Applying our new measure of functional load to the French lexicon reveals that the apparent differences observed using more classical methods such as minimal pair counts or information entropy, are likely due to factors that our new measure precludes. Indeed, phonotactics may play a large role in this. The low functional load of the place feature, according to the entropy measure, is in part explainable by cluster restrictions, both word initially, and word internally. Indeed homorganic obstruent clusters such as /pf/, /ts/, /bv/ or /dz/, in addition to geminates, are either very rare or non-existent in French.