They are different styles of cooking, both have their place.
To overgeneralize terribly, italian cooking has more of a focus on highlighting great fresh ingredients in a simple way that lets their quality shine through, french cooking, while demanding great ingredients as well, has traditionally been more focused on formal culinary training creating new flavours out of the ingredients. A lot of french recipes are based on other recipes based on some basic stock made out of xyz ingredients and so on.
There are snobs on both sides, I imagine. The traditional parisian style might view the italian as not cooking at all, just a bunch of farmers who are proud of what they grew/raised. Modern foodies tend to be very ingredient focused, perhaps in reaction to the crap ingredients most of us grew up with in north america.