One morning in May, residents of the small French city of Orléans woke up to stickers slapped onto light poles, park benches, and other street furniture. “Muslim-restricted area,” the stickers read — accompanied with crossed-out photos of headscarf-wearing women, bearded men, and figures praying. Below another text read, “A better world without Muslim [sic].”

The stickers, left-wing daily L’Humanité reports, included the URL of a recently jailed Normandy-based neo-Nazi. He was infamous for his T-shirts proclaiming, among other crass and racist things, “Refugees welcome” in the form of the entry gate to Auschwitz.

The stickering action was no isolated incident. Nor was it the most extreme. In the first three months of this year, seventy-nine Islamophobic hate crimes took place across France — an increase of more than 70 percent relative to the same period in 2024, according to the interior minister.

If this shift has accelerated in recent months — made all the more poignant by the fatal April 25 stabbing of Malian man Aboubakar Cissé in a mosque in Southern France — the country’s Islamophobia epidemic has much deeper roots. Such is the bad atmosphere for Muslims, it’s even leading to brain drain. That’s the main finding of a recently edited and rereleased book by three French researchers, La France, tu l’aimes mais tu la quittes (France, You Love It but You Leave It).

For three years, Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard, and Julien Talpin investigated the increasing numbers of highly qualified, well-educated French Muslims who have decided to leave the country for greener pastures — usually in more multicultural countries like Britain and Canada. The researchers interviewed more than a thousand French Muslims living abroad — nearly all of whom were born and raised in France and had French nationality — to identify the push and pull factors leading members of France’s largest religious minority (representing between 8 to 10 percent of the population) to leave the country in droves.

For most interviewees, it was not one moment, but a slow buildup of microaggressions and a generalized climate of Islamophobia that precipitated their decision to leave France. But French Muslims nonetheless recount painful individual experiences of discrimination.

After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks, college classmates bullied Yaël; one morning she awoke to the sound of two men peeing on the doorstep of her dorm room. Monia recounts how as a child, her neighbors circulated a petition to prevent her father, an engineer, from buying a house in the bourgeois outer suburbs of Grenoble. Yasmina describes her shock at being accused of shoplifting at the post office.

For some, like Sofiane, being Muslim in France is comparable to a form of “social death.” “When one publicly displays their religion . . . they can’t get housing, a stable job. We are obligated to hide in order to do something [pray] that we need to do every day,” he said.

It’s hard to estimate the total number of Muslims living outside of France, the authors explain, because the state does not keep statistics related to religion or ethnicity. Still, they calculate that as many as 200,000 French Muslims may be living abroad — most of them with no plans to return to France. “A French brain drain is happening in front of our eyes,” the authors write.

In the survey, Muslims were asked to identify their reasons for leaving France. Nearly three-quarters responded that it was to “suffer from less racism and discrimination,” while 64 percent said it was “to be able to more serenely practice my religion.” Many respondents decried the role of France’s mainstream media, which regularly runs segments aimed at sparking polemics over Islamic practices, such as the wearing of the headscarf.

Sihem, who lives in neighboring Luxembourg, pointed out the egregious double standard: “We are the seventh [economic] world power, yet people are dying from hunger in France. And all [the media] is interested in is whether [soccer star] Karim Benzema is going to sing the Marseillaise [national anthem]!”

Political decisions on the traditional Left and Right have contributed to the feeling of malaise for many French Muslims — about 70 percent of whom are estimated to have voted for left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the most recent presidential election. In 2015, amid the Charlie Hebdo and later Bataclan terrorist attacks, center-left president François Hollande proposed changing the law to allow dual citizens who had committed an act of terrorism to be stripped of their French nationality. The move — popular with the French public — nonetheless contributed to a feeling, for some of the French Muslims included in the study, of being reduced to second-class citizens whose nationality is contingent on exemplary behavior, the authors write.

Five years later, in 2020, Emmanuel Macron’s then interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, dissolved two anti-Islamophobia NGOs on grounds of “Islamic propaganda.” Darmanin claimed at the time that political Islam was an “enemy of the Republic” and that “communitarianism” (a negative term that denotes a lack of racial or ethnic mixing) needed to be combated “in all its forms.”

Macron’s current interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, has been no better for France’s Muslims. After the murder of Cissé in the mosque in Southern France, Retailleau waited two full days before visiting the scene of the violent crime. He refused to meet Cissé’s family on account of the slain Malian’s undocumented status.

A partisan of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which suggests that the higher birth rates of immigrants will lead to a dilution of French (white, Catholic) culture, Retailleau has been quoted as saying that France is experiencing “a submersion” of migrants. He didn’t wait long before moving ahead on a law aimed at banning headscarves at French universities and in sports competitions.

Under Retailleau’s watch, the number of Islamophobic hate crimes has skyrocketed. This wave has affected all of metropolitan France. In recent months, Celtic crosses were tagged on a mosque in Moulins, a dead boar was deposited on the doorstep of another near Dijon, and one mosque in Amiens was targeted with an arson attempt.

As Islamophobia rises across Europe — manifesting itself in the form of last August’s anti-Muslim hate rallies in the UK, a far-right takeover of the Dutch government, and the rise of anti-Islam movements like Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West) in Germany — the authors of France, You Love It but You Leave It suggest that in terms of Islamophobia there is nonetheless a “French exception.”

As Harrison Settler has written in Jacobin, mainstream French politicians are particularly unwilling to admit that France has a problem. This, the authors note, combined with the dismantling of groups aimed at bringing awareness (such as the Collective Against Islamophobia in France, or CCIF), has exacerbated the problem, giving French Muslims little recourse for having their complaints heard.

The authors of the study note that this collective denial, in addition to the obvious moral questions it poses, has meant a huge financial loss for the French state — to the tune of €150 billion in lost revenues due to discrimination.

“The people we met preferred to leave — to save themselves when it no longer felt possible to save France,” the authors conclude. “The goal of this book is to contribute to reopening that debate.”