Back then, France punched above its weight when it came to tech. The EU needs it to rediscover its taste for the cutting edgeIn 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 wa...