! There is right-hand priority in France! The absence of “Yield” sign means you must let the car from the right go, if they don’t have their own sign, EVEN if they’re from a smaller road (apart from private roads).

You were probably victim of a French person using their priority correctly, which is very misleading because you would have been found full-guilty. I call it an “implicit priority to the right” and municipalities use it abundantly to create slow traffic, but foreigners don’t always know that smaller innocent secondary streets can have priority OVER the main road of a village.