Are you both saying that you are "living on the startup scene" but don't see any startup ? Or any successful ones. On the top of my head I can already cite you Blablacar, CapitaineTrain, Dailymotion, Deezer as relatively successful for the French market ... Of course if you're looking for planetary mastodon as sign of success ...
There are plenty in france.
The startup model assumes you use VC cash to drive explosive growth.
Bla bla car took 13 years to slowly becomes the average company it is, being covoiturage.fr before. Deezer barely makes a dent in spotify market despite the fact it was born before. Even french don't know about daily motion, it survives because of all the pirated content it contains. Captain train had a moment, and lost it. The oui sncf service has won. At least if you disagree, none of them scream "explosive growth" in my mind.
I'm not saying there are no successful startups. Meetic and free are examples of that in there times.
But there's not a lot of it. Next door, ledger was midly successful, and maybe kryll will do something if they manage to get binance on board and then add the forex to their targets, but I don't see a uber, stripe, dropbox, etc. anywhere.
Where are they? Cause as a French, I've been living on the startup scene for 10 years, and I don't see those anywhere. There are successful companies, but startup?
I hear about a 1000 more US ones than french ones, while I'm literally living next to an incubator.