Great question! I don’t know France that well. Perhaps there are no IT companies in France dealing with user content in a significant way? Perhaps debate on the matter is stifled by incompetent media not understanding questions of importance that would make them realise how important news about this is?
I would argue that it is maybe even worse, as there is a potential conflict of interests of our main press agency, AFP, about this topic, as they are a huge proponent of Article 11. French media are very reliant on that news agency, so we don't hear about the protests about it, and the public do not care.
It doesn't help that our main EFF-equivalent, La Quadrature du Net, didn't have a very clear position about the copyright directive at some point [0].
