Is French design siding with objects?

It is paradoxical that French poetry, through the intermediary of Francis Ponge, managed to side with things while French design seems to have sided with images and signs, through being forced to deal with a sort of semiotic diktat and the hypertrophy of the figure of the designer. How then are we to describe, circumscribe or even approach the idea of French design? Is it even possible to define the characteristics of the French approach to design? Is it even possible to speak of French design or should we be talking about French designers? It would appear that this list of questions poses a certain problem as it is tricky to try to envisage common ground between the work of someone like Philippe Starck and that of Martin Szekely for example, or the work of Roger Tallon and that of Marc Sadler.