Acadian revenge: JT discovers the law of unintended consequences.

Having been mistaken as an insane Frenchman instead of a sane foreigner by the police officer I encountered in the port of Le Havre, I had inadvertently circumvented the first barrier that normally confronts a trans-border traveler: the need for a visa.  So now that I was safely well inside the country, I assumed that headache was well behind me—not so in today’s France.

In years past, then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy pressured national and local authorities alike to take it upon themselves to find the un-papered masses and sort things out, which hasn’t slowed down much, even since Sarko has found other ways to occupy his energies with full-time relatively gainful employment of his own.

In my case, the heavy hand of the law was brought to bear by a simple, mild-mannered banker—one of the last people you would guess would be an informer.  I was in a branch of a major bank to exchange the little money I had into euros and was asked to wait in an office for a moment while the banker purportedly consulted an updated exchange rate table.  When he returned twenty minutes later, he was accompanied by two fearsome-looking officers of the law.  For the second time in as many weeks, I found myself in State custody.

Upon our arrival at the local police station, the officers subjected me to a pre-incarceration chest x-ray (for tuberculosis) followed by handwriting analysis (for penmanship and personality profiling) and then entertained themselves by going through the standard questions: my name, nationality, occupation, last residence, etc.

It was not until they got to the section that they thought was purely for North Africans that things got interesting:  “Is your country, territory or place of origin a former colony, possession or territory of the French Republic?”

My instinct was to say “no”—as they fully expected—but I paused for a moment.  Having spent most of my life in or near Pointe de la Hache, Louisiana, I actually was from a former colony of the French Republic.

“Yes,” I replied, to their utter confusion and consternation.

So it turns out that what got me in trouble in Le Havre—the fact that I am from Louisiana—is precisely what got me out of jail ten days later in Rouen.  And now, to my delight and disbelief, I am not only a legally-papered resident, but now have a citizenship petition pending, thanks to an obscure provision of French immigration law known as Civil Code Article 21-19(5).  Welcome to France.