pack with many brands including Ferrari, Bugatti and Lamborghini.
As for the French, can anybody name a single desirable car? Ok, maybe the timeless Citroen DS.. odd, isn’t it? A country that contributed so much to car evolution and engineering somehow fell off the top and never recovered.