diff --git a/spacy/lang/fr/tokenizer_exceptions.py b/spacy/lang/fr/tokenizer_exceptions.py
index 997a81534..b0f188278 100644
--- a/spacy/lang/fr/tokenizer_exceptions.py
+++ b/spacy/lang/fr/tokenizer_exceptions.py
@@ -423,5 +423,5 @@ _regular_exp.append(URL_PATTERN)
 
 TOKENIZER_EXCEPTIONS = _exc
 TOKEN_MATCH = re.compile(
-    "|".join("(?:{})".format(m) for m in _regular_exp), re.IGNORECASE
+    "|".join("(?:{})".format(m) for m in _regular_exp), re.IGNORECASE, re.UNICODE
 ).match