I have recently moved to France (the Pyrenees) from the UK - within the last month.
Today we sign a year long lease for an appartment and with proof of address sorted, I am keen to apply for my Carte de Sejour.
My husband has EU citizenship, and we are both self employed (we own a small UK-based business).
I have been scouring the French govt websites, Youtube, this forum, etc to try and understand:
Does my husband need to apply for a Carte de Sejour before I can apply for one? I swear I read this somewhere but perhaps it was a hallucination!
If he doesn’t NEED to does it still make sense that he will apply/we can apply simultaneously? He seems to feel he doesn’t need one but I am inclined towards having paperwork in order.
Welcome Eve…My (EU citizen) wife and I (a Brit) have discussed this issue several times. She has NOT applied for one. She thinks the only possible advantage of applying is that you have an easily recognisable (to French authorities) form of French ID if you don’t fancy showing your passport whenever ID is needed, which has been relatively rare to be honest. I don’t think she relishes the inevitable amount of paperwork required (some 25+ documents for a renewal for example) unless it proves essential to have one, which it currently isn’t.
There are some others. For example apps that are being rolled out that require a French ID, the Carte Vital app and La Post numeric ID to name but two. Perhaps in the future these and others will accept non French IDs but if you want to use them now one is required.
I was surprised that not while actually needing one, I could still get one. Getting it was a doddle and it’s valid until 2034, so I suspect I won’t be bothered about a renewal.
It’s also sort of nice to have, it completes the circle started with my first CdS in August 1981.
In order to use FranceConnect+ those of us sans papier (or whatever you would call it now, dematerialized) will probably need to go through the bother and get a CdS.
I have heard of cases where an EU citizen has gone through the bother of uploading umpteen documents to ANEF and then been rejected, saying basically “You don’t need this- don’t bother us”, when in fact, you DO, or will need a CdS in order to transact digitally with the man.
It’s going to be my winter project- I have just done a version of this to get my wife a CdS as spouse of an EU citizen (me), so its basically the same stuff.
And, btw, they can’t reject requests for these by EU citizens- it is provided for in EU and French law.
I didn’t see anything indicating that you could sign up at a post office. It’s all done on the app itself. It redirects you you to an online application that reads your ID, holograms and all and takes your photo, face on and three quarters, and then verifies it, which takes a few hours, so maybe human intervention. If the verification fails I think you can trot along to the post office and they’ll verify the Id for you. But basically the application is via the app.
It’s rather like the UK ID Check app (which is a cool bit of S/W) or EU Login.
I’m sure it will all be sorted out in due course. Validating a passport vs a French ID will probably require different technology. The slick UK ID Check app used my phone to scan the biometric chip in my UK passport.
So rather than wait I just got the CdS. It wasn’t too onerous.
PDF downloaded ready for my application this week. Appreciate it!
