I’d like to see which sources told you that french do “glue” together the word and the punctuation.
Here are some source telling that the punctuation (?, !, :, not . neither ,) should be space from the word on their left, like : « Comment vas-tu ? »
- https://jacques-andre.fr/faqtypo/lessons.pdf page 32 it’s a free book about french typography
- In the « Lexique des règles typographiques en usage à l’Imprimerie nationale » (Glossary of typographical rules used by the National Printing Office), page 149 we see: « espace fine insécable ? espace juistifiante » so they don’t tell to use a U+00A0 (NO-BREAK SPACE) but a U+202F (NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE) (that I don’t know how to type on my keyboard, but still it’s not a U+0020 (SPACE). (Sadly the book is not free so I don’t have a hyperlink to it).
- French Wikipedia tells: « En France, il est d’usage de placer une espace fine insécable avant le point d’interrogation, ou une espace insécable si la fine n’est pas disponible. » (In France, it is customary to place a thin non-breaking space before the question mark, or a non-breaking space if the fine is not available.)