The status of Engineer is protected in France in the same way that Doctor is in this country. To be a real Engineer capable of designing the stuff technicians repair takes a 4 year degree course then at least 10 years of training and work to achieve chartered engineer status. At that point you'll merely be competent. Most of the problems we have are due to technicians failing to follow basic procedures or work instructions. Fitters are notorious for failing to understand basic metal fatigue. This leads to us engineers designing in multiple interlocks and increasing reserve factors on designs to account for misuse.
That said I would say engineering has become a victim of what I call B*ll S*it Britain, many undergrads come to interview and when you ask them what they want to do they answer "manage", not understanding that if you don't understand how to do a job, you won't be able to manage it.
Why do you think all manufacturing and design has gone abroad? The French, Germans, Americans, Chinese and Japanese all value real engineers and hence have more manufacturing. I could go into history of how there was an exodus of engineers to the US from the UK in the 1800's that lead to standardisation of production techniques etc.
Could you as an engineer design the following, 2 tonne liquid sodium pumps, a mechanical log splitter, a 40 tonne reactor access house including the negative pressure air system, then switch to thermodynamic modelling and design of cooling systems, HP compressor design for gas turbines and do safety case assessment with fault tree analysis and a bit of human factors assessment, you might be there.
Oh and I do know the basics of mechanical repair and electronics as well….