A couple who moved permanently to the south of France after their wedding day discovered that what initially seemed like a great idea had turned into a nightmare.
Rachel Hosie said she and her husband moved to the Côte d’Azur shortly after getting married, hoping to make a home for themselves in the popular holiday region.
Moving in part because of her husband’s job, Rachel said that after she quit her job and the couple sold their Hampshire home, they made the nearly 1,000-mile journey by car and began laying the foundations of their new life.
With enough French to get by in both spoken and written forms, they hoped that setting up home wouldn’t be much different from doing so in the UK — but they were wrong.
Rachel said the main overarching problem with trying to set up life in France was the bureaucracy — bureaucracy over finding a house, bureaucracy over setting up a new WiFi provider, bureaucracy even over the daily bin collections.
All of this, Rachel said, created a level of frustration in their new life in a part of the world where temperatures regularly reach 40C in the summer.
Writing in the Times about how they felt soon after their arrival, she said: “It wasn’t long before we realised how naive that was. Honeymoon destination it may be, but life on the French Riviera isn’t all rosé by the sea.
“My husband and I speak passable French (for the average Brit), but that hasn’t stopped us feeling utterly out of our depth when it comes to bureaucracy and etiquette.”
Rachel added that the bureaucracy was so intense that they had taken to walking the streets with mountains of paperwork, just in case they were required to produce them.
She said: “We’ve been told it may take the best part of a year to get our cartes de séjour (residency permits), and then there’s the carte vitale for healthcare, carte grise for our cars, and various other cartes.
“We’ve taken to walking around with thick wads of documents, including our marriage certificate and my husband’s job offer letter, as we’ve been asked for them for everything from registering our car to registering with a doctor.”
Despite the bureaucracy, Rachel said she was glad she and her husband had made the move. She explained: “So, as I take the recycling out for the umpteenth time, I try to remember that there are worse places to start married life. But the bureaucracy? C’est terrible.”
Rachel isn’t the first British expat to highlight the negative aspects of moving to France, with one expat writing on Reddit about their discontent at living there, reports the Express.
User ‘k0zmina’ claimed on the platform: “Here’s the big problem with France: terrible job market, very little diversity, and limited new business creation.
“The country is very centralised, as most jobs and opportunities are in Paris. Then there’s the issue of employers choosing to discriminate against you based on which elite, expensive school you did or did not attend.
“Networking — who you know — is a huge deal! Outside of Paris, it’s true the cost of living is lower, but so are salaries and job opportunities.
“Ultimately, you have cheaper rent and apartments but very expensive groceries, technology, and electric bills, etc., because of taxes and other factors I won’t get into.”