EXPLAINED: How to use France's new online portal for citizenship

Since I’ve lived in France, I’ve by and large been impressed by the country's digital public services, especially compared with the US and UK, and that was also the case with applying for nationality using the NATALI online portal. 

Submitting my dossier was an entirely digital process using the new nationality portal. Since there are many pathways to apply for nationality (marriage to a French citizen, descent from a French person, and so on), the service-public.fr website has a special simulateur widget that helps you narrow down the pathway suitable to you.

There’s also a specific simulation that then provides you a list of documents based on your situation.

As a célibataire, full-time employed salarié US-UK dual national homeowner without children, born outside France, applying based solely on five years of residence with the special Brexit-flavoured titre de séjour residence permit, mine narrowed down a total 15 documents I needed to provide:

• Passport;
• ID photos;
• €55 in timbre fiscale;
• Titre de séjour;
• Birth certificate (plus approved translations);
• Parents' birth and marriage certificates (plus approved translations);
• Casier judiciaire and overseas equivalents (plus approved translations);
• House title (acte de propriété);
• Tax returns (avis) for 3 years;
• P237 bordereau de situation fiscale covering 3 years (available via the tax office);
• Certificat de travail (this is an attestation from your employer, in the standard format "I the undersigned, Mme X of company Y at address Z, certify that Mr A of address B with Sécu number C, is employed as with a CDI as a job title D since date E, and he’s not on any probation nor has he resigned) 
• Employment contract;
• Last 3 pay slips;
• Pay slips for November and December of the last 3 years;
• Language qualification to at least B1 level

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As it turns out I wasn’t asked for an ID photo — perhaps because I have an existing titre de séjour. Note that you will also have to input your every one of your home addresses over the last 10 years down to the specific day that you moved in and out, although no documentary evidence was required online.

Best to ensure that you have that information to hand, and I absolutely plan to bring a couple of bank statements, utility bills and similar to my assimilation interview.

The site also asked for a recent proof of address — the usual phone bill seemed to suffice. I found that the key to making this simple is collating all the information you’ll need and figuring out what accompanying documentation (or, indeed, in the case of the language tests, what exams) you can upload to provide it.

Tips for the process

You can either create a new login or use a FranceConnect login from another government service (such as the health service’s ameli.fr or the tax office’s impots.gouv.fr — I used the latter).

Pleasingly, this prefills all the information that the service already holds on you. I’m a millennial digital native with a reputation as a spreadsheet fancier, so I organised the process with a one-page spreadsheet to track the documentation. I also numbered each of the types of information, with a corresponding folder number on my computer, both for tracking and for the upload process.

That meant it took really only a few minutes to work through the submission site and upload my documents one by one. I plan to file the paper originals and printouts of these documents in a tabbed file when, fingers crossed, I’m called to the assimilation interview.

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I was very impressed by the uploading process: the site allows for multiple uploads at the same time (so you can select all of the payslips you’ve carefully put into a folder at once, for example) and file size limits are a very reasonable 10MB so there’s no need to resize your smartphone picture scans.

If you’re an iPhone user and have used your phone to scan pictures, they may be saved as HEIC files rather than JPGs. You’ll need to convert them (I used the Preview app on my computer) to upload.

I’d highly recommend having very clear filenames for your documentation, including translations — “certificat de naissance - mère - original”, “certificat de naissance - mère - traduction”, and so on — rather than leaving it as “IMG1234” or whatever.

I did this in French to make it as easy as possible for whoever reviews my file. Note also that where translations are needed that there is a separate upload button for translations.

I was glad that I’d had the foresight to add the word “traduction” to the names of these files!

Lessons learned

The time and effort in this process was mainly around squaring away my overseas documentation, which took a couple of months. Given that language exams are only held a few times a year, these is probably the first thing to arrange.

As someone with grade A French at A-level, who uses French on a daily basis in my local village, I popped over to my nearest centre for a morning of exams, and took the B1 level test. 

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Once you’ve booked in the language exam, start on your overseas documentation. This, especially from the UK, can be expensive, complicated and can take months.

(The UK’s police certificate website here is a particular shocker: it looks like it is a scam website, the processing time is outrageously slow and it only sends out physical forms. The French casier judiciaire version is free, online and immediate.)

By contrast, I found that securing every piece of French documentation, from the P237 form I’d never heard of, to the casier judiciaire police check that I’d never needed, all the way down to getting an electronic timbre fiscale, was easy, digitised, free and usually instantaneous.

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Do take a good look at example documents to understand exactly what you're being asked for before you apply for them from your country of origin, or where you may have lived over the past 10 years. For example: my parents’ marriage certificate from the UK didn’t include their dates and places of birth, just their ages at the time of marriage.

I found an excellent and very responsive local translator “agréé” (aka a translator “assermenté-e” or approved translator) from the official list of certified translators (provided). It is best to approach a translator at an early stage to ensure availability and check pricing.

They may also be helpful with some of the finer details of what documents are needed. Mine was happy to review, make minor edits to, and then stamp some earlier, non-agrée translations of several of my documents, which cut the cost somewhat.

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Overall, and certainly in contrast with the horror stories I’ve heard from friends applying for US and UK nationality, the process of submitting my dossier for French citizenship was simple, inexpensive and straightforward. If you're not a confident online operator, you might find the website slightly overwhelming, but there is a national network of digital help points if you’re concerned. 

Now, I wait... Wish me luck at the interview.

Next steps

Submitting your dossier online is step one of applying for French citizenship, a process that takes on average between 18 months and two years. Find the full process outlined HERE

John Walton is a joint US-UK national who lives in the département of Loire in central France. He works as a journalist specialising in travel and aviation and tweets as @thatjohn - find more of his work here