As an aside, people forget how scifi France was and, to a certain extent, still is. Jules Verne was French. Paris is/was "the city of lights" because the French were early adopters of electricity. Descartes, Lavoisier, Fourier... Even the Maginot line was a high-tech approach to national defense, and the French were willing to give it a shot. I'm actually surprised that France hasn't done much, much more to foster high-tech startups. Imagine if they made some reasonable Paris suburb a free economic zone!