The “Certificat de non opposition aux bans”
This certificate is supposed to prove you are about to get married, and nobody officially refused your union.
Usually, when 2 people get married in France, one month before the wedding, an announce is published in the city hall. If anyone has a good reason to cancel the wedding, it’ll give him the opportunity to speak.
After 10 days of publication, if nobody complained, the “Certificat de non opposition aux ban” is delivered.
Looks easy. But it means ALL the wedding paperwork must be completed.
So {{in order to get the VISA, you need to complete the wedding paperwork}}.
And there is something even a lot funnier: officially, you CANNOT complete all the wedding procedure if one of the couple is not physically in France.
So if you followed me:
– 1) We require a staying permission
– 2) We need a proper VISA to get this permission
– 3) We need the wedding paperwork to get the VISA
– 4) We have to be in france to complete the wedding paperwork.
– loop back to 2)
I must confess we were quite depressed when we discovered this.
now I’ll talk a little more about the wedding paperwork, it’ll help you to understand.
The wedding paperwork
First, you have to ask the city hall to give you a booklet with the list of what you need.
Once you start preparing your wedding, I strongly recommand you to phone from time to time to the city hall you planned to get married in. They tend to forget, and It would be a shame, the D-Day, to be told “but… who are you exactly?”.
The wedding papers are not that hard to get. The only problem is the health check. Officialy, you have to submit a recent health check report. “Recent” being less than 1 month. But if one of you isn’t here, it’s hard to go to see the doctor, right?
People may tell you “just take this check in Japan, and ask the ambassy to translate”. This is plain bullshit.
If you do this health check in another country, and ask your ambassy to translate, then send the paper, it’ll take at least 2 weeks (and I think I am underestimating).
Then the city hall can publish the announce, and wait 10 days, so you can get the paper to send to the ambassy to complete the VISA procedure.
Well, in the best case, it’ll take 50 days. And 50 days being longer than a month, all of this is useless.
I think the only possible workarround is to get friend with the city hall you’ll get married in.
After a lot of phone call & meetings, they accepted to publish the announce BEFORE they had the health check reports.
At first, they refused, because they believed the announce could be published only 1 month before the wedding. But they are public officers, so anything new is frightening for them.
I checked the law text about this, and it clearly states that this announce can be published up to 1 year before the wedding.
Anyway, in our case, they finally accepted to publish this paper 4 months before the wedding. After 10 days (well, actually, it took 3 weeks), I could finally pick up my “certificat de non opposition aux bans”.