There's a place for both pilots and computers in the cockpit.
The great advantage of computers is that they will flawlessly execute a task for which they are programmed, again and again, without ever making a mistake or getting tired, and with precision that far exceeds anything a human being can manage.
The great disadvantage of computers (and all digital systems) is that they have catastrophic failure modes that they may enter whenever they encounter situations for which they have not been programmed. Digital systems have no physical constraints (unlike the analog systems of the old days) and will do extremely dangerous things whenever they are pushed into situations that they have not been designed to handle. In systems of non-trivial complexity, it is not possible to design for every conceivable situation.
The great advantage of pilots (and human operators in general) is that they will often make reasonable decisions even in very unusual circumstances. A computer might cheerfully flip an aircraft inverted if confronted with, say, clouds or an abrupt temperature change, but a human pilot knows better and will not make that mistake.
The great disadvantage of pilots is that they are unable to match the precision of computers, and they can make mistakes due to fatigue, inattention, lack of training or competence, forgetfulness, etc.
The role of pilots in modern airliners is increasingly to keep tabs on the computer, serving as "sanity checks" to catch anything that the automation is doing that might be odd. Normal flights are increasingly handled entirely by automation. Emergencies are (or should be) handled by pilots.
The trend is towards elimination of pilots, which I'm sure is the dream of every airline and many French engineers. It will be a long time before automation is trustworthy enough to allow flights without pilots, though, and chances are that the automation will be trusted too early, with many tragic results before people learn the hard way that you cannot just toss computers into the mix and hope they'll work.
Given all this, Airbus makes one serious, potentially fatal mistake in its designs: it does not let pilots override the computers (or at least not easily or universally). The pilots don't serve much purpose if they can't override the automation—their whole purpose is to handle things that the computer can't. Yes, certain movements might damage the airframe … but in certain situations, damaging the airframe might be preferable to crashing the aircraft. This is something a computer cannot foresee or evaluate, whereas an experienced pilot can.
As for French engineers, they are almost always the product of education, rather than inborn talent. That's why they always produce workable solutions, but the solutions are always vastly more complex than they really need to be. And they have a higher opinion of themselves than their skills can actually justify, which can be dangerous.