Quotes of the Day

Back when they both lived in France, Hamid Senni and Edouard Jozan might have been on different planets. Senni, the son of Moroccan immigrants, grew up in a soulless housing project near Valence and, egged on by his father, scraped his way through school. More than once, he was told he would never find a job. Jozan, by contrast, is one of France's highflyers. He attended one of the best secondary schools in Paris and, after graduating from the nation's ultra-competitive élite engineering college, switched to a career in international finance. For all their differences, however, the two have some very important attributes in common: they are both French, in their early 30s and ambitious. And they have both left France, in no hurry to return.

Senni, incensed by the discrimination he says he faced daily at home, first went to Sweden and now lives in London, where he has set up his own consulting firm. It advises companies — including some French multinationals — on how to deal with ethnic diversity in their workforce. "Going abroad was like an exorcism," he says bluntly. Jozan spent five years working in Germany after college before moving back to France — only to get a big shock; the place seemed cliquey, introspective and stuck in a rut. So he quickly left again, taking a career break to do an M.B.A. at the London Business School, which happens to be just down the road from Senni's basement office. He says he expects to stay on in London for work when he finishes. "The quality of life in France is good," Jozan says, "but if you are young and ambitious, it's not a place that allows you to succeed."

That's not how things used to be. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast." Such a thought may have held true for a generation or two of Europeans and Americans, inspired by the youthful and sometimes rebellious spirit of the French themselves. But these days, the feast seems to have moved elsewhere — and a growing number of young French people are going with it.

Jovan and Senni are just two of an estimated 2.2 million French citizens, about 4% of the population, who have joined a wave of emigration. According to the Foreign Ministry, there has been a 40% increase in the number of those registering at French consulates abroad since 1995. People are leaving for all sorts of reasons, of course, ranging from greater opportunities to higher salaries, from romantic entanglements to the search for a foreign utopia that may not exist. Two people leave France every day for tax reasons alone, according to a recent Senate report. But for the most part, those leaving are not wealthy retirees looking for a place in the sun; they are talented and ambitious young people in their 20s and 30s who have left because they felt they couldn't advance their careers at home, or because they were simply frustrated by the French system.

A 2005 TNS Sofres poll shows that about half of those departing are under the age of 35, and that one of the main reasons they give for moving is the desire to leave France. What's more, they show little inclination to return. A whopping 93% say they are pleased with their new life, while 45% only intend to return to France when they retire — or never. What's going on?

Look back in anger
France has always had its explorers and travelers, but unlike Portugal, Italy or Ireland it doesn't have a tradition of mass migration because it has been such a rich country for so long. What's striking about the new French exodus (and is causing a sometimes-agonized debate back home) is the description these new émigrés give of the France they are leaving behind: a country where it's difficult and sometimes miserable to be ambitious, where landing a stimulating job often depends on connections rather than talent, where bureaucracy is daunting and discrimination sometimes overt — a France, in other words, that is set in its ways and frustratingly unresponsive to the hopes, plans and dreams of its young.

I'm not one of those people who spit in the soup. I would like to go back if the opportunity arises," says Florence Cellot, 32, a marketing specialist who has just moved to London after five years in Tokyo. But, she says, "France is like an old lady. It is paralyzed by the fear of what it could lose." Jacques Deguest puts it even more bluntly. He's a friend of Cellot's who moved to Tokyo in 2001 after a web-hosting company he started in France collapsed in the dotcom crash. It was a bitter experience, and he says he has no intention of ever returning. "France is like a restaurant where the food is fantastic, the best of everything, but the comfort and the service are zero, zero, zero — and the bill is exorbitant," says Deguest, 37. "I love France, but in small doses."

The French themselves are not quite sure what to make of this exodus. To an extent, what's happening in France is also being seen elsewhere. Many Europeans are now discovering the joys of a newfound mobility — and not just the brainy scientists who have long deserted their home labs for the U.S. As borders have fallen, more people than ever are packing up and leaving: thousands of Britons are trying their luck in France and Spain, even as Poles and other East Europeans flock to London to take often menial jobs.

Some French commentators, including the best-selling author Nicolas Baverez, view the outflow of talent as the latest manifestation of French decline. Others are more upbeat — the french conquest of the world blazed the headline of one article on the issue in the right-wing daily Le Figaro — and the official government line is that this exodus is a welcome sign that young French people are keen to broaden their horizons. At the same time, the government has been putting in place several programs designed to encourage émigrés to return, including offering cash incentives to talented scientists.

What's evident is that the exiles are holding up a mirror to French society itself. Their description of a dysfunctional France has become a central theme in the election campaigns of all three key candidates for the French presidency. Nicolas Sarkozy on the right, centrist François Bayrou and Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party's candidate, are all taking aim at a France they describe as "blocked" and "immobile." And they are making promises galore to resolve many of the issues that have sent these young French abroad in the first place. Royal wants to hand out $13,000 interest-free loans to aspiring entrepreneurs, and says she will create 500,000 state-funded jobs to get young people into the workforce. Sarkozy pledges to introduce a new work ethic to France, and better reward those who work more than 35 hours per week. Bayrou promises to end the politics-as-usual domination of the two main parties on left and right that he says is the cause of France's decline over the past quarter-century. France, he told supporters at a Paris rally in March, "is a country in pain and anesthetized that needs to get back into shape so that it can stand upright again."

The French diaspora isn't waiting. Emigrés are voting with their feet, and that has turned them into an election issue: almost 1 million of them have registered to vote in the two rounds, on April 22 and May 6, more than double the number in the last presidential election in 2002. Royal's Socialist Party briefly mooted whether to institute a tax on French who move abroad, but soon dropped the idea. For his part, Sarkozy staged a boisterous election rally in London in January, a first for a French presidential candidate, and urged the crowd of about 2,500 expats to return. "We need your work, your intelligence, your imagination and your enthusiasm," Sarkozy said, adding, "Seeing France from the outside, you can better see its defects and its weaknesses — and they are all the more unbearable for you ... But all over the world, I want the French to be proud again of France!"

Pride is one thing; reputation is quite another. The question of whether a new French President will be able to restore France's luster for this generation of exiles is a critical one — for those who have stayed as much as for those who have left. Interest in the campaign is running high in France itself, and many émigrés are following it closely. Jozan, the M.B.A. student in London, believes the stakes are significant. "The question is, do we have another five years' delay or do we take the bull by the horns and confront the big issues?" he asks. "It's fine to debate, but France needs a leader. It needs to adjust to a new world. If it wants to be competitive, it needs to move."

Others, looking home, see signs that make them hopeful. Olivier Pourquié, a scientist who moved from Marseille to Kansas City, Missouri, five years ago, is pleased that a younger generation of politicians is finally taking power in France. "Whoever is elected, it will mean an end to the gerontocracy. It's time to move to something more dynamic," he says. Pourquié left France out of frustration with the rigid state-funded scientific establishment — and because the American lab where he now works, the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, offered him a package of pay and perks that was four times what he was receiving back home. Yet he and his French wife are bringing up their young daughter bilingually and, he says, "I would come back as soon as I could. My country is France." First, though, "whatever government comes to power will have to do something quite dramatic to change the spirit."

Exit this way
Why have so many headed for the big door marked Sortie? France's gummed-up labor market is a key reason. Youth unemployment of 22% is easily one of the highest in Europe, both east and west, and it's not just school leavers with few or no qualifications who can't land a job. More than 7% of French university graduates in their late 20s are unemployed — one of the worst records in the European Union and about 50% higher than the E.U. average. Moreover, many of the jobs that are available to young people, even highly skilled ones, tend to be short-term and poorly paid. That's a consequence of a skewed labor market, which provides so much protection to full-time employees that firms are reluctant to hire people for anything other than temporary positions.

When biomedical researcher Keren Bismuth returned to France last year after completing the research for her doctorate at the U.S. government's prestigious National Institutes of Health in Maryland, one of the inconveniences she found was being put onto a series of three-month contracts rather than a permanent one. Finding work in London, Dublin, Montreal and other foreign cities, by contrast, seems much easier. Vladimir Cordier, an unemployed French graduate, got a job within five days of arriving at London's Waterloo Station on a one-way Eurostar ticket, and was so elated that he even wrote a book about his experience in 2005. Its title: Finally, a Job!

Laurent Girard-Claudon can tell dozens of such stories. Seven years ago, he started his own recruiting agency in Ireland together with a friend. Approach People, based in the Dublin suburb of Blackrock, now has 14 staffers and has placed a total of almost 1,000 French people in jobs in Ireland, including 300 in 2006 alone. Girard-Claudon says many of his job seekers are either well qualified but lacking in experience — a severe handicap in France — or looking to jump-start their careers in a country where you don't have to be in your 40s to be given management responsibility. Google, Apple and other U.S. technology firms that are hungry for French-speaking talent as they expand their European business usually snap them up.

Back in France, such success stands conventional wisdom on its head. Opponents of change often cite supposedly draconian working conditions and a lack of job security in countries such as Ireland and the U.K. as reasons not to abandon the highly protected French model. Girard-Claudon scoffs at such arguments. "France is frightened of this monster called liberalism, but in Ireland you can't be fired overnight, and if you lose your job you find another one," he says. He surfs the Internet on his office computer to double-check the Irish minimum legal wage. It's $11.10 per hour — higher than in France. But money is a subsidiary issue. Most importantly, "here young people are accepted and welcomed," he says. Even though he was just 23 and lacked experience when he started the company, "I wasn't laughed at, either by the bank or by the authorities," Girard-Claudon says. Ask him if he would have been able to set up his firm in France rather than Ireland and his answer is categorical: "In France I would have been too young."

Other budding entrepreneurs complain of similar obstacles, and worse. Red tape is a good way of strangling entrepreneurial spirit. Benoît Lavaud, a designer who works for a cosmetics company, tried to set up a luxury leather-goods brand in Paris, only to run into massive administrative hurdles. Among other issues, he couldn't understand why French authorities demanded that a start-up with no revenues should pay compulsory pension contributions. Lavaud, 33, left France three years ago for Tokyo, where he has since created his own clothing brand. "Japan is far more welcoming to young entrepreneurs," he says. He's still affectionate about his native country, but he's not likely to return for work anytime soon. "A lot of young people have dreams," he says, "but in France we've lost the energy to turn them into reality."

Then there's the bugbear of discrimination. Yahia Zemoura's problem with France isn't so much his age or his dreams, but his color and his name: he's a second-generation Algerian, now studying in London, whose parents moved to Paris in the mid-1960s. France's failure to integrate its substantial immigrant population is a significant theme of the current election campaign, with all mainstream candidates promising to ease the ethnic tensions that exploded into days of rioting in November 2005 and continue to simmer. In late March, riot police battled about 200 teenagers at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris, prompting sharp political exchanges between the various candidates over who was to blame and what should be done. At the same time, a heated debate has erupted about what it actually means to be French, prompted by a suggestion from Sarkozy that, if elected, he would create a ministry for immigration and national identity. Hamid Senni, who set up his own consulting firm in London, says the rhetoric sounds like "a broken record. Ever since I was born I've heard talk of integration, discrimination and immigration. But the debate is hollow."

Like Senni, Zemoura moved abroad because of what he describes as a poisonous mix of discrimination and a difficult job market. He's 24, a lanky basketball player who passed his baccalaureate school-leaving exam and went on to attend a commercial school in Paris. "I had to get out because I felt claustrophobic. I had so many friends in the same situation: qualified but unemployed," he says. That's not just a feeling: new research by French economists Laurent Gobillon, Harris Selod and Thierry Magnac published in March shows that where you live in the Paris region is a critical factor in whether you'll find a job — and coming from the wrong suburb can quickly disqualify you. Zemoura didn't need to wait for the scientific evidence. In one interview, he says, he was asked: "Is being Arab a problem for you?"

Marc Cheb Sun, the editor of Respect, a French magazine that focuses on ethnic minorities, says the decision to pack up and leave is now increasingly common among second-generation immigrants. "What's new is that young people are leaving because they are saying: there's no place for me here," he says. Zemoura borrowed $12,000, an astronomical sum for him, to pay for an English-language course he's been taking in London since September. He earns his keep and money to repay the loan with a series of part-time jobs, including washing cars and handling administrative tasks at the school where he's taking classes. A Muslim, he's lodging with a family of Orthodox Jews in north London. This came as a surprise, but, he says, "I've grown up so much in five months. Every morning I wake up optimistic." One experience in particular stands out for him: the day he went to see about a job at McDonald's in London and was told by the recruiting manager: "If you don't understand everything, don't worry. I'll repeat it." That tolerance and willingness to give tongue-tied outsiders a chance "is unimaginable in France," he says. "All doors are open here; in France they're closed. Yet it's less than three hours from Paris."

Speaking from experience
The wave of émigrés can and does stand as an indictment of France's condition. Yet there's another way to look at it. If France put its house in order, those who have left in the last few years could turn out to be just the injection of spirit that it needs. Dominique Mendes, for example, spent the last three years working as a sales representative for Apple in Cork, Ireland, a job he landed quickly despite a lack of professional experience that handicapped him for French positions. It paid well, and he had fun. But best of all, he says, his international experience stood him in good stead once he started looking for openings back in France. Mendes now works for a technology consulting firm in Paris. Bismuth, the biomedical researcher, says she too is glad to be back in France after her five years in the U.S., especially as she has landed a research project she's very interested in. "I want to give my country a chance," she says.

But even willing returnees like Bismuth are under no illusions. "It's a very complex situation here," she says, "and the mentality has to change. I just hope the elections give a new élan to the place." More than 2 million French émigrés — and a large proportion of the French who've stayed at home — would probably agree. There's an impatience for change, and the main presidential candidates are fueling that mood by promising an end to the decline-as-usual mentality they say has characterized the past decade. But as French governments of both left and right have frequently found to their chagrin, it's one thing to promise reform and quite another to deliver it. If France remains stuck and unresponsive to the ambitions of its young people, watch for the exodus to swell.

The Celtic Tiger
Name: LAURENT GIRARD-CLAUDON
Occupation: Recruiter
Age: 30 Destination: Dublin

Girard-Claudon says Ireland is more expensive than France, but that's a price worth paying. Approach People, the recruiting firm he founded in 2000 that specializes in placing French people in Irish jobs, is thriving. When hiring, he says, "people in France are terrified of making mistakes. But in Ireland, people who don't work out go on to other things." He often socializes with fellow expats, especially at the main French haunt in Dublin: Sinnotts Bar. "The big difference is the confidence in young people. In France, even the word jeune (young) has a bad connotation. But we are the ones with the energy and will. Confidence in the future, in the job, in your neighbors, your friends — that confidence has got lost in France."

Seeking a Better Mix
Name: HAMID SENNI
Occupation: Diversity consultant
Age: 31 Destinations: Gothenburg, London

When Senni walks down the Champs Elysées, he makes sure to wear a suit and tie. "If I'm in jeans, people think I'm a shoplifter." That impression of being denigrated because he's a second-generation immigrant is a strong one, born of years of bitter experience. His answer was to leave France, first for Sweden and then Britain, where he advises clients on workforce diversity. "In the U.K., diversity is seen as an opportunity. In France it's still seen as a problem," he says. While some corporations are changing, he says, French politics is not. "When will France have the courage to really look at its problems?"

The Life of the Party
Name: BENOIT LAVAUD
Occupation: Designer, nightlife entrepreneur
Age: 33 Destination: Tokyo

In Japan, he's known as Beno, especially to the hip set who flock to the crowded, invitation-only nightclub parties he's been co-organizing for the past 15 months. "I had projects in France but times were difficult," he explains. In Tokyo, by contrast, he finds things easier. The Isetan department store has begun stocking his clothing brand, Boëge, named after his home town in the Alps. He keeps an eye on French politics, but has few illusions. "There's so much inertia," he says. "It's a wonderful country, but the energy to succeed needs to return."

A Foreign Education
Name: FLORENCE CELLOT
Occupation: Marketing specialist
Age: 32 Destinations: Tokyo, London

Born into a family filled with teachers, Cellot says, "I love my country, but it's outdated." She and her husband left for Tokyo five years ago, and recently moved to London, where she's currently doing an M.B.A. She says about one in five of her classmates from the Edhec Business School in Lille, where she studied marketing a decade ago, also moved abroad. That pace is now quickening: the school says one in four of its class of 2006 found their first jobs outside France. Her own brief work experience in France was typical of recent graduates: she says she was put on a series of temporary contracts in her first job. "If you are young, you don't have the feeling in France that people are investing in you," she complains. She's been following the twists of the election campaign closely, but so far she doesn't find any candidate convincing. Perhaps life is still too good back home, she reflects. "We're privileged. More people need to be touched before anything really changes."

• PETER GUMBEL
• Why a growing number of talented and ambitious young people are leaving France behind