I am grateful to reader Geoff Morris for his words of wisdom on getting hitched in France: just like preparation for school there is a whole lot of buying and finding new things in order to get to your first day with all the right equipment:

In our experience there are three huge hurdles in arranging expat marriages over here:

1) Language (obviously) - everything needs to be in French, translated by an approved source and the translation approved by another approved source.

2) Timing - it's necessary to get form A after receiving declaration B and before submitting request C, etc... and everything seems to have a certain "sell-by date" - so you have to juggle when to carry out all your applications.

3) French bureaucracy versus everyone else's bureaucracy - as mentioned at the end of the editorial, they may suddenly request documents that simply don't exist in your country of origin and don't offer any flexibility in finding a solution.

Photocopies are almost never allowed so everything has to be "original" - yet they will be locked forever in their vaults (such as birth certificates specially re-issued at great personal effort on the other side of the Earth - not a fun thing to discover when it's finally presented to the Mairie back in France).

The criteria may change depending on which employee you've been talking to, or after you think you've met them.

And finally; they may even doubt the authority of the official stamp of the issuing body because it's not French - in our case the foreign ministry of one of the countries of origin.

After suggesting we just go back and sort it out, we finally appeased them by getting the embassy in Paris to write (and officialise) a letter attesting to the authenticity of the original document and the authenticity of the stamp on the document plus an extra stamp of officialdom for good measure.

To sum it all up: the French system expects everyone to use the French system.

My advice:

- Start by asking for a list of documents at the Mairie - about a year before you might need to travel to any country of origin, let alone hold the wedding.

- Write to all the authorities you think you need to contact asking about procedures and conditions for each document, work out any extra conditions as these crop up.

- Return to the Mairie with a plan including all "sell-by-dates", extra conditions, etc. paying attention to ask about official stamps and official translations.

- Modify the plan until it meets their approval (and check again with other authorities if necessary).

- Plan your holidays around the "sell-by-date" conundrum (remember to account for from-application-to-issuing periods).

- At the correct moment launch the countdown to the wedding and embark on the document requesting itself.

Of course it's easy to write all this now... we managed to organise ours in a chaos of unsent invitations and unbooked venues while still trying to beat looming visa expiries - everything culminating in a (literal) last-minute panic since the Mairie forgot to book an interpreter!”

Geoff Morris / Expatica