Once A Frenchman, Always A Frenchman, Apparently

My father is not a French citizen. He worked and lived in France for a few years in his late twenties. When he turned sixty-two, a beaten-up letter arrived in the mail with many, many forwarding stickers on it.

He opened it to find a very threatening letter from the French government demanding his French citizen’s ID number so they could pay him his accrued French retirement of one euro per month.

The letter said that failure to respond or lying in response would result in jail time.

Dad figured that his employer had filled out the wrong paperwork back when he was in France and said he was a citizen. He figured it was probably easier to simply never return to France than to try to figure out how to reply to the letter correctly.