Science has been making headlines in France's newspapers, but not for the reasons that some might like. Laboratories are suffering from brutal and indiscriminate cuts by the centre-right government, which has lopped as much as a third off some labs' budgets. Whatever the government's economic predicament, these cuts and the resulting job losses are sending the wrong signal to the young minds that French science badly needs to attract.

No wonder scientists are livid. Electoral pledges by President Jacques Chirac last year had left them expecting research to be a national priority, with annual spending being hiked from 2.2% of gross national product to 3% before 2010, in line with goals agreed by European Union heads of states (see page 6). Claudie Haigneré, the science minister, is sympathetic to the scientists' plight, and recently won a reprieve from a further round of cuts. But the best she can probably hope for is that a vague promise by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will lead to a better budget next year. What irks many is that the nation's scientific and technological fabric appears to be being sacrificed to pay for populist electoral promises such as tax cuts and a dubious spending spree on the police.

The critics have a point. The science-budget crisis is a symptom of an increasing political disengagement over recent decades. Now the ship is adrift without a captain. Substantial progress demands a renewed and sustained political commitment, and a new contract between science and government built on mutual confidence. Scientists themselves must shake up the bloated and bureaucratic French science system, so that it provides clearer goals, flexibility and cost-effectiveness, and responds to the aspirations of young scientists.

This will require strong and constructive contributions from all stakeholders, including the trade unions and a new and positively inclined generation of research leaders. Haigneré is contemplating a radical reform, transforming the country's large research organizations that run their own laboratories, so that they play a greater role as research councils, funding autonomous laboratories through competitive peer review. None of her predecessors succeeded in pulling this off, often because they tried to transpose and impose superficially appealing Anglo-Saxon models without taking into account the cultural realities of the French system.

Adopting what works well elsewhere would liberate French scientists from stifling centralization. Encouragingly, Haigneré seems to appreciate that change will require careful thought, as France's weak university system is in no fit state to manage the country's laboratories — progress may require a hybrid system involving the research organizations. She is in an unenviable position, but seems to have a sincere desire to listen, and to seek constructive ways forward; scientists and their trade unions should work with her, not against her.

But researchers can only do so much. Meeting the challenges of twenty-first-century science in France requires political leadership that is currently lacking. No French politician since has matched the powerful vision of the role of science and technology pioneered by Pierre Mendès France, who led a Socialist government in the early 1950s, and General Charles de Gaulle, who returned to power in 1958. Despite the competing demands of the need to build the social- security system, and fighting wars in Indochina and Algeria, France's governments of the time turned that vision into an unprecedented expansion of science, taking France and Europe to the leading edge of molecular biology, space and nuclear technology. France, under Chirac, now has a similar opportunity — and for the sake of its and Europe's international status in science, France must take it.