Computer says “non”

The French are proud of their bureaucracy. For Sophie Pedder, The Economist’s Paris bureau chief, dealing with it can be thrilling

By Sophie Pedder

My new colleague in Paris can’t understand all the fuss about French bureaucracy. He’s spent the past five years in India. If you don’t have to hire somebody to wait in a queue in order to find out what forms you need to fill in, before hiring that same person again to queue up with the forms once they have been completed, then the system is efficient.

It’s true that in some respects the French administration is admirable. In Britain, the summer for A-level students is routinely spoiled by the nail-biting wait for results. In France, the marking of the baccalauréat, the school-leaving exam established by Napoleon in 1808, is so swift that teenagers find out their grades within days of taking their final papers. An army of 170,000 examiners churns through the marking by the first week of July. Perhaps it’s no bad thing that French examiners value their holidays too.

But just as you are busy admiring the competence of la bureaucratie, along comes a reminder that the French invented a term that means, literally, government by desks. Recently, I went to the town hall to register my son for his military service. It’s not real military service – that was abolished in 1997. But teenagers still have to spend a day with the French army, mostly learning about first aid, as far as I can tell. If you don’t, you can’t sit the baccalauréat.

Before turning up, I checked on the French administration’s website to make sure that he didn’t have to go in person. It was clear: any parent can carry out the registration, as long as the child is under 18. So I took along the required documents – his French carte d’identité, the family’s carnet de famille – and arrived during the hours indicated on the town-hall website. The office was shut.

I tried again the next day. The office was open this time. Three women were sitting behind desks, looking reasonably cheerful. There was hardly a queue. It all seemed promising. When my turn came, I confidently handed over my documents. “Ah non,” the lady behind the desk replied. All children have to register in person, because they need to sign the application. “But it says on the website that it can be done by a parent,” I ventured, rather pathetically. “Oh we know it does,” she shot back, “but it’s not true.”

So I packed up my documents and left (and my son did his own registration on Saturday morning). But it reminded me of the time I had to swap my old British driving licence for a French one. This time the bureaucratic trail involved a visit to the préfecture. When I got to the front of the queue, armed with each document listed on the website, the same thing happened. “Ah non, but we don’t list everything we require online,” the woman stated. I thought I detected a note of triumph in her voice.

In that case, though, there was a sense of sweet justice about it. Once I had finally obtained written confirmation from the British driving-licence authority that I was still legally entitled to drive, and once I had got that letter stamped by a French lawyer, and once I had gathered proofs of residence and identity, I took my dossier back to the préfecture. The application was accepted, and a few weeks later I went to collect my French licence.

When I arrived, the woman behind the counter extracted the letter of authorisation from her pile, and stared at it. Something seemed to be wrong. She glanced up at me sceptically, and then at the document again. A colleague was summoned. The pair of them consulted the letter together, and scrutinised me again. I braced myself for the worst.

But then out of her drawer came a pink cardboard licence, with my photo and details. The woman unfolded the inside page, which lists the different categories of vehicle you are authorised to drive, picked up her rubber stamp, and vigorously started going down the list, stamping every category available. Heavy-good vehicles, articulated lorries, buses: you name it, I have official French authorisation to drive the lot. I was absurdly thrilled. As Adam Gopnik once wrote about living in France: “Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the Ile de la Cité feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and exhausted but on top of the world.”

ILLUSTRATION MICHEL STREICH

Discover more

1843 magazine | Djibouti, the port-state squeezed by the Houthis’ Red Sea campaign

While warships protect cargo, migrants trying to reach the Middle East are on their own

1843 magazine | How a trucker became a deadly people smuggler

Transporting undocumented migrants across America can seem like easy money – until everything goes wrong


1843 magazine | Tinnitus nearly drove me mad

I have had to learn to live in a world without silence