Madame R. is our immigration officer, the person helping us with the paperwork to get our identity papers. In France you need to carry identity papers as the police can ask for them at any time. But it’s hardly a police state. You can live here all your life and not be asked for papers except when you apply for a driver’s license, rent a place etc. It’s also true if you are outside of a big city you’ll rarely even see the police.
It's a cold morning when we set out and the rain is pelting the city when we arrive at the at the immigration office. We go into a tiny waiting room with a couple of chairs and a half filled water cooler and wait until Madame comes to get us. She greets us with a big smile and a cheery “Bon Jour.”
Unlike the existentially weary Kafka-esque bureaucrats one sees in the movies, Madame R. is a rather energetic woman with twinkling brown eyes and a pile of dark hair on her head. She’s wearing a colorful scarf around her neck and has a very fashionable short leather jacket hung over her chair. She escorts us into her office and we begin to learn our first really big lesson in working the bureaucracy.
Unlike the existentially weary Kafka-esque bureaucrats one sees in the movies, Madame R. is a rather energetic woman with twinkling brown eyes and a pile of dark hair on her head. She’s wearing a colorful scarf around her neck and has a very fashionable short leather jacket hung over her chair. She escorts us into her office and we begin to learn our first really big lesson in working the bureaucracy.
The French legal system gives new meaning to the word byzantine. It is a madman’s labyrinth of two thousand years of laws that have been added atop each other with few ever being removed. The rules are so many and so contradictory that no one really seems to know how to follow them. That means that the official you are dealing with, is trying to figure out what the rules are as much as trying to solve your problem.
Madame R. doesn't get many Americans needing papers so she is quite tickled that we have come for her help. It is I guess 'fraternie avec les etat-unis" but with little experience with our kind of request Madame has to resort to a shelf of thick black tomes. Sifting through them, she pulls one out and begins reading to herself.
This book is not a French law book so much as a cookbook full of regulations and procedures laid out as recipes for dealing with all sorts of situations. This cookbook approach gives a bureaucrat a lot of freedom within a strict set of instructions. If they make a good faith attempt to follow the rules they can do whatever they want. The goal is to produce a beautiful “dossier” that can be filed away and forgotten.
When Madame R. finds the recipe for us she begins to go through the check list of steps. She’s clearly taking her time deciding which ones she thinks are worthwhile and which ones are not.
Finally she says is that we will need three passport size photos of each of us. Well, no sooner said than done. I had taken passport shots of us and made about twenty tiny prints of each. We are down to the last ten. I hand the six little pictures to Madame R. who is pleased with our preparedness. Diane takes other papers out of her official looking, leather file case and offers them to Madame. But she Madame simply smiles at each offered paper and says something to the effect of, “don’t worry my dears, you are in my capable hands and you won't need that or that or that."
Yes, she is going to get us our identity cards and she's happy to do it.
That’s the big lesson. Every French official you encounter whether a train conductor, a Mayor or a bureaucrat like Madame R. needs to be approached in a certain manner because each can simply make something happen or not.
And the best way to get what you need is by following these three simple steps:
1 Establish that you are helpless and foolish. As in “We were supposed to go to the police but we tried and couldn’t find them.”
2.Ask them what they would do in your shoes. “What would you do in our place? The Mayor sent us to you. What are we to do next?”
3 Next just shut up and just let them work out the solution.
Madame R. has reduced the whole identity paper process to a few minutes of paper signing and sends us off to get a couple pages of financial information translated for our dossier.
Leaving her office with us she steps outside, gives us a big smile and looking up says, “The sky is beginning to clear. It will be a fine day.”
Photos and text © 2010 Steve Meltzer
So the question is, you have been up front with them that you are moving there in retirement or are you still working? Did you have to prove you had a certain amount of money for them to allow you to take up residence? Do you pay for medical in their system or do you have world wide health insurance from USA?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely upfront. Got a Competence and Talents card to work and told them about my American work. As for work in France who knows? If we ever get to that place we will speak to them.
ReplyDeleteYes we had to "prove" we had the money but I suspect that there were no accounts to go over our books. We have world wide insurance which is oddly cheaper then Us insurance. Down the road perhaps we will be able to buy into a Franch insurance /government coverage. We are a longway from that.