I understand that a space is sometimes (always?) required with punctuation in French, but the space should then be a nonbreaking space so that punctuation marks can't end up at the beginning of a text line by themselves.

Was the text perhaps originally created in a program that can't manage nonbreaking spaces (such as a plain text editor)?

What you can do is replace a space character and a following punctuation mark with a nonbreaking space and the same punctuation mark, for example: ^s?

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional