address change

One Last Step Before Applying for Citizenship

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I’ve been following forums and Facebook groups more closely in the last few years, knowing I was going to be applying for citizenship soon. There are some areas of the country that have notorious reputations for that process. Montpellier, for example, has been known to have a five-year average waiting period from depositing your dossier to your interview. For some years Paris had a 18-24 month reputation, which all things considered, wasn’t too bad, and since I had spent the majority of my French life in Paris, I had set that expectation in my head for years.

But that changed with Covid and the dematerialization of the citizenship process.

Now, with the possibility of submitting everything online (you used to have to make an appointment and deliver everything in a folder in person, and if there was anything not satisfactory you were sent back to get it and had to make a new appointment), Paris was, by all reports, consistently tracking at 6-8 months, whereas the Department where I was living, Seine et Marne (77) was tracking at 18 months. Save a year by moving back to Paris? No brainer.

Except I didn’t end up saving that year, for what should have been the simplest of changes, but ended up being a nightmare instead.

For context, I’ve been dealing with the French authorities for more than a decade now, and have become so comfortable that I charge money for consultations and have written a book about how to move to France. But France always finds a way to humble those who think they have it all figured out.

Turns out, the nine-month delay (cutting into the 12-month savings I thought I was going to get by making the change to Paris) I ended up experiencing in turning in my citizenship dossier was held up by a dual address change, one for me, one for my business. Let’s start with the simpler one first.

Personal Address Change

Now I’m not talking about the regular “civilian” logistics of changing your address which include notifying your bank, etc. That’s covered in this article. This about an administrative address change, which is different from a simple postal address change.

So what’s the good news? There’s a dreamy new website that, while not perfect, makes the whole process of living in France as a foreigner so much easier. The Etrangers en France website allows you to:

  • Apply to renew your visa
  • Apply for French citizenship
  • Ask for a work permit
  • Apply for a new card because
    • You lost your old one
    • You changed your address
    • You’ve gotten married (or divorced)
  • You need a travel document (this is for people with special statuses, like refugees (TVE) or minor foreigners (DCEM)

So I put in for the address change and it took under five minutes to submit the form. My experience with the French told me it should take 2-3 weeks for them to process this.

Wrong.

I submitted in March 2023, hoping to pick up my card in May. Instead, in late April, six weeks after my initial submission, I messaged them, asking (with typical French politesse) if perhaps this had gotten stuck in the system somewhere. Within 48 hours, I was told that the change would be made. Just like I had done many years ago when I stuck a post-it note to a letter to the Carte Vitale folks, a simple short follow-up nudged my request out of the gears of bureaucracy into which it had fallen.

Sometimes it’s that easy.

So what followed was another four weeks or so before I got a text message saying that my card was ready to be picked up in early July. It would cost 25€, to be paid by fiscal stamp (also, now available online). But the problem was that I had to make an appointment the old-fashioned Hunger Games way: by waiting with a bunch of other people here when new appointments were released, and then hoping I snagged one before they disappeared within four minutes or the system crashed, whichever came first.

I spent weeks trying to get an appointment before I landed one in mid-September (this was, of course, influenced by the aoutiens in the administration, who I can’t blame for their preference, since I’m of the same persuasion), in which I was able to come in and get the card. 

Make sure to get the right kind of stamp! We were witness to someone who had bought a stamp for a French citizen to get an identity card, which is not the type of stamp you need as a foreigner getting an identity card. People looked on as he haplessly held his phone on high, trying to get a cell phone signal so he could buy the stamp online, a signal which is elusive inside the Police Prefecture on Ile de la Cite. Select “titre pour etrangers” in step 1 to avoid this dilemma.

So, that problem was solved, six months after the initial request. 

Why did this matter in the first place? Because part of your citizenship dossier requires a current CDS, and since I wanted to apply for citizenship in Paris, my new Paris address, in the 12th, needed to be on my CDS.

As this was going on, another struggle was happening concurrently, that of my business address change.

Business Address Change

As I explain to my Profession Liberale clients who ask, when you move from one residence to another inside France, the authorities consider that your business has “closed” and “moved” to a new location too. Since you’re a sole proprietor/trader, that makes a certain amount of sense.

But this means that you will be issued a new SIRET, because the old SIRET was tied to the now “closed” location, which has implications for your invoices and tax returns.

But that’s okay. I’d actually changed my business address twice before, when I moved from the 2nd to the 19th, and when I moved from the 19th to Moret-sur-Loing, where I lived until March 2023. There was a fairly straightforward paper form known as a P2. You submitted it, the wheels of bureaucracy turned, and about a month later you would receive an all-important Certificat d’Inscription, with your new SIRET. You can take a look at it here, if you’d like, but it’s no use filling it out as it’s a now-defunct form.

A current Certificat d’Inscription is necessary for your citizenship application if you hold a PL visa, as I do.

The problem was that the dematerialization scheme which had created the new website I alluded to above had created one for small businesses as well. Welcome to INPI Connect.

The website is not intuitive, but with some trial and error I found the section that related to changing my business address. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out the forms, and then I attempted to submit my form but the website kept refusing to accept what I thought was a legitimately “signed” document.

Enter the QES.

Qualified Electronic Signature (QES)

So in the past, the P2 form worked like most administrative changes. I filled it out, signed it, and mailed it in. The idea that someone else would want to change my business address for nefarious reasons was as ridiculous then as it is now.

But that didn’t stop the French from requiring a level of security on an electronic signature that, unless you work in law, you have probably never heard of. If you want to get nerdy, you can read more here.

As I kept trying to upload the address change document that I had hand-signed, the website kept rejecting it (I thought this was like Docusign, like most e-signature systems that I had grown accustomed to.). I dug a bit deeper and saw that they tried to offer some helpful advice, along the lines of, “if you don’t have access to a QES, simply use FranceConnect+, which allows you to do this easily.”

FranceConnect+

So, FranceConnect is an awesome system that allows you to use some other user name/password to a website of French bureaucracy to login. It cuts down on having to maintain multiple passwords and gives the French confidence that it’s the same person. 

For example, for my login to the Etrangers en France website, I consistently use FranceConnect and my login and password for the Department of Finance (taxes). 

FranceConnect+ is heralded as an even more secure, even safer version of FranceConnect. The only problem? To use it, a foreigner needs a CDS that has more than 5 years validity. Well there’s only one such card, the golden 10-year Carte de Resident. Despite having lived in France ten years at that point, I didn’t qualify for this service though I was reminded once again that I should have gotten my ten year card years ago.

Which meant that I had to find a private service that would give me QES access. Enter ZealID.

Now I should pause for a moment. These discoveries did not all happen in one day. As with any project in life, you run into a frustrating wall and then you can pick up your task again when you have time and emotional stamina to try to overcome that wall. So this period of trying to make an address change, finding out that each of the changes had to be certified by a system that the French government had deemed I couldn’t have access to, then having to find such a system on my own, then finding out the address change had to be done in a certain order, was not something that occurred over a period of days, but over weeks which stretched into months.

And remember, I had thought I was going to save all this time by applying in Paris. 🙂

Anyway, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about the ZealID folks. They only charge something like 40€ for five signatures (when I bought it it was 25€ for three signatures) and their software is intuitive and easy to use. There may have been a fist pump (or three) when the INPI Connect at long last recognized that I had uploaded a document with a valid QES and queued it for processing.

Now I ran into my second problem.

I had mistakenly thought that I could change my personal address and my business address in the same form. I was told, in typical pedantic French bureaucro-speak that I was obviously too much of an idiot to realize that I needed first to change my personal address with one form, then submit a second form closing my old location and opening my new one, related to my new personal address.

How I could have found that out when no instructions existed on the site didn’t matter. And what mattered was that I had an answer, so I could move forward.

I had to wait some weeks for that first form to be processed before submitting the second form. Which also took some time to be processed.

Here’s where the digitalization came back into my my favor. They no longer mail a Certificat d’Inscription to you. You simply need to go to this site, enter your new SIRET and download the document that is generated. It’s not a Certificat d’Inscription but it is accepted as an equivalent. It is an “Extrait des inscription.” This is analogous to US state websites where you can print out certain forms that are equivalent to articles of incorporation, which you may need to open a bank account. 

About ten days after that final form was submitted, my new SIRET was active and I printed my form. It was the 19th of December. I had started the address change process for both my personal and business addresses in March of that year.

Now I was ready to apply for citizenship, humbly reminded that even ten years of experience doesn’t prevent papers from getting caught in the gears of bureaucracy. But the citizenship application process is a story for an upcoming article.

The photo is of the stamps that I first bought when I moved to France in 2013. They, like the Paris metro tickets, are history now.

address change

Change Your Address, Change Your SIRET

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I’ve written in the past about changing addresses here in France.  In the United States whether you are dealing with the bank or the government, you simply assert that you have moved and give the new address.  In France, you must prove you have moved.  Some years ago I moved from my favorite address in Paris, in the 2nd, to my current quiet neighborhood in the 19th, and didn’t realize that my address change for my business would trigger a change for my SIRET.

What’s a SIRET?

A SIRET is a 14-digit number that identifies your particular French business.  It is made up of your SIREN and NIC.  The SIREN (Système d’Identification du Répertoire des ENtreprises) is nine digits and is permanent and cannot be changed.  The SIRET (Système d’Identification du Répertoire des ETablissements), however, depends on the number of establishments you have.  Each one will have a different SIRET.  Solopreneurs like myself just have one.

In 2016, when I first established my French business at my address in the 2nd, the NIC (Numéro Interne de Classement) which accompanied my SIREN was the identifier for the only “establishment” (location) of my company.  But when I moved to the 19th in 2018, the system “closed” the SIRET tied to the address in the 2nd and assigned a new one for my “new establishment” in the 19th.  The old number still appears in submenus in my URSSAF dashboard, for example, but for all intents and purposes I use my new SIRET and my new SIRET only when dealing with French bureaucracy.

When Do You Use a SIRET?

Your SIRET and APE (Activite Principale de l’Enterprise) should be listed at the bottom of every invoice you send. If companies in France want to make sure you’re legitimate and in good standing, they can look up your SIREN for free on Société (if you can’t get enough of these acronyms, I’ve got an article from when I first started my French business where you can score a few more).

Interestingly, the US equivalent to the SIREN, the EIN (Employer ID Number) is also 9 digits.  But it doesn’t change if you move.  Further, unless you are a publicly traded company, you won’t be listed in the free national directory.  However, you can easily search by name (and for free) on the Secretary of State website of the state that the company is incorporated in.  This search will give you the same type of information available on the Société search here in France.

Learn As You Go

The longer I live here in France, the more I see that I’ve learned about business practices the same way that I did in the US: by trial and error.  Native speakers don’t instinctively know how to start or maintain a business just because they speak the language.  So, be patient with yourself and continue upgrading your French so these aspects of your life in France become easier (at least in one way) or you’ll at least possess the ability to read the answers you find on Google.

Photo by form PxHere

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Change Your Address? Not So Fast!

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It didn’t seem that long ago that I penned an article explaining the few steps necessary to change your address.  So, as a “veteran” of the process, I thought it would be just as simple to do it again.  Not exactly.

The Post Office

As I did the last time I wanted to change my address, I showed up at La Poste with a copy of an EDF from my new address as well as proof of my old address.  The clerk helping me seemed fairly new to the whole process, and after 15 minutes of typing in my information, he asked his supervisor to certify the form, and the supervisor squints at the computer monitor and says in French, “Oh, sir, this is much easier to do at home on your computer.”  “Why would I do that at home, I’m already here,” I responded in French.  Then he did it.  The shrug.  “It’s better,” he said, and walked away.

No need to get upset, I thought.  I just walked home and went to the La Poste website.  I laughed out loud at the tagline it sported: “Simplifier la vie.”  Oh yeah, you’re making it really simple.  I clicked through to get to this page.  I clicked the 6-month option to find out that I was required to create a La Poste account to do this.  Remember to smile, I thought.  It’s just France being French.  I created the account, filled out the contract for the change, paid, and got a confirmation.  At the bottom of the confirmation, in fine print, it told me that I needed to take this printout, with a copy of my ID, to the post office, to certify the contract.

I looked at the Paddington Bear on my desk with disbelief, asking him to commiserate.  But, remembering where I lived, within a couple of days I duly showed up as required and two minutes after I got to the front of the line my contract was certified.  But, that was just my personal change of address.

INSEE

You might remember that I did a post on the alphabet soup of agencies that entered my life once I switched over to Profession Libérale.  The most important one is INSEE.  Their database serves as the clearing house for all the other agencies connected to your professional French life.  Your postal change of address is insufficient for INSEE.  You essentially need to do a professional change of address, using this exciting form.  Send that to INSEE, or if you’re like me and like to outsource things like this, you can simply ask your business accountants to file it for you before or after tax season.  For a fee, of course.

The Banks

I’ll start with the easy one first.  My French business bank is BNP Paribas.  I opened it post-FATCA, but I had been in France for years at that point and I had a working visa, so despite the extra forms I had to fill out as a “US person” the account was opened without question on my first visit.  Additionally, BNP Paribas has amazing tools (disclosure: I’ve done some contract work for them so I really got some insight into how tech-forward they are) and technology and it showed in this simple desire to change my address.

I was able to change my address inside the online banking suite within two minutes.  I was also able to change agencies.  I then ordered a new chequebook with my new address.  This all happened with zero friction and to be honest, a fair amount of (pleasant) surprise on my part.

Not so with Société Générale, holders of my personal bank account, and one of my very first “paperwork” experiences in France.  They required me to go to my original branch, in the 17th, with proof of my new address (EDF bill) that was from the last 90 days as well as ID, etc.  This only permitted me to change my address.  There’s no way to do it online.  “And, may I change my agency, too?” I asked in French with a smile, thinking, maybe it will be that easy.  “Non, monsieur,” she gravely replied to the lady who had dutifully stamped my address change dossier just moments before.  “You’ll need to go to that branch and request the change yourself.”  I laughed.  She was a bit bemused, but I gave her a smile and a bonne journée and out I went.

I live in the 19th now and there’s a Société Générale very close to my house, and I went there to request an agency change.  “You have to make an appointment,” the nice young man told me.  Of course I have to make an appointment, I thought.  It’s not like you’re my bank and have been for the last four years.  To be fair, this is simply politesse.  The new branch wanted to “get to know me” so they could serve me better, and to do that I’d need to come by, have a coffee, etc.  Fine with me.  I made an appointment and brought everything I thought I would need (and as usual, even stuff I didn’t think I would need) and fifteen minutes into our appointment he was on the phone with someone higher up asking about “US persons.”  I knew he was discussing FATCA stuff, but I was a bit puzzled as SG had been filing my FATCA paperwork for years now.  “I need you to bring your French tax return,” he said.  I handed it to him, from the pile of “stuff they may ask me for.”  “Okay, give me a week or so and I’ll get back to you.”  A week came and went.  No word.  I called and left a message.  No return.

I reached out to a banker I knew at my old branch in the 17th and asked her what the hold-up was.  She made a couple of calls and found out that the branch manager at the branch I wanted to transfer to didn’t want to accept an American into her branch.  The implication was obvious to me: she would have to do all my paperwork and be responsible for me and she didn’t want that merci beaucoup.  I laughed as the banker who had chased up the intelligence told me about her refusal.  “But you’re the same company,” I switched to English as I didn’t have the French to properly express my confusion.  “I know, I will talk to my branch manager to talk to her.”  That was four weeks ago, and even the friendly banker seems to have forgotten how to reply to my email.

I’ve decided to let it be.  There are only a few functions that require you to visit your branch (I’ve detailed a couple above!), and that branch in the 17th is in a lovely neighborhood, my very first one in Paris, and I can always find other useful things to do if I need to head out there.  But it’s just an example of two banks with differing approaches.  One, stuck in revered (and inefficient) Gallican ways, the other, daring to be a bit more Anglo-Saxon and customer-friendly.  One will receive my undisputed recommendation when friends ask where to open a bank account.  The other?  Well…let’s see if I ever get a call or email back.

As for that pesky French bank account question, I’ve been doing some research to get more updated information to you than I furnished in my previous articles here and here.  As an intermediate free solution with minimal paperwork, you could open a Wise Borderless account.  That will get you a euro-denominated IBAN as well as a free debit card so that you can start enjoying the privileges of a French/European bank account right away.  I’ve discussed Wise as an easy way to send or transfer money to France (I think it’s by far the cheapest way to send money to France) in the past but that assumes a European/French account to transfer funds to, and I wrote that article before Transferwise created their multi-denominational Borderless account (you can hold up to 40 different currencies), which is awesome (I have one as a backup in case anything ever happens to my French accounts).  Once my research is complete, I hope to have some updated options and scripts for you to carry into a bank with you to open your own French account.

In the meantime, remember to smile and consider: this is France.  This is how they do things here.  Love it or leave it 🙂

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