I'm an American that just spent five years in France. My experience, for what it's worth: I can't say enough nice things about it in every aspect outside of work. I lived in the south of France and I now realize how nice life can be.

Life -- not work. Working there was a nightmare. The pay is low, and while you can live on it, you're not really saving. For a while I was part of the startup community there and while there are many great programs from the government, there is a bit of a local mafia deciding things. Investors were so unsophisticated that technology itself seemed to scare them.

All-in-all, if I could have made it work, I would have done so in a heartbeat. Living there is simply a small piece of heaven on earth. There's just no way to viably work there that I could find.