Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.
The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.
This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.