President Emmanuel Macron yesterday held talks with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in his first meeting with an American official since the scrapping of a submarine contract with Australia plunged relations into crisis.

Blinken, who has been seeking to patch up ties with France after Canberra ditched the deal as part of a security pact with the UK and US, did not originally have an appointment with Macron on the agenda for his two-day visit to Paris.

The one-on-one meeting lasted around 40 minutes with "common agreement that we have an opportunity now to deepen and strengthen the coordination" even though "a lot of hard work remains to be done", a senior State Department official told reporters in Paris.

Macron was furious last month when Australia scrapped a multibillion-dollar deal for French submarines, saying it would pursue US nuclear versions instead. His government called secret talks leading up to the cancellation "a stab in the back" and the French president recalled his ambassadors from Washington and Canberra.

US President Joe Biden, possibly taken aback by the extent of Macron's anger, has since tried to make amends. But there were also signs that France had started softening its stance.

Macron is meanwhile still livid with Australia, and a long-planned round of Australia-EU free trade talks has been postponed by a month.

Canberra announced the submarine decision on September 15 as it joined a new alliance with Britain and the United States, dubbed AUKUS, one of a series of initiatives by Biden who views countering China as the paramount concern of the United States.