How do you say Entrepreneur in French? According to Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post, you don't. Or at least you don't in France these days:

To anyone steeped in the thousand-year history of Anglo-French enmity...the highlight of France's presidential election campaign was surely the speech that Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right candidate (and now the very precarious front-runner) gave this year in London. Standing in the heart of London's financial district, Sarkozy heaped compliments upon his country's historic enemy. The British capital was, he said, a "town that seems more and more prosperous and dynamic every time I come here." More important, it had become "one of the great French cities." He understood, furthermore, that hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen had moved to Britain because "they are risk-takers, and risk is a bad word" in France.

How odd and tragic that the language and people that gave us the word "entrepreneur" (someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it) so excels at placing institutional barriers in entrepreneurs way and denies the inherent value of their defining characteristic- calculated risking-taking. The consequences for the French economy of such behavior is hard to understate:

With distinctly un-English passion (some things never change) he pleaded with them: "Come home, because together we will make France a great country where everything will be possible, where fathers won't fear for the future of their children, and where everyone will be able to make their plans come true, and be responsible for their own destiny."Unfortunately, it seems that even a Sarkozy victory in the final round of voting on Sunday won't persuade all of the 2 million-plus French exiles to go home. Asked by a French polling company, TNS Sofres, "Are you satisfied with your life abroad?" 93 percent of French emigres surveyed recently said "yes." Asked, "When do you expect to return to France?" 25 percent answered "never."

But Royal too knows that no country can afford to lose 2 million of its most able and enterprising citizens.

Countries such as Poland and France may soon be forced to scrap those regulations and taxes that hamper employment, however much the French unions and the Polish bureaucracy want to keep them: If they don't, their young people won't come home. Leaders in those countries may also have to alter their rhetoric. Sarkozy's Socialist opponent, Segolene Royal, now uses words such as "entrepreneurship" at least some of the time, too.

Should she win, Ms. Royal should use it more, and follow the words up with deeds if she hopes to avoid hearing a million or so more "Au revoirs" minus the "a demains."