Scientific researchers across France have voiced solidarity with their American colleagues by joining the "Stand up for Science" movement, protesting against massive budget cuts and what they say is 'sabotage' by Donald Trump's administration.
Under the banner "Stand up for Science France", a collective scientists held several demonstrations and conferences in cities across the country on Friday in support of similar events organised in the United States.
The "Stand Up For Science" movement is calling for an end to censorship, the protection of funding and the rehabilitation of researchers who have been brutally removed from their work since Donald Trump came to power.
Mass firings and sweeping cuts overseen by Trump's senior advisor Elon Musk in recent weeks have targeted research in a range of areas including climate and health.
"Science has become a target," prominent French climate science researcher Valérie Masson-Delmotte told French news agency AFP.
"Today I am talking about obscurantism: making scientific knowledge inaccessible and spreading disinformation. All of these attacks are of an unprecedented gravity in a democracy".
Freedom of speech curbed
In an interview with Franceinfo on Friday, Delmotte said that academics' freedom to communicate had been severly curbed, which was a form of "sabotage to the detriment of American society ... and scientific progress in the world."
"Researchers from federal agencies – the equivalent of the CNRS in France for example – are banned from exchanging with colleagues from other countries," she said.
She gave the example of NASA's chief scientist, Kate Calvin, co-chair of Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who was banned from participating in the last plenary session of the IPCC last week. "She was also banned from speaking to the press and her support team has been dismantled," Delmotte says.
Delmotte was one of many French scientists who published an editorial in Le Monde on Tuesday with the title "Defend science against new obscurantisms".
The signatories insist that the US brutal budget cuts were already directly affecting society and would affect international cooperation and data sharing.
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For example, hundreds of scientists and experts have been fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a leading US agency responsible for weather forecasting and climate analysis, Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman said last week.
In response, France's Aix-Marseille University announced a new programme this week to welcome scientists who "may feel threatened or hindered" in the United States and want "to continue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom".
University president Eric Berton told AFPTV that he would have preferred to not to have had to issue this "recruitment call".
"The risk these researchers face is that their projects will lose funding and that they themselves – if they are foreigners – will have to return to their home countries," he said.
Scientists afraid to speak out
"It is a real danger," he emphasised, particularly for academics who work on "sensitive subjects such as the climate, social sciences and the humanities in general".
Berton said his university could not take in everyone, adding: "I hope we can launch a national movement".
The university's "Safe Place for Science" programme will provide upto €15 million that can accommodate around 15 researchers over three years.
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French astrophysicist Olivier Berné, a researcher at the CNRS, says he has received anguished testimonies from some of his American scientific colleagues.
"Already, for a certain number of them, they are afraid to speak out," he told Franceinfo.
"They are afraid of losing their jobs. We do not realise at all in France what is happening in these circles. In the United States, there is an extremely strong attack on the scientific world. Donald Trump has announced that people who go to demonstrations on campus could be thrown in prison or expelled from American territory".
"There is also an attack on data with a pure and simple suppression of access to data concerning climate studies," the scientist underlines.
Asked about welcoming US scientists, France's higher education and research minister Philippe Baptiste said it was necessary to "strengthen" existing systems for international scientists.
"But this discussion must also take place at the European level," he told the French parliament, lamenting budget cuts by the Trump administration that were "contrary to scientific consensus".
