The existence of the left-periphery accounts for the availability of Hanging Topics, Dislocations, and Focus across languages. However, cross-linguistic persistence does not exclude differential rates of realization. Focus movement seems common in Italian (Bianchi 2013); it is rare in French, and restricted to only some of its varieties. The reason for the low rate of Focus movement in French relates to its competition with clefts. This is accounted for by the language’s prosodic constraints. French demonstrably disfavors pre-verbal stress, which discourages pre-verbal Focus movement, and favors the post-verbal focused phrase of clefts. Structural properties of languages account for the variable currency of cross-linguistically stable configurations.