Ask HN: How can I switch to remote freelancing?

I'm a full-stack Java/J2EE engineer in France that until now worked on soul-crushing projects for big corps (mainly high-traffic web portals and almost-realtime data analytics). I'm moving from the city to the countryside; to work on bootstraped startup projects (expect an annoncement soon) and to do some remote freelancing. I won't be able to find some Java remote freelance gigs in France, so I'll guess I'll have to go "international". Do you have some clues on how to make this transition ? I don't really have a network to leverage and cannot get back to previous big-corp customers (they never allow remote working).