I've heard in France, you don't even need to do a lousy job. You just need to ask to be "voluntarily fired", and you can receive benefits. If you have a startup, you can receive those benefits indefinitely.
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Some companies would agree to fire you on your demand, but it not very legal, so bigger one might not do it. You'll have to get good relation with your management to do it.
You can received unemployement help for 2 years, given that you worked enough before (it is roughly 70% of your salary, but decreasing over time ). You can also ask a part of that money up front, but that will cut your right.
There is also an interesting "autoentrepreneur" status that is nice if you want to boostrap something that allow you to be registered as a company but ask you minimal accounting, simplify registration and only tax you if you earn anything. It's important because company are taxed more than in the US.
Salaries are lower too (it's not very easy to accumulate 6mo/1year of cash in advance ), few peoples speak english, so you really need to speak french to start something in France.