All rear end shunts were in the UK, the last one while I was French resident, always claimed successfully from 3rd party insurers, no loading of my premiums, I retained the salvage and made money from the repairs although would rather have avoided the situations.
Tailgating never a problem on the autoroutes, its in hick areas like mine where people want to push the car in front to go faster rather than overtake, driving standards en campagne are deplorable, pretty much every journey you will see another wrecked car in a filed having rolled multiple times, a dead straight road with no side turnings, no other vehicles involved, loads and loads of drunken drivers.
Get on the périphérique de Paris and you will see a very high standard of driving and lane discipline, very cut & thrust and no-one is hanging around.
Parking in Paris & large cities is another matter entirely, people park bumper to bumper actually touching & will have caused dents & scratches each time, when the plates were pressed steel they would look like something on a dodgem car, nobody uses their handbrake when parking like that, when someone needs to extract their vehicle they just push the line of cars ahead or behind, or both until there is enough space to get out.
I drove to the Monaco Grand Prix in 2004 in a split screen camper, we camped in the street and it was constantly being shunted by people parking or wanting to extract their vehicles, at the traffic lights on the steep hills we noticed that people were stopping touching the bumper of the car in front (we kept getting shunted again) and soon found out why, nobody could do a hillstart with the handbrake, they would release it and roll back into the car behind before engaging the clutch. We would leave a normal gap and the car in front would roll back gathering speed and ram us the bedbug had super solid bumpers and they would damage their vehicle and tell me it was my fault for not being close behind them or touching!