Weren't a bunch of high profile French actually leaving France because of HUGE taxes in france?
Any French here can answer this question?: for a start up making 5000 euros a month - how much would you pay in taxes?
But corporate tax alone is not a good way to evaluate the opportunity of creating your company in France.
As a startup you are supposedly doing innovative stuff and R&D so you actually get tax credits[0]. Crédit Impôt Recherche &Crédit Impôt Innovation brings you up to 30% of your R&D investment.
As a startup in France you are eligible to the Jeune Entreprise Innovante status which basically means you pay nearly no social contributions on the salary of your R&D personnel (which is a huuuge amount: as a rule of thumb, total cost of 1 salesperson is roughly twice his/her net salary. Paying half of that for your engineers is...cool).
As a startup in France you also get grants from BPI (Banque Publique d'Investissement) and colateral for your private loans.
As a startup in some regions of France you can get local grants which can be a huge amount as well (and Paris is not one of them).
If you want to try to get into the French Tech Ecosystem, there is a program similar to Startup Chile, French Tech Ticket[1], but the grant is only 25k€
To give an anecdotal example, I raised south of 1M€ of private equity (which is obvious a very small amount by US or european standards), but I got almost as much public grants/tax credits/local help. My colleagues/competitors located in the Paris region got substantially less local help for the same amount of money raised and comparable market/R&D programs.
[0] http://cache.media.enseignementsup-recherche.gouv.fr/file/CI... [1] http://www.frenchtechticket.com/
[1] https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
which basically means you pay nearly no social contributions
But as a startup, you have so many ways of diminishing your taxes. You can deduce your investment into R&D when it is a least 20% of your costs, up to 80.000€/year, "young innovative enterprises" (JEI) get a 50% tax break for 7 years, the CIR is quite literally 30% of your R&D paid by the state, I can't even list them all because there are so many.
As a startup, you are most likely going to choose to pay impôts sur la société, which is taxed at 15% for the first 38.120€ of benefits, then 33.3%. In your example, 5000€/month adds up to 60000/year, so the first tax bracket takes 5.718€ out, and the second one 7.220€, for a total of 12.938€ in taxes per year. Once again, that is before any tax rebate, which can very easily get your down to maybe 6.000€/year[1]
The high profile french leaving were leaving for tax havens, so I'm not sure that's really a good example.
[1] http://www.impots.gouv.fr/portal/dgi/public/professionnels.i...
Im all for the idea, but 195euro/desks are not a solution IMO. If you want to create thriving business scene (in any country) - drop small business tax rates (and other liabilities) to 0-5% and lock them there for first 5 years. Then if business makes it successfully to the commercial stage in 5 years - increase taxes to the current "market rate".
Ka-ching! Then You really have a new start up mecca!
I'd love to complain about taxes (and I do that all the time) but ultimately it didnt matter. I left the country because there is no job.