France FinTech, the lobby for financial technology startups, held its soirée d’été, or summer party, on Tuesday, July 9, in a chic country setting in the heart of western Paris’s Bois de Boulogne forest. The name of the venue? “Tir aux pigeons” (“Pigeon-shooting”). It’s almost impossible to not see within that choice the Freudian symbol of a French tech industry worried about its future.
In 2012, digital entrepreneurs who feared being swindled by a tax law deemed confiscatory came together under the name of “pigeons.” But that year, they found their champion. Emmanuel Macron, then deputy secretary general of the Elysée Palace, convinced the French President François Hollande to back down. This episode marked the beginning of an intimate relationship between startups and a political leader adept at “disruption,” as he proved once again when he chose to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale and call early elections following the European elections on June 9. You could even call it a love story.
But it’s been a rude awakening. From Versailles to Las Vegas, from the Elysée Palace to Davos in Switzerland, Macron has so embodied French Tech that its members now fear being collateral victims of his electoral setbacks, as they are deemed too close to a largely discredited political leader. “My fear is that those outside the ecosystem won’t understand how our contribution is useful. With the arrival of artificial intelligence, too, some may feel left out of innovation,” said Roxanne Varza, director of Station F, the startup incubator in Paris’s 13th arrondissement.
“François Mitterrand went to the villages every Wednesday. Jacques Chirac felt the cows’ asses, and Emmanuel Macron caressed the unicorns,” the nickname given to startups valued at over a billion dollars, said Hugues Le Bret, president of Nickel, the promoter of the “bank account for all.” While French Tech was created in 2013 by Hollande’s government, the future president Macron gave the program a new dimension when he became economy minister in 2014: out of personal taste, out of the interest he had in associating his image with modernity, and out of his demand for “sovereignty.”
Macron became the poster boy for French Tech during his January 2016 jaunt to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the industry’s global hub. With his three-day beard, he was the king of an evening financed by the Business France agency to the tune of €289,000, talking into the night with captivated entrepreneurs.
Fragility of French Tech
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