On "so-called self-employment" I agree and can personally confirm ;). It would be interesting to look into it comparatively - but my impression is that it's fairly general. Corporations have downsized and put skilled people out to fend for themselves as consultants, freelancers, agents, whatever; or they simply don't hire any more for positions that used to be in-house. Anything to put those extra points on the bottom line that our dynamic financial system requires.

The difficult thing in studying this would be to find objective statistical measures that would deal with the real amount of work available and carried out - but we can certainly compare numbers of self-employed. I suspect they're fairly numerous in France, as in the UK, and for the same reasons. The narrative about them is, of course, as you say, dynamic, go-getting entrepreneurs blah. In how many cases it's really a start-up rather than a finish-up it's hard to say.