300 kilometres, a train ticket and a day off. This is the price that Edouard paid for the simple purpose of redoing his expired identity card. He lives in Paris and, like so many other French people at this time, his identity papers must be renewed before the summer if he wishes to be able to go on vacation. Only for residents of large cities, getting an appointment at the town hall can take months.
“All the first week of May, I tried to find a date of meeting before the summer, explains Edouard. I looked in Paris, in all the cities of Ile-de-France, I even looked at in Vendée or around Lille, there were no appointments available before October 2022”, he confides to us.
After a few days of research, Edouard ended up finding an appointment in the town of Chaumont, prefecture of Haute-Marne, located almost 300 kilometers from the capital.
“I found an appointment available on Monday May 17 in Chaumont, says Edouard. Only, it’s a day when I’m supposed to work, so I had to take a day off specifically to redo my card. The idea did not delight me, any more than the price of train tickets, 90 euros round trip”, he continues.
Not without concessions, Edouard was therefore able to redo his identity card in time and is reassured, because he will indeed be able to go on vacation this summer.
He still regrets having had to travel such a distance, but puts it into perspective: “I was not the only one to have had to take the train to redo my map. In Chaumont, I met a man who had been confronted with the same problem. Only he had not done 300 kilometers but 600, since he came from Marseille.”
600 kilometers to redo his identity card, a record according to the employees of the town hall of Chaumont.
