Our French Wedding

This week we celebrated our 5 year anniversary

Photo by Sylvain Le Lepvrier

It wasn’t a huge surprise that organising a mariage in France required excessive amounts of paperwork. The file is called a dossier and if you’re getting married here I suggest you add an ‘admin fee’ line into your budget. We needed an appointment to obtain the list of necessary documents and an appointment to submit them, plus everything must be less than 3 months old when you submit it, so once you start the process you’re on the clock to get it all together before time runs out and you have to start again.

I married on a foreign passport and my husband was widowed with a child so there were emergency trips to the Australian Embassy (for expensive apostille stamps and declarations that I was not secretly already married) along with countless birth, marriage and death certificates. As the days ticked by our emails to the translator became more and more desperate as everything must be submitted before you can secure the date for the civil ceremony.