France was one of the few countries able to launch rockets soon after the end of WWII. Some of these rockets were used to observe the Sun and other astronomical targets in the ultraviolet in the early 1960s. This program continued with the placement of French UV cameras and spectrographs in the French satellite D2B-Aura (1975), in two Soviet satellites and in NASA's Skylab (1973) and Spacelab (1983 and 1985). In parallel, a stratospheric balloon program was initiated around 1978, which has been considerably more successful than the rocket and satellite programs. We describe these activities and their scientific results, which culminated in an important French participation in the focal instrumentation of the Hubble Space Telescope and of several NASA and ESA ultraviolet satellites.