I was wondering if anyone could advise me or has perhaps been in a similar situation ?
I have lived in France 15 years and have recently just got divorced here using a French avocat, as I have two children living here with me . I am a Uk citizen and was married in the Uk to another Uk national before we moved to France.
The divorce is now finalised and registered here on the Repertoire civile in Nantes but it says the following at the bottom on the divorce certificate;
I take this to mean that my divorce has to be registered in the Uk somehow , but I have contacted the British Consulate who can't help, I also rang the general register office of England and wales who couldn't help either !!
So how do i get my divorce recognised in the UK , surely if I ever wanted to marry again in the Uk there must be some kind of record ??
When we got married at a small English registry office, the registrar asked to see my birth certificate and my wife's passport and I asked whether she needed to see the divorce paper (in Norwegian). All of the documents got a glance which I would say would have been too short to read my wife's typically long Latin type name let alone three documents. We said what our dates of birth and so forth were. Witnesses did their bit, signing after our signatures and, exaggerating only very slightly, called 'next please' as though it was an NHS dentist. I was divorced because I said so and had a bit of paper and that was good enough. Sure, I have a couple of divorce papers to cart around in my files, but personally I think I've had enough of those games anyway, so perhaps I will never need them again.
My French birth certificate has, as mentions en marge, 1. that I got married in Scotland, 2. that I divorced in France, and 3. that I got pacsed - the last two also appear on my livret de famille. (This is why French people have to supply birth certificates less than 3 months old for official purposes) My British birth certificate is the same age as I am & perfectly valid, obviously. As for GB divorce paperwork? NADA, so I have to cart the judgement around with me & tell my life story, oh so TEDIOUS.
There is no such thing as 'registering a divorce' in the UK - I have asked the Embassy. Maybe that is why GB used to be (& for all I know still is,) the bigamy capital of Europe.
Under the EU-laws one can choose the (EU-)country in which the divorce will take place and this divorce will be recognized in any EU-country. What I would suggest however is to contact the town in which you married and ask if they can change the records, based on your final divorce papers.
Sorry being a french native living in France, I am a little bit out of topic on this one. But my ex-wife left me the 20th september. I saw nothing coming. We were trying to save furnitures for the last two years and she told me things were all right. But she just lied to herself and me by the same occasion.
I just discovered bad things who took me down more again. It’s been 3 months now, and I am just starting to feel a little better.
I left my parisian life to start a new life in Picardie on the Opale coast with her. She left with our daughter, I will see her every two week-ends and half of holidays.
Not a good year for me…
I am starting to process all of this and can sometimes imagine a future. So it will take time to turn the page, I know it. But the schock is now behind me.
You’re right Maxime - the shock and sadness will fade with time. My first marriage ended 25 years ago; about 5 years after this I met my second wife - she already had a daughter from her previous marriage, and we went on to have 3 more children together, and I was immersed, in my late 40s, in a new challenging but wonderful family life. The lesson is: not only does life go on after divorce, it might well get better!