Concorde, nuclear power and Minitel took three different paths. What can they tell us about Europe’s next technological bets?

Concorde, nuclear power and Minitel. AI-generated Illustration

I’ve spent the last week walking the streets of Marseille, indulging in my long-desired vacation. My routine was simple and mostly included booking tables at local spots, open for unapologetically short hours. A sense of urgency is a funny concept when applied anywhere in southern Europe. Born & raised in a southern European city, I can really say that.

At the Airbnb where I am staying, the skyline is surprisingly busy. The dense, almost panoptical view makes me think about an interesting thing. I wonder whether the atmosphere that I would describe as “clinically relaxed” was different in the past.

France in the 1970s was just peak. Unlike today, it was leaping ahead on a bunch of different tracks where bold vision, execution speed and big capital mattered. It was a tight race, and the French were taking the corners perfectly, often taking the lead over the Soviets and Americans.

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The thirty years after WW2 are widely known as Trente Glorieuses or “Three Glorious Decades”. Of course, this era was not as perfect as French history documentaries may portray it. France went through a fair share of political crises when re-establishing itself politically, as well as a couple of ugly (post-)colonial wars. Yet eventually, long-lasting peace and transatlantic partnerships finally gave the continent the time and security needed for generational moonshots.

Unlike Germany, which was torn in two and heavily destroyed, France enjoyed a more pleasant type of integration and the luxury of deciding its own destiny. That included nationalising critical industries, obtaining nuclear arms and racing towards the edge of technological success.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, French advancements were just bold. One of the quickest nuclear build-ups in history laid the foundations of French energy independence that endure to this day. Minitel — a French version of the internet, before the World Wide Web took over. And of course, a symbol of the supersonic dream: Concorde. Three bold bets on the future. One became a luxury, one became infrastructure, and one became obsolete.

Concorde: ahead of time

If there were ever a thing that I’d be willing to blow an unreasonable amount of money on immediately — it would be a Concorde flight. As a kid with parents in aviation, I am not easily surprised by anything flying, yet Concorde is something different.

Six Concordes parked on the apron. Photo courtesy of British Airways; supplied for editorial use.

Technically, it wasn’t all French: the two manufacturing facilities were located in Britain and France. That required a lot of coordination and joint effort, yet the French were never shy about taking credit for it.

The plane itself was incredibly sophisticated. There was a mechanism for changing the position of the nose section on every take-off and landing to give the pilots a clear view of the runway. Flying at supersonic speeds made the outer surface so hot that the whole plane would actually extend by tens of centimetres during the flight. Also, fuel would be pumped from one tank to another mid-flight to balance Concorde’s centre of gravity.

Concorde’s first test flight, Toulouse-Blagnac, 2 March 1969. Photo: André Cros / Archives municipales de Toulouse, 53Fi1931, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Concorde could let you beat the clock. With a flight time of around three and a half hours and New York five hours behind London, you could leave at noon and arrive at 10:30 am local time. The whole idea of stitching together the two sides of the Atlantic with a fast-track channel in the air was futurism in reality, a testament to post-war prosperity and a true European “Ad Astra” moment.

The cabin was narrow, with just four seats across. Yet it was still a more prestigious flight, with Champagne, caviar and a certificate for breaking the sound barrier. Passengers would sit next to the tiny windows and enjoy watching the plane reach a supersonic speed of Mach 2 live on the built-in indicators. In the 1990s, designer Andrée Putman redesigned Air France’s cabin, using light and restrained details to make the small space feel elegant.

Champagne service aboard a British Airways Concorde. Source: Heritage Concorde.

Celebrities loved Concorde. No private jet could match the vibe of a cutting-edge aviation unit, leaping forth ahead of its time. Among its passengers were Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Catherine Deneuve and, of course, members of the British royal family.

Fred Finn beside a Rolls-Royce, with a British Airways Concorde behind him. Source: Gentleman’s Journal.

The final flight of Concorde took place on November 26, 2003, when it flew to Filton for preservation. Commercial services had ended the previous month. Its demise had no single cause. Instead, it was a mix of circumstances, including the famous jet crash of 2000, a shrinking market and rising maintenance costs. The oil crisis of 1973 had already made the economics of supersonic travel harder, long before the final retirement. Add to this a limited number of routes (sonic booms restricted supersonic flying over land) and you get the reason why Concorde became a piece of the future that was no longer economically viable.

Nuclear: an atomic ramp-up

Back in Marseille, I’m pulling out my phone, which I’ve set to a radical “do not disturb” mode, to check the map, as we’re heading to the beach. One of the push notifications that somehow invades my attention span is about upcoming spikes in energy costs. I put my sunglasses away to figure out the route and instinctively dive into noisy news blurbs, wondering if my electricity bill is gonna hurt after I’m back home in Berlin.

My electricity bill might be lower if I decided to settle in France. Energy price shocks are hardly new to the French. Back in the seventies, France already had a nuclear industry when oil prices skyrocketed. The crisis then pushed the country to accelerate its reactor build-out.

The idea of strategic autonomy and the notion of self-sustaining politics were cornerstones of post-war France. This was the reason why such assertiveness in both the military and civilian parts of the economy was taken to a higher level. Ironically enough, the heart of the nuclear programme ran on American hardware. France had already built reactors of its own design, but chose a different technology for the expansion. In 1969, the final decision to use PWRs under a Westinghouse licence was reached. Later on, the reactors were adapted and “franced” — by the 1980s, production had achieved a reasonable degree of local autonomy.

Flamanville nuclear power station under construction, August 1980. Photo: Jacques Lemière / Archives départementales de la Manche, fonds 115 Fi. Source.

The build-out itself was carried out in the same manner as all the other post-war transformations: centralised, strategic, massive. EDF (Électricité de France) was basically the state-owned national utility. To fund its enormous effort, it was authorised to borrow enormous sums. The amount of borrowed capital was so huge that by 1976, EDF was the third-biggest borrower on the US capital market — right after Ford and General Motors.

Make no mistake — France did not predict the oil crisis, nor did it slide through it. At the time, the energy price spikes did really bite. Yet in March of 1974, when then-prime minister Pierre Messmer announced an acceleration of the build-out, there was infrastructure in place to be accelerated.

The build-up wasn’t flawless: the speed and the directive manner backfired, sparking various protests across the country. One major flashpoint was Superphénix — a new form of reactor that ran on the principle of “fast” neutrons and used a much newer and more experimental technology. Yet it wasn’t the only thing people were mad about.

It was the non-consensual policy that made people angry: both intellectuals and the working class from rural areas. Specifically, this happened at Plogoff, near Pointe du Raz, where EDF was planning a four-reactor nuclear power station. The locals viewed this as a risk of land expropriation and disruption to fishing. Soon enough, the protests spun out of control, and after years of tension, the project was called off in 1981.

Anti-nuclear campaign posters from Plogoff: boycott, confrontation and solidarity. Source: SKREO-Dz. The first two also appear in Plogoff’s municipal archive; the third is credited to Pierrick Le Corre by Musée départemental breton.

Nuclear power was probably France’s most successful 1970s bet. Energy security drove the programme; lower-carbon electricity became another lasting benefit. Yet it became a backbone of the country’s autonomy and reduced volatility & external dependence, setting France apart from its neighbours.

French electricity production, 1980–2023. Chart: Theanphibian / Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Data: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

To this day, French power plants are monuments to Cold War-era futurism that actually became part of the economy and didn’t disappear. And surprisingly, some of them look really nice for the industrial monstrosities those things are always considered to be. It could be the beautiful landscape around them that is doing the job, or the more elegant architecture the French are famous for. But probably both.

Paluel nuclear power station, Normandy, 2005. Photo: Francis Chanteloup (EDF) / Energi-vore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.Cruas-Meysse nuclear power station, 2012. Photo: Yelkrokoyade / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Minitel: online before the web

I’m trying to get a table at Le Ventre de l’Architecte at the famous Le Corbusier house. The opening hours are wild: 12–2 pm, 7:30–9:15 pm, meaning you’d better get hungry when the place is open. After reading a bunch of unhinged comments from the restaurant manager (check their reviews on Google, it’s just fire), I navigate to the website. As a person who led a premium web studio, I am disappointed but not surprised by what I see. A question that pops up in my mind: was the French internet any good?

Spoiler: hell yes.

When we think about the early days of the internet and picture its mass adoption, we immediately imagine the US. Yet France brought online services into millions of homes well before the web became an everyday habit.

Minitel was a European predecessor of the World Wide Web. It kicked off at the beginning of the 1980s. As a telephone subscriber, you could get one of the Minitel terminals for free. This wouldn’t be a regular PC: no apps or games on the device, just a b&w text interface for online services. Its design had practical limits: screen designer Jean-Yves Michalik described the 40-column display and an alphabetic keyboard that was later replaced with AZERTY.

Thomson terminal used in the Télétel trial, Vélizy, 22 November 1980. Photo: Bernard Marti, CC BY 3.0.

Minitel terminals were originally a fancy replacement for the paper directory. People would get hooked on additional functions like purchasing train tickets or making bookings pretty randomly, after their usual phone number searches. Apparently, this was a great strategy for adoption: by 1989, France had around five million Minitel terminals. By 1993, that figure had grown to almost 6.5 million, with terminals in 20% of households.

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Minitel was no random accident. It was part of a visionary digital transformation, imagined, described and delivered by the French state in order to bring a futuristic reality into everyday life. “The Computerisation of Society”, a report that came out in 1978, explored the emergence of an information society. The report contained a blueprint of how the mass adoption of computers would shift many gears in societal interaction, how business would change and how politics would follow. It also considered the infrastructure and political choices that this transformation would require.

That report captured the ambition behind France’s push into networked computing.

One of the things Minitel would give birth to was anonymous dating chats. Or, as they called them, “pink chats”. Users would assume they were speaking with someone who was who they said they were, which was not always the case.

Minitel’s early success did not turn into global dominance. Its dedicated terminals and centrally organised network made online services accessible, but eventually faced competition from personal computers and the open web. An OECD assessment pointed to ageing technology, high usage charges and limited export markets. The system that had made getting online simple also had limits.

The last official year of Minitel was 2012. That was a surprisingly long life for a network born at the beginning of the 1980s.

Nowadays: winds of European tech sovereignty

One thing that caught my eye in Marseille was how many things are called “Mistral”, from navy ships you can see docked in the harbour to local soda brands and driving schools that have this word in their name.

It’s a special, even holy word for many francophones. Mistral is the name of a strong, cold & mighty Mediterranean wind that blows all across Provence.

Also, Mistral is the name of one of the few European frontier AI labs. As I write this text, the fourth generation of its Large model has been announced, adding another chapter to France’s ambitions in computing.

Mistral AI Now Summit, Paris, 28 May 2026. Source: Mistral AI

It’s too early to predict whether the new European bet on open-weight sovereign models and an application layer for robotics and manufacturing will win the future.

But at least we know that writing the future was once in fashion in Europe.
Why not again?

Further reading

  • British Airways: Celebrating Concorde — the aircraft and its service history.
  • Andrée Putman: Le Concorde Air France — the cabin redesign.
  • IAEA: France country profile — the nuclear programme and reactor choices.
  • Archives départementales du Finistère: Plogoff — the proposed plant and opposition.
  • OECD: Minitel assessment — adoption, economics and limitations.
  • Jean-Yves Michalik: Minitel screen design — a contemporary practitioner’s account.

Supersonic dreams: how post-war France invented the future, and then stopped was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.