When you think of European high-tech, you probably think of Germany. Or maybe you think of Sweden, home to Spotify. You may be less likely to think of France, a country whose name evokes the smell of warm bread and too much red wine. But everyone wants a slice of the tech pie (pi?), and if there’s one person who wants more France-based high tech activity, it’s President Emmanuel Macron.

Le président de la République française is spearheading multiple initiatives to help startups, such as a new tech visa and government subsidies. He and other European leaders are also fighting back against Big (mostly American) Tech monopolies. Facebook even recently agreed to pay the French government $125 million in back taxes. Reigning in these massive corporations will promote healthy competition in the tech sphere. France, however, had been struggling to position itself as a place for global high tech innovation, despite being home to renowned engineering schools, like École Polytechnique. To remedy this difficulty, Macron wants to bring more talent to France. This shouldn’t be too hard, considering the country promotes a work-life balance filled with enough joie de vivre to counterbalance the intellectually demanding work.

Macron wants to create a third, European model for generating tech companies. This third model would act as a middle ground between what he believes to be the US and Chinese models, with the former not being regulatory enough, and the latter being too authoritarian towards its citizens. France, and Europe, could be a theoretical Goldilocks zone for fostering sustainable and successful technological enterprises. 

A recent article from France-Amérique describes how the French president is keenly looking to promote the development of “unicorns.” The French word for “unicorn” is licorne, but like with many terms in the tech world, English remains the dominant lingua franca (a term whose use is pretty ironic, given the languages being discussed). A unicorn is a startup valued at or above one billion dollars: think of companies like Uber, AirBnB, and Vice Media. France so far only has eleven unicorns, trailing behind the likes of the UK (25), China (94), and the US (182). Emmanuel Macron wants to change that.

Macron isn’t just about bringing new industry into France’s borders, though. He and the rest of the French government want to make sure that the future of tech is geared towards human interests, not simply innovation for innovation’s sake. As testament to this desire, Paris hosted the 2018 Tech for Good Summit, which featured discussions on inclusivity in the tech world. Another theme of the conference was opening up conversations about how governments and private enterprises can work together.

France believes that one of the best ways the government can aid in the progress towards an innovative and humane future is through open data. This approach to information takes the French stereotype of brutal honesty to a whole new level, with the government practicing active transparency in how it discloses data to the public. Back in 2016, the French government signed into effect La Loi pour une République Numérique, which made government data public by default. To see this law working in action, check out data.gouv.fr, which hosts over 40,000 publicly available datasets. 

So how is all of this going? Well, France currently has over 18,000 startups, 11 of which are unicorns. La French Tech is a sleekly-branded organization that seeks to standardize and promote French technology to the world. The site makes it easy to search through the myriad startups and corporations that have brought French technology so far. Ironically, one of the hottest locations for French-led tech isn’t in France: It’s in New York City. France, though, has been home to myriad innovators and inventors during its time as a republic, and it will continue to be part of the innovation conversation for centuries to come.

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(Thumbnail photo by Dorian Hurst)