How to become French?, or Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (part 1 of 6)

Mid-April 2015 we entered the prefecture in Mâcon in order to find out what exactly was needed to obtain French citizenship.

Préfecture - Mâcon

In the prefecture there is a special office for Naturalisations, there was no queue at the counter, and hence we were immediately dealt with by a very friendly lady. Just to be safe instead of sorry we had brought along our thick folder with "important papers". It helps enormously when one can actually show that an international birth certificate issued by Dutch authorities has a French text as well, and ask the French official whether this would suffice or not.

Folder with important papers

Fortunately the answer to the question was yes, and we finally went home with a long list of required official papers, and of other things we had to sort out. Two identical long forms had to be filled in, we had to pay legal dues, four pass photos (French style) had to be supplied, they wanted three envelopes addressed to myself and stamped, and further a wide range of papers of which the only one that might cause some problems was the declaration of good conduct. This is only issued in Dutch (and English) by the Dutch authorities, and hence it needed an official French translation.

French pass photos

After this my homework began. Most papers from the Dutch town halls could be obtained via the internet. A list with all my home addresses from my birth up to now gave a few more problems, but in the end I managed to come up with a list. I think that in the end I only guessed the house number of one of the addresses. The next problem was the list with all the employers I had worked for. But again, with the help of the testimonials I received over the years, this was not such a chore after all. I found an official (court) translator in Nîmes who could produce (and very quickly) a translation of the declaration of good conduct at a reasonable price.

Court translater

We only went back once to Mâcon to ask for some explanation of one of the questions, and after that everything seemed to be under control. The only thing we were waiting for were the papers from the Netherlands.
To be continued.
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