Real-Debrid, a popular streaming and download service, says it’s implementing far-reaching anti-piracy measures, including hash and keyword filters, in response to a notice from the French Federation of Film Distributors. The API and instantAvailability feature are set for deactivation too, while content from “notorious” pirate sites will be blocked.
My guess is it’s probably a national cultural tradition affected by previous or existing French laws and rightsholder practices regarding different common ways of “sailing”, making DDL from filehosts through debrid services a preferred choice over e.g. p2p methods like torrents, ed2k, gnutella etc. I’m pretty sure the filehosts+torrents products combo are a newer addition to debrid services without having used them myself. No idea about what their actual situation is and has been - but I know that some torrent trackers for French content currently exist today too.