Dailymotion is a bit of an exception, and somewhat of a waste (Specially when Orange, the national/historic telco operator in France, was forced to bought them by the government, and didn't help Dailymotion development).
But one the other side, you have tons of small to mid size enterprises that got bought.
For example, Adobe has bought quite a few French companies such as Neolane (marketing solution) Fotolia (image bank) or Alegoritmic (3D texture editor) in the past few years.
