The Spanish snail eaters showed the way

No. When it came to eating snails It was not the French but the Spanish who showed the way. A paper published in the journal Plos One estimates that Palaeolithic humans in Spain began eating snails 10,000 years earlier than their Mediterranean neighbours.

Reports the BBC:

Archaeologists working in Cova de la Barriada have found large and concentrated amounts of snail shells among stone tools and other animal remains in pits that were used for cooking during the early Gravettian era - 32,000 to 26,000 years ago.
Lead author Dr Javier Fernández-López de Pablo, from the Catalan Insitute of Human Palaeoecology and Evolution, told BBC News: "What this suggests is that these groups [of humans] had already opted for a strategy of diet diversification that allowed them to increase their population."

Would you like them with garlic and butter?

They are as big as the palm of a human hand. weigh almost a kilo and are a West African delicacy when peppered, then sautéed with onions and tomatoes, garlic and chilies. But not something that is likely to be on US menus anytime soon.
A shipment of 67 of these Archachatina marginata, or banana rasp snails, were recently seized by customs inspectors at Los Angelese airport after arriving from Nigeria. The officials described the snails as "highly invasive, voracious pests" that eat paint and stucco off houses and can munch their way through 500 plant species, if they can't find fruits and vegetables.
They were consigned to an incinerator rather than a cooking pot.