page_title: Romani diaspora
section_title: France
hierarchical_section_title: Romani diaspora / Western Europe / France
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Lors du pèlerinage gitan, diseuse de bonne aventure aux Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer
context_page_description: The Roma people have several distinct populations, the largest being the Roma and the Iberian Calé or Caló, who reached Anatolia and the Balkans about the early 12th century, from a migration out of northwestern India beginning about 600 years earlier. They settled in present-day Turkey, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Hungary and Slovakia, by order of volume, and Spain. From the Balkans, they migrated throughout Europe and, in the nineteenth and later centuries, to the Americas. The Romani population in the United States is estimated at more than one million.
  There is no official or reliable count of the Romani populations worldwide. Many Romani refuse to register their ethnic identity in official censuses for fear of discrimination. Others are descendants of intermarriage with local populations and no longer identify only as Romani, or not at all.
  As of the early 2000s, an estimated 4 to 9 million Romani people lived in Europe and Asia Minor. although some Romani organizations estimate numbers as high as 14 million.
context_section_description: Romanies are generally known in spoken French as Manouches or Tsiganes. Romanichels or Gitans are considered pejorative and Bohémiens is outdated. The French National Gendarmerie tends to refer to "MENS" ("Minorités Ethniques Non-Sédentarisées"), a neutral administrative term meaning Traveling Ethnic Minorities. Traditionally referred to as gens du voyage ("traveling people"), a term still occasionally used by the media, they are today generally referred to as Roms or Rroms. By law, French municipalities over 5,000 inhabitants have the obligation to allocate a piece of land to Romani travellers when they arrive.
  Approximately 500,000 Roma live in France as part of established communities. Additionally, the French Roma rights group FNASAT reports that there are at least 12,000 Roma, primarily from Romania and Bulgaria, living in illegal urban camps throughout the country. French authorities often close down these encampments. In 2009, the government returned more than 10,000 Roma illegal immigrants to Romania and Bulgaria. In the summer of 2012, with mounting criticism of their deportation of Roma migrants, French key ministers met for emergency talks on the handling of an estimated 15,000 Roma living in camps across France. They proposed to lift restrictions on migrants (including Roma) from Bulgaria and Romania who were working in France.
caption: Fortune teller in the Romani shrine of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
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