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)