Professionals such as doctors, engineers, and lawyers could not practice their professions without having passed the relevant French examinations; other skilled and unskilled workers were forced into the shadow economy, if they could find work at all. The nostalgic evocations of emigrant cafés filled with cultivated men and women who had nothing to do all day other than read the papers and debate politics contained some truth, but many of those reading and debating were in fact enduring the enforced idleness of unemployment
