In the 1960s, France became the third country, after the US and Soviet Union, to independently place a satellite (Astérix) into orbit, and the only country to send an animal into space and – crucially, for Félicette the catstronaut – bring it back alive. A decade later, the Franco-British Concorde flicked passengers across the Atlantic in three and a half hours and the TGV began to propel them through the countryside first at 250km/h (155mph), and then 320km/h. Then, in the late 1980s, the French space agency designed a crewed spaceplane, Hermès, that corrected for the Nasa space shuttle’s vulnerability by being integrated into its launch vehicle rather than perched atop it.
A concerted buildout of nuclear power left France with one of the least carbon-intensive economies in the world. And then, of course, there was the Minitel. More than a decade before anyone was typing “www” into their web browsers, French users were able to buy train tickets, check film showings, do their banking, play games, find recipes, read their horoscopes, or even log into, yes, erotic chats – la messagerie rose, as it was known.
Obsessed with independence and sovereignty, the postwar French state excelled at driving technology that served a collective purpose – something that offers a lesson to the European Union as it seeks tech “sovereignty” from the US and broader answers to questions about what kind of tech is needed, and by whom.
Why look back at all this now? Because as a new “made in Europe” industrial policy responds to competition from the US and China, the EU has a chance not just to resist the Trump administration’s pressure to surrender laws that place restrictions on hate speech and illegal online content but to break free of US tech domination entirely and reimagine what kind best serves European citizens.
The Minitel was initially an electronic phone book system with a screen and a fold-down keyboard. It could find people even when their names were misspelled, as long as they were phonetic, as well as display information about businesses, including their location on a map. As a 1982 news report showed, the first users thought of it as a gadget more than a life-changing technology.
By the late 1980s, 20% of French homes had a Minitel terminal, and – perhaps between the games and the chats – found their usage bills exploding, leading to the entry into the market of Mistral, a device that proposed to download up to 60 Minitel pages at a time so that users could consult them offline, where time no longer cost money.
Most people think of the internet as an American, or perhaps Anglo-American, phenomenon; in reality, it’s a deeply Franco-American-British beast, with a purely French detour, a ghost of what-once-was. At the same time as the US was developing Arpanet, the predecessor to the internet, French researchers were on the case. They divided, however, into two competing camps, Cyclades and Transpac, split by the idea of decentralised networks (where packets of data, “datagrams”, took whatever route was available to them and were reassembled into coherent information at their final destination) versus centralised ones (where data followed itself successively, like train cars on a railway).
France Télécom supported Transpac’s centralised closed system, and, to spur adoption, offered free Minitel terminals in order to monetise their use. The number of services France Télécom offered jumped from 145 to 2,074 in a just a year, between 1984 and 1985.
This success was partly its downfall. Minitel’s orderly, predetermined dataflow meant that the network had trouble scaling. Some will look at this, smirk, and think, “So the government backed the wrong technology and lost out to the market.” I want to challenge that with a different takeaway: the Minitel was overtaken by the internet not because the government brought it to life, but because France Télécom insisted on end-to-end control as a way to monetise it – exactly the same mechanism behind the way that behemoth tech monopolies have, as Cory Doctorow writes, “enshittified” the modern internet.
Centralisation worked, but only to a point, and Minitel hit that point roughly around the same time that France did. The US tech monopolies that came to dominate were those whose venture capital-subsidised prime directive was to amass a giant self-perpetuating user base – at which point the sheer number of English speakers and the scale of the US stock market took over. Tech shifted from something that had largely socially net-positive collective implications to the deeply individualised, but socially net-negative, focus of capturing attention and extracting user data.
With Germany calling on budget-constrained France to increase its defence spending, all of Europe would do well to acknowledge that much of what European technology does exist – from nuclear energy to space exploration, to telecommunications (think Eutelsat, an alternative to Starlink), to chip manufacture, frontier AI (Mistral AI is a French company, whose name winks back to the Minitel era), and quantum computing (Pasqal) – comes from the French government’s stubborn refusal to cede to market logic and forgo capacity in all these areas.
But even political will can run into a wall of sheer scale. For all its foresight, France could not, and cannot, climb that wall on its own – only a more integrated EU can.
Even more important, though, is what kind of tech we are going to end up living with. The US had the scale (and the public subsidies) to “win”, but what a hollow victory it has shoved on the rest of us: monopolistic, big tech run amok. Like big tobacco and big oil before it, Silicon Valley has saddled us with the costs: overpowered democratic systems and the devastation of lost attention spans, fractured mental health and social isolation. Even to the tragedy of ads in the Paris Métro promoting an American AI whose purpose is that it, not another human, will be your “friend”.
The EU needs to regain sovereign control over the technology that controls so much of our lives. But it can choose to do so in a way that puts us more firmly back in democratic control of the technology itself. Arguing over the merits of deregulation, as Germany wants, versus a government-led approach, as France favours, is, in this sense, a false debate. Some markets are worth competing in, some aren’t. The EU, should it recognise it, is lucky enough to have the scale to choose which ones to close off and cast aside.
Alexander Hurst writes for Guardian Europe from Paris. His memoir Generation Desperation is out now
