Moving to France: You’ll Need Your Birth Certificate. Your Most Recent One.

Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash

“You will need your birth certificate,” she told me, reeling off a list of required documents.

I was at the Centre des Impôts, the tax office, which is a wonderful place to spend a morning (and you will, rest assured, spend the entire morning there), if you want to hone your French language skills, practice the art of negotiation à la Français, and stockpile some ‘things to râle about to your friends later’.

We were in the process of setting up my business and residency in France.

I slid the slightly dog-eared slip of paper across the table to join my passport, my proof of address, my social security number, and the five hundred other seemingly irrelevant documents that are required in France in order to do, well, anything that you might want to do (merci, l’Administration Française).

She glanced down at the hand-signed certificate that proudly bore the date and time of my arrival in the world.

“Non” she said, in that way that French administration workers are taught to dismiss your attempts at compliance without offering any hint of an explanation.

“Non?!”

“This is no good” she clarified, as if perhaps I had misunderstand the word no.

“Why not…?” I insisted. I’ve learnt by now that you do have to be quite clear in your requests if you would like a straight answer.

“It has to be your most recent birth certificate” was the response.

“Excuse me?!”

My most recent birth certificate? From my most recent birth?

Now, just in case there are any French people reading this, I want to make my confusion clear. Under British logic, a birth certificate is a certificate that is issued when a person is born.

It has important information on it such as your parents’ names, and the date and place of your birth… the kind of things that NEVER CHANGE and therefore, do not need to be updated.

Being as most people — aside from Jesus and, briefly at least, John Lennon — are only born once, you typically only get one birth certificate. Aside from undergoing gender reassignment surgery or being legally adopted, there are very few reasons that you would ever be issued an updated version of your birth certificate in England.

But it turns out, such is the French love of official paperwork, even your birth certificate gets a renewal date in France. In fact, if you need to provide your birth certificate in France (which you will if you want to get a visa, get married, sign a mortgage, renew your ID card, and, possibly, walk your dog) you will need not only your ‘most recent’ birth certificate, but a birth certificate that is less than three months old.

Which, incidentally, is just about the time it will take you to organize for said birth certificate to be signed, sealed, and delivered from the UK; be officially translated by a government-approved translator; and finally secure one of those elusive rendezvous with your delightful tax officer, just in time for her to glance down at it and conclude…

“Non”

It’s already a week too late. You’ll need to be reborn again.