Treading on Eggshells - France - page 120

divided into three groups: there are the Parisians, who look down on the rest of the popula-
tion; there's the rest of the population, who don't consider Parisians to be proper French; and
there's Les Fonctionnaires , the civil servants who are feared and despised by both Parisians
and the 'proper' French.
Very few will have a bad word to say about Les Fonctionnaires in public - they are like the
old East German STASI, nobody wants to upset them and nobody really wants to talk about
them either or your file might disappear. There is this notion that should Les Fonctionnaires
go on strike then the country would be strangled, everything would stop; what it seems to
me hasn't been considered is that their grip on everything and their vicious use of duplic-
ate, triplicate, multi-departmental (accent on the 'mental'), labyrinthine, make-it-up-as-you-
go-as-long-as-it-causes-confusion modus operandi means that the country is already being
strangled - it is already practically at a standstill.
When we first moved to France we brought our existing car over and the process of having
it locally registered was painful, elongated and merciless, but in the intervening five years the
process had been changed. It was now much, much worse. Firstly, you needed to get a carte
grise (proof of French ownership) but our garage, despite importing cars regularly, wasn't
sure how to go about doing this. They weren't the only ones.
The garage suggested we should go through the DRIRE (Direction Régionale de l'Industrie,
de la Recherche et de l'Environnement), while on the other hand the Mairie (town hall) told
us to ring the Trésorie in Chateauroux. They moved us on to the Centre des Impôts, which
we visited, got something stamped and were then told to go to the Préfecture, which was
shut because it was a Monday. In the meantime, the DREAL (I'm still not sure who or what
they do) got involved and informed us that we couldn't get a carte grise without a contrôle
technique (MOT). The contrôle technique people wouldn't perform an MOT without a carte
grise . Don't worry, said the DREAL, we'll send them a letter (meanwhile retaining all our ori-
ginal documents). We then went back to the MOT people with the letter, that's fine they said,
but we still can't do a contrôle technique because you don't have a certificat de conformité .
Apparently, you can't get a certificat de conformité without a contrôle technique or the ori-
ginal documents, which were still at the DRIRE. The garage rang the DRIRE who insisted
that a contrôle technique had to be carried out and so it was. The garage then realised that
a contrôle technique was unnecessary as the car was less than four years old; it had taken a
month to get this far and the DRIRE or DREAL (frankly I'd lost the will to live by now) ad-
mitted their mistake. But, hey, what are you gonna do, they're fonctionnaires ? In reparation
the lady at the DRIRE promised to send us the certificat de conformité . Isn't that just doing
your job we asked? Yes. The certificat de conformité arrived, though it is now called an at-
téstation d'identité .
By this time the image of the admin branch of the Keystone Cops was running around my
head, I was seeing stars and we still hadn't got the carte grise - plus, we still had to visit the