Foreign Perspectives

It sometimes seems that every aspect of French life needs to be documented and, for the most part, by documentation that doesn’t exist outside France.

When you move to France, you will continually be asked for your ID card which isn’t issued (yet) by the UK and quite often for your Carte de Séjour (residence permit) which, if you’re European, you’ve not been required to have for several years now. In the absence of those, your passport will obviously suffice and sometimes even a driving license.

The Livre de Famille or family book is given to those who marry in France and contains, in effect, the birth certificates of the couple and any children that they have along with the marriage certificate. Almost every contact you have with French officialdom asks you for this mainly because the French don’t issue birth certificates and the documentation that they issue instead is only valid for three months. In practice your own passport and the birth certificates of the children are the equivalent. Since the French documents expire, many people will assume that your documents do too and keep them as is the practice with the French documents; if you point out that they are certificates they’ll usually photocopy them instead.

Proof of address is obviously difficult to provide when you first move to France and in some circumstances later on too. To get around this, the French authorities will normally let you produce an “attestation” that states you live at your current address. The “attestation” is effectively a letter (in French) saying that you live there. Even the French recognise that it’s not always possible to prove that!

One oddity is that the French will often ask for the amount of income that you had in France before you came here. Now, for the majority of people the answer to this will obviously be “nothing” but that doesn’t stop the French using that information and paying you assorted social security benefits on the basis that since you didn’t earn anything in France, then clearly you didn’t earn anything elsewhere. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but they definitely pay out money on that basis. What I’m wondering is what they’ll do when we leave France as they can hardly charge us tax, social security and health insurance if we’re not here, although you never know with the French.

This is part of our series on buying a house in France.

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