I think this is because we are a socialist state: everything used to live or death by selling it to a government monopoly or was made by the state itself. In yo

I think this is because we are a socialist state: everything used to live or death by selling it to a government monopoly or was made by the state itself. In your examples: Minitel was developed by the Post ministry, TGV by the SNCF. In this context you have very few incentives to sell it abroad since these national companies are satisfied once the French people got the innovation. We still have issues with this mentality: startups are created to surf on public money, often lacking a real technological advantage (e.g, "the sovereign cloud"). Some services such as Uber could not even have emerged since there conflict with an existing monopolies. And finally there is the fiscal pressure which is killing the smart and medium companies while the biggest ones have very advantageous rates or even no tax to pay when foreign.