June 4, 2025
Welcome to the seventh and last entry in my Holiday in Sicily series. Here we are. The full eruption. It’s no coincidence I’m writing this from Sicily, flying back over Etna’s crater. I call it Mafia, and I’m a quarter Italian, so I get a pass. But this isn’t a vendetta; it’s a reflection. And yes, I love my lab, I love my job, and I know how incredibly privileged I am. Tenure with no grant pressure, no publishing quotas. Most researchers land a permanent job after one or two postdocs. Then you’re a civil servant—and short of criminal activity, you can never be fired. Sounds amazing, right?
People warned me: the French academic system is incredibly closed. I didn’t fully understand what they meant until I saw it. Take my lab: many people come from the same advisor or their academic offspring. Me? I’ve been called “the American,” even though I’m French and did my undergrad in France. I just spent a few years abroad: four in the UK, three in the US. Someone once told me not to speak English in the coffee room, “We won’t hire internationals otherwise.” Not a joke.
More broadly, coming back to France was a cultural shock. I missed the COVID-era chloroquine debates. I wasn’t prepared for the hijab discourse. Bias here is subtle but pervasive, and you don’t realize how saturated the environment is until you’ve seen the outside world. Most people haven’t, I can’t blame them. It’s a bit like Russia (an extreme comparison, I know): if you’ve never left, it’s easy to believe the system around you is just how things are everywhere.
It wasn’t easy to infiltrate the Mafia. But I finally got in two years ago. Today, I’m a permanent researcher at Inria, i.e., a civil servant for life, and I also hold a teaching position at École Polytechnique as a Professeur Chargé de Cours. I landed my dream jobs, and I’m genuinely grateful to those who supported me along the way. Now, let’s dive into the different types of positions and how the Mafia protects its own.
The French academic Mafia operates through two main channels: CNRS and Inria. These are the elite research-only positions. There's also the Maître de Conférences (MCF), the backbone of university teaching. A few new positions exist, such as CPJ, Chaires de Professeur Junior, but I won’t go into those here.
These are the top research roles in France:
This is the standard university role: 192 hours of teaching per year, plus research. The pay is low, the teaching load heavy, and the conditions aren’t great, often at underfunded universities, with little support and students who struggle. It’s an unappealing option compared to the research-only tracks.
Let me now explain how you get made in the French research Mafia. The CNRS process is mostly the same as Inria’s, with a few small differences.
Let me illustrate Step 3 with actual data. What’s nice is that, for all these civil-servant jobs, the final rankings are publicly available online. The table below shows the number of visible re-rankings, i.e., candidates who changed positions between oral and final results. This does not include people who disappeared entirely from the list (likely because they accepted other offers). Coincidentally, these re-rankings tend to happen for the very last available spot. How convenient!
| Inria Center | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saclay | [N/A] | 1 | 3 | 0 |
| Paris | [N/A] | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Bordeaux | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| Nice | [N/A] | 1 | 0 | 1 |
It’s closer to the UK/US model but with very French twists:
They will almost never hire someone they don’t already know; after all, it’s a job for life. They often prefer someone who isn’t too strong academically or too independent, someone they can assign the least desirable teaching duties to, who won’t outshine anyone. Especially not the local CNRS stars; imagine having 192 hours of teaching and still publishing more than them. Localism is officially banned, of course, but it happens quietly. It’s more about placing your former PhD student into your Mafia cousin’s lab. Cozy, isn’t it?
Once you’re in, life is good. Work-life balance here is genuinely amazing. The two-hour lunch break is widely observed, and I use it to play sports every day. But even with all these perks, I still find it hard to fit in sometimes. Let’s be honest: expectations are lower than in the US or UK, mostly because we only compare ourselves to each other. There’s a persistent myth that we work less but better, that it’s not about how long you work, but how well. Uhm, sure.
In theory, the work week is 35 hours. In practice, it's closer to 30. People take 45 days of vacation a year (yes, 45), and most of July and August the lab is completely quiet. May is a minefield of public holidays: sometimes you show up to an empty building. Many researchers only come to the office two or three days a week (Inria officially allows three days of remote work). The culture is protective of its time, which is great, but also deeply suspicious of productivity. Publishing a lot raises eyebrows: you must be faking it, or worse, making others uncomfortable.
One colleague told me, straight-faced, that publishing 12 papers per year for five years was “impossible.” I just blinked. But that’s not even an extreme case, in the US or UK, people routinely manage that. They supervise four PhDs, three postdocs, maintain multiple active collaborations; 60 papers in five years is tough, but totally reachable. It’s doable when the ecosystem supports you and expects you to aim high. Another time, someone told me they were going to delay submitting a paper until after Christmas because they had already submitted “too many” papers that year, and any more would be badly perceived. Apparently, being too productive can get you in trouble.
I think part of the disconnect is that I got lucky. Throughout grad school and after, I was supervised by and worked with people who were not only extremely bright but had an incredible work ethic. The kind of people who get up early, think hard, follow through, and hold themselves to very high standards—not because of some external metric, but out of sheer intellectual drive. That energy shaped me. It’s hard to forget what intensity looks like once you’ve seen it up close.
That’s why I find the expectations for PhD students here so strange. No paper? Average. One paper? That’s considered very good. Two? Excellent. I don’t understand why we’re even putting number barriers like that, it only creates complacency. I’ve met incredibly strong PhD students throughout my career who published much more than that and weren’t obsessing over metrics, just genuinely pushing boundaries. Here, I’ve literally heard second-year PhD students say at the gym, “I’ll have a paper soon,” as if they were done and could coast for the rest of their PhD. It’s baffling. And let’s talk about hours. Most students show up to the office late and leave early. What a shock. At Oxford, people worked incredibly hard. And Columbia? Oh my god, 8am to 8pm every day, weekends included. I’m not saying we need to glorify burnout but we do need to acknowledge that deep work requires time and intensity. That’s just reality.
Meanwhile, over here, with a 35-hour work week, nine weeks of vacation, and a proudly unobsessed attitude, it’s not surprising that we live in a bubble. A well-catered one, yes—but a bubble all the same. Most people here don’t even know what’s considered normal elsewhere.
I couldn’t not mention French administration. As civil servants, we deal with it constantly and its rigidity is part of daily life. I used to think all bureaucracy was terrible. Then I left France and realized: French admin is uniquely dysfunctional.
Take letters of recommendation for MCF. When I called HR because I didn't know what the rule was, the person on the line said, with a condescending tone, “By law, you can’t submit letters of recommendation. Period. I can’t help you.” It was astonishingly unhelpful—and frankly, dismissive. Not to mention that reimbursements for conferences or payments for extra teaching hours can take anywhere from three to five months and that very same HR can't be bothered to speed it up.
Hiring an intern at Inria is a full-blown bureaucratic saga. The secretary told me: “You must send the hiring request at least two months in advance.” Why? Because seven different people have to sign off, and each signature takes about a week. Two full months to rehire someone we already knew—a brilliant student from our Master’s program and a former intern of mine. But because he’s on the autism spectrum, the delays were especially stressful and hard for him. No one at Inria seemed to care. Thankfully, Corinne Chen, the secretary at ENSTA, helped us bypass the system and hire him through a different channel. She’s incredible, and I’m terrified at the thought of her retiring soon. She’s spent her life fighting her own kind of Mafia—the patriarchy. She reminds me of my mother: a strong woman who raised five kids on her own. (Funnily enough, as I write this, the Inria secretary just emailed me to say the books I ordered back in November finally arrived—a month ago. But someone still needs to stamp and catalogue them, and that hasn't happened yet. Classic.)
French admin isn’t much better outside of work. My carte vitale (national health card) took four months. A passport photo was rejected while I was applying in person because the date printed on the sheet was from 13 months ago, just over the official 12-month limit. I cut the date off with the clerk’s scissors—“Voilà!”—but she simply replied, “They’ll know.” I asked how. She said the government can track photobooth systems. Honestly, go touch grass.
The real issue isn’t the rules themselves, it’s the robotic, blind enforcement of them. On the road here, no one follows rules: bikes run red lights, cars never stop, pedestrians cross wherever they want. In admin, it’s the opposite: zero flexibility.
The ground has stopped trembling, the lava has cooled, and the ash has settled. In the stillness, it’s easier to see the landscape for what it is. Scarred, yes, but fertile too.
I don’t blame them. Most people haven’t seen how it works elsewhere, and maybe it’s better that way. But we can do better. The Mafia is strong but not unbeatable. Despite all this, I still believe in the French system. We’re not obsessed with metrics. We don’t treat academia like war. Most of us just want to make good math, good science. Let’s keep that spirit but show up a bit more, stay open to the world, and realize how privileged we are.