As a professional scientist I can say first hand that French science institutes are forced to speak French and can only hire french speaking staff. As English is the de facto language of science and science publication, this makes it, to my knowledge, the only country that doesn't operate on English in this regard and by choice, is generally exclusionary to foreign science and foreign scientists. Which honestly just hurts them, but it is, nevertheless true.

As a professional scientist I can say first hand that French science institutes are forced to speak French and can only hire french speaking staff. As English is the de facto language of science and science publication, this makes it, to my knowledge, the only country that doesn't operate on English in this regard and by choice, is generally exclusionary to foreign science and foreign scientists. Which honestly just hurts them, but it is, nevertheless true. This is also, and this is more a personal opinion, why France lags it's neighbours in Science, despite having some quite generous funding and some truly storied institutions.

This is also, and this is more a personal opinion, why France lags it's neighbours in Science, despite having some quite generous funding and some truly storied institutions.

Oh, really? Let's look at the number of Fields Medals per capita. Even disregarding the fact that France has traditionally been very good at maths, if you look at statistics on the number of publications, France's scientific output is exactly what you would expect compared to other mainland European countries. I really feel like you started this whole argument with no clue what you are talking about.