What’s it really like to move to France post-Brexit?

The price of pain au chocolat? Painful administrative procedures, according to Anna Richards. She charts the emigration journey in all its gory detail, from the vicious cycle of getting a housing contract without a visa to passing an integration test, now the UK’s freedom of movement in the EU has come to an end

Lyon life: emigrating to France has become a whole lot more complicated (Getty/iStock)

I timed my move to France impeccably. September 2021: a few months too late to be eligible for a withdrawal agreement residence permit. It was also a time when no one, staff at the visa centre included, knew what to do with Brits looking to flee across the Channel. But life crises are rarely scheduled, and when my father died in June 2021, I dealt with it in a completely rational way – by quitting my job and chasing my dream of living in France as a writer.

It wasn’t the first time I’d lived in France. As a student, aged 20, I’d lived here for six months, and the move really had been as simple as getting on a plane. No paperwork. No red tape. Not even a passport stamp to indicate I’d ever been there. But this time around, the bureaucratic landscape became a barely navigable mass of red tape that I imagined like laser lines in an action movie, crisscrossing to form an obstacle course I needed to somersault over and limbo under.

Anna decided to chase her dream of living in France (Anna Richards)

But despite this, I’m not alone in my desire to flee the country; a survey conducted by the Byline Times earlier this year found that half of Brits would prefer to live abroad. Roughly once a week I’ll get a message from someone, often another freelancer, asking me how I moved to France. The answer: with great difficulty, getting everything wrong in the process, and a considerable dose of luck. Here’s the reality of moving to France post-Brexit, and how it differs from my first experience in 2013 – I hope you can learn from my mistakes.

Breaking the vicious circle

It’s le serpent qui se mord la queue (the snake that eats its own tail), as the French put it – or a “vicious circle”, as we would say. The first and most significant hurdle you’ll face is no visa = no housing contract, but no housing contract = no visa.

I arrived in France on a three-month tourist visa, during which time I had the good fortune to meet my housemate, landlord and one of my future best-friends-to-be. He was happy to offer me a house contract on the assumption that I would obtain my paperwork, and the cycle was broken. If Lady Luck doesn’t smile on you, try to find a French friend who can act as a guarantor (stating on your visa application that they’ll house you if you get into financial difficulties). Did I need a visa for my house in France in 2013? No, I did not.

La vie en rose: the red tape was worth it for Anna to start a new life (Anna Richards)

The money

Save, save and save some more; France don’t want no scrubs. If you want to hop the Channel as a freelancer, you’ll need to prove that what you’re doing is economically viable and that you’re earning at least the equivalent of minimum wage. As I was just launching my freelance career, I needed to prove instead that I had roughly €12,000 saved for the year, but that was with a house contract. This can rise to €43,800 if you have no fixed accommodation, or €120 per day. (It’s lucky that this wasn’t the case in 2013, as a student who lived permanently in my overdraft.)

The integration process

Once you arrive in France, you’ll need to validate your visa online. Then you’ll be called for mandatory medical checks (including a lung scan), and you’ll need to provide your full vaccination history. There’s a French language exam too (my UK degree certificate wasn’t accepted as proof of my proficiency). If your level of French isn’t deemed sufficient, you’ll be enrolled in compulsory French language classes, a la Emily in Paris.

France remains beautiful, even if the paperwork doesn’t (Anna Richards)

This is followed by what I affectionately refer to as visa school – where you devote several full days to learning about what the French immigration service deems to be of importance currently. Friends here who went through the process a decade ago tell me it used to focus on the history of cassoulet and naming which Louis ascended the throne in which year, but now it’s largely sermons on contraception and consent. Quizzes on French culture would have been a fun night at the pub with your mates in a pre-Brexit world, but now they’re a key part of the integration process.

Still want to jump ship? Here are my dos and don’ts.

Do

• Supply far more documentation than you think you need to support your visa application. Got friends and colleagues in France? Get them to write character references for you, the immigration service loves this
• Allow extra time. Even if you supply all the required documents, the French immigration service loves to ask for more, often obscenely obscure
• Print everything. Twice. It’s normal that your visa application weighs the same as a killer whale; if it doesn’t, you should be concerned
• Take a good book to the TLS (visa application) centre and prepare yourself to settle in for the long haul

Don’t

• Google your symptoms. Online visa groups can be helpful, but participants are not professionals and are largely speaking from their own (limited) experience. An online visa group managed to convince me I was a criminal who’d be banned from the Schengen area, and it took hiring an immigration lawyer to convince me otherwise
• Try to change visa types outside of your native country. I fell foul of this one; if you’re changing your visa type (eg, salaried to freelance), you’ll need to return home to do it 
• Give up. To use a very high-brow quote from Emily in Paris’s Mindy, “France is beautiful but illogical.” The illogical refers to the admin, the beautiful is everything else. Persevere and it’s worth it

Use the visa wizard to find out which visa best suits your situation