A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to City Hall

Funny thing happened to me at city hall (la prefecture) this afternoon.

So I decided that I would go down to the foreign office and find out whatever happened to my residency permit, seeing how I applied for it in August and had received two letters asking for additional documents. After standing in line for almost an hour I finally made it to a window and informed the lady behind the glass that I had not received a notification letter, or any other letters asking for more documents, as is their wont. She checked on her computer to see if my card was ready, and sadly, and she did genuinely look sad, informed me that it still was not ready, and in fact they were waiting for just one more document, apparently Mika's birth certificate, the long form, showing that we are still civilly unioned (PACSed).

So I was quite pissed that they wanted more documents and I had not received the letter stating that. The lady behind the glass said, "well I will at least renew your temporary paper (récipissé)"; which was nice, because I heard another woman tell people they would have to come back the following day and would need a photo ID. So she gets up to get the blank paper and comes back to her seat and starts entering my details into her computer to print out the new temporary ID. But then looks blankly at her screen for a moment, and then looks up at me and says "I can't do anything for you". I was really not in the mood to hear that, I asked "what do you mean?". Then she asked me if I had submitted a naturalization application, to which I responded yes, thinking, every little thing trips you up. The lady behind the glass said "well the computer says that your application is invalid, I can't give you a temporary ID, in fact, I don't even need your partner’s birth certificate". I was becoming perplexed, so she showed me the screen which said in bold letters at the bottom of the screen, THIS APPLICATION IS INVALID, YOU CANNOT PROCEED.

So I asked her the obvious question, "Why not?" To which she responded in a typically bureaucratic way, but with a smile in her voice, “Because you’re French, I can’t issue a foreign residency card to a French citizen”. I stood there slack-jawed, and she asked, “didn’t you receive a letter informing you of the decision, which I had, but the language was so legalistic I was not exactly sure what it meant, and even if I had a strong hunch, I was not entirely sure when it would be “official” official. I told her that I was still waiting for the official announcement to appear in the French government journal (Journal Officiel) and in fact, I had sent an email to the Journal to find out when my announcement would appear and make it official. To which she replied, “it’s official, you’re French, I don’t know when you will receive your French ID, so be on the lookout for the announcement, they’re going to want to have a little ceremony”. And that is the story of how I found out it is official. I’m French.