We were told that when the water damage along the bottom of the front wall was "repaired" (more on that later), a proper French drain was put in to carry water away from the front of the house.
This, by you, is a French drain?
A French drain is supposed to be a trench a foot or more deep, with a perforated pipe at the bottom, a mesh screen on top of that, then filled with crushed rock. This thing was just a couple inches of crushed rock on top of a sheet of roughly folded plastic.
I'm beginning to believe more and more strongly that the previous owners of the house were cheated by the contractors who "repaired" their water damage. They didn't "repair" a damned thing. They slapped up a piece of poor-quality interior-grade strand board up against already wet and rotting wood, stuccoed over it, scabbed a few joist ends, threw some cosmetic chunks of board in between them to hide the rot, tacked up some styrofoam insulation to conceal what they'd done, put down some plastic sheeting at grade level and threw two or three inches of crushed rock on top of it, and called it done.