Integrating in France: Don't learn the hard way

I asked a few friends and acquaintances how their perceptions of France had changed over the years of living here. Most still felt their decision to leave Britain was right, but missed family and friends more than they expected. France had also failed to deliver on fulfilling social contacts and work opportunities.

That was notable among the early retired with poor French, who had to rely on meeting like-minded expats. In French rural areas, there is no big middle class group like there is in Britain. The young and the ambitious have moved to the cities. The French seem to prefer to buy new homes on lotissements and leave the crumbling village houses to incoming foreigners.

We have seen many an unfinished project. People start doing places up and then leave, having run out of money and found no way to make a living.

B&B dilemmas
We were visited in France by friends who ran a successful B&B near Stansted airport, and who were thinking of buying a chambre d’hôtes near Carcassonne. In England they had charged around £56 per person per night (about €156 a couple) and were never short of bookings. They were disappointed when we pointed out the differences in French culture that make it unlikely for a businessman to go to an English-run B&B when he could book himself and his wife and child into a Formule 1-type hotel for €55 a night.

There are B&Bs charging €156, but they tend to be in magnificent châteaux. From my own experience of running a B&B in Scotland I know how much work is involved and the disruption to family life. Is it worth coming to France to do all that for a third of the income? To make a modest income of, say, €20,000 gross, means filling a €55 room every single day of the year. Anyone thinking they can make a living needs to look carefully at the market. Its easy to find the house,much harder to find the clients.

Jobs for the boys
The only self-employed people we have met who make a living legally are software or internet specialists whose skills are in demand worldwide.Well, nearly worldwide. Much of rural France has not (and may never have) Broadband, so technology-based employment could mean setting up a satellite system. Mobile phone coverage is patchy too.

We have known British and Americans on contracts with international companies. Others making a reasonable living were professionals in real estate or healthcare, and those who came early and set up their own businesses to service the needs of expats. I have never met a British person working on a supermarket checkout or as a security guard, for example, which are the kind of low-skill jobs that immigrants can do in Britain. Unemployment is a serious problem in France.

House-proud People seem to be delighted with their properties, but the downsides are all similar – not integrating and missing family. Boredom with a social life that is restricted to meeting other expats to whom nothing new has happened since the last long lunch seems a common theme. Also, buying houses and doing them up may work in Britain as a means of building up a pension, but it’s not the same in France.

We ourselves responded to the downsides by selling and moving to a different part of France.Without having to go on the open market, our home sold within a fortnight.We were lucky there was a buyer out there with more sense than us – it was bought as a letting investment and holiday home. So we bought two flats, one by the Mediterranean, and the other in Paris.

Having learned to behave as Parisians we felt we had at last truly integrated into France. Two things were missing though – room space and greenery. So we set about moving for the third time.

Ideally we wanted to move in the spring but when the right house came up we had no option but to relocate. The owner wanted to sell before the end of the tax year so we were forced to move in at Christmas. There then followed the coldest winter for 30 years and we had no heating.

Anyone moving in France, even with good French and pots of money, knows you cannot just magic up workmen. It was a serious mistake to move in to what was a wreck with no heating, dangerous wiring and leaky pipes and try to live there during the demolition stages. We should have hired a caravan and parked it in the garden.

I decided that all the improvements to this house would have to appeal to the main market, that is French buyers. There is a definite style of architecture and presentation of properties that seems to attract Parisian weekenders. As we still have a long way to go to finish this house, there is no question of moving either within France or back to the UK at the moment.

That is an option though, as we never intended to end our days here. Having moved from one country and started a new life, we have had the training to tackle it again as a challenging assignment.We never had the option of sabbaticals or a gap year but may be able to claim a gap decade – which is, all in all, a pretty fine thing.

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