France pioneered the use of EMV-style chip credit cards in the 1990s.
French banks had already developed chip-based payment cards before the international EMV standard existed. The French banking network deployed the Bull-CP8 smart-card system, and France began generalizing chip cards for payment in 1992. The technology was intended to make card fraud harder than it was with magnetic stripes.
EMV itself came later: Europay, Mastercard, and Visa jointly developed the standard in the 1990s, with the acronym formed from their names. France’s earlier nationwide chip-card experience helped make it an important model for the emerging international system.
A common mix-up is crediting the United Kingdom because Britain became famous for its nationwide “Chip and PIN” rollout in 2006. That was a later mass deployment, not the pioneering 1990s adoption. France’s early system also helped sharply reduce certain forms of payment-card fraud.