This is a little story about an interaction I had recently with “le Millefeuille administratif” that I just had to share. As a Brit living in France, when you reach the age of 70, you must give up your UK licence and swap it for a French one. The process is theoretically simple : complete an online form, send them a photo and your new licence will be posted out to you some time later. In theory.
So, ahead of Dad’s birthday, I visited the ANTS website, found the relevant form, completed it and we posted off a photo. A week or so later, we got a response : your request has been refused. No reason provided. So I called up. After an eternity on hold, I explained the situation and the man told me that the reason my request had been refused was that I had filled out the wrong form. Seeing as I had previously been issued a French driving licence, I should instead have applied for a reinstatement instead of an exchange.
I told him that Dad had never in his life had a French licence. He replied that in that case, there was clearly an error in their system. He suggested I reapply, including this time a written statement confirming Dad does not and has never held a French licence.
I completed the form again, attached an attestation, and we again posted a photo. Several days later, the request was again refused. I called up, getting a different person, and explained the situation. They suggested I reapply, sending in a written statement confirming Dad does not and has never held a French licence. I hung up, bashed my head against the wall a few times, took a deep breath and then wrote them a letter (sadly, still the most effective form of communication as far as the French state is concerned) explaining the whole situation to them. I asked that they process my 2nd application and this time, take note of my attestation.
A few days later I got a response. They still refused to process my application because I’d filled out the wrong form. In exasperation, I called again. This time by sheer fluke, a helpful person answered. I gave her the reference numbers, she looked Dad up and I explained the situation. She took all this in and then put me on hold for a good 5 mins or so.
When she comes back she has some very odd, specific questions for me.
“Have you ever previously lived in France ? Perhaps around 30 years ago ? “
– Yes actually, we did move out here for a short time at the end of the 80s.
“And this was in the Dordogne – Bergerac area ?
– Yes, that’s right.
“Ah OK. And do you ever remember getting in a car accident while you were here? Or making an insurance claim ?”
– Umm, no I don’t think so… It was a long time ago though.
“Can I put you on hold again? “
– Sure.
When she came back, she told me her colleagues had in fact been correct. At some point in 1990, the French state, for reasons that are to this day unclear, created Dad a French driving licence. Even more bizarrely, having done so, they then failed to issue it to him. It just sat quietly there in their system doing neither harm or good – until 30 years later when it managed to cause utter confusion.
This established, she told me I needed to reapply, but fill out the reinstatement form, not the exchange form. And so for the third time, I submitted the application and we posted out a photo – and this time it all went smoothly. Possibly the most maddening thing about all of this is that the two forms (reinstatement and exchange) are, except for the title, entirely identical.
Addendum March 2026: Mum’s turn
And of course, all this palava awaited Mum too. We sent off her application (with some trepidation after all we’d been through with Dad) in August 2025. It was ultimately rejected a few months later because – yep, you guessed it – we’d filled out the exchange form and not the (identical) reinstatement form. It seems the French state had also made, but never issued, her a driving licence in 1990.
So, we immediately reapplied, filling in the right form, and were then kept waiting until mid-March, when the application was once again refused. The reason given? Because we had filled out the reinstatement form and not the exchange form. When you have interactions like this with the French state, you can literally feel your life force ebbing away from you, drop by drop.
And so, I rang them. After 20 minutes on hold, I got someone, explained the issue and they hung up on me. I swore, took a deep breath and rang again. When I finally got through to a human prepared to listen, I described to her all the woes that ANTS had put us through. After a while on hold, the rep came back and said the application had been rejected after a colleague got confused over which was Mum’s maiden name and which her married name. A rejected application cannot be re-opened, so I was told we needed to apply again. It seems three is the minimum number of applications you need to make before you get anywhere with these maddeningly inflexible bureaucrats…