Foreign Perspectives

The ongoing saga of the residence permit continues…

A little over a week ago we called in to the mairie to see what they’d received from the prefecture. Well, it was a document listing a whole heap of documents that they required me & Wendy to provide before they would give us the residence permit. It was illegal under European law for them to ask for every single one of the documents that they wanted! No surprise there really as they’d previously told us that European law doesn’t apply in France.

Anyway, we pointed that out to the poor girl at the mairie who, once again, called the prefecture for us and pointed out that we had applied for a European residence permit, not an “ordinary” one and that they were breaking the law by asking us to provide them with those documents. We also said that we wanted an appointment with them to sort this out properly; Muriel was to call us back the next day. That was a week ago.

In the meantime, we thought we’d drop the SOLVIT people a line to see what they could do. August isn’t a great time to do anything in France as most places are closed but we received our first reply from them today so, who knows, perhaps we’ll get the permits this month after all.