Wash on the line; buying a house in France

July 5, 2013
Wash on the line; buying a house in France

          Up early to run an errand in Carcassonne, I start the laundry just before I leave, so I can hang it out when I return in about an hour.  Today is the first day of full sun, all day, a washerwoman's paradise.  Indeed, I hang the wash on two clotheslines suspended over the green plastic dining table and chairs set up in the small courtyard between the front gate and the door to the house.  The set up is not the best if you plan to eat outside, but it is great for drying clothes.

          When I was a girl my mother would put laundry on a line.  We have all seen television advertisements for laundry detergent highlighting whites drying on a line in a sun-filled field.  While my two long rows of clothespinned items are not all white, and not uniform in any sense, nevertheless the sight of clothes drying on the line in the sun is somehow cheering.

           The temperature is so hot that I dry two loads of sheets and towels on the lines in a morning.  Taken off the line, the whites do look brighter. The towels smell and feel inviting.  So long as the good weather this summer lasts, everyone in Caunes-Minervois will dry the wash on the line.

                                                                   ***

          I have been active organizing a possible purchase of a house on the outskirts of Caunes.  The procedures are quite different from those in the United States.  For one, there is only one attorney handling the transaction for both parties, le notaire.  This might seem odd, particularly as the French say  to foreign purchasers that the notaire is impartial, and that he protects the buyer's interests.

          The concept is fundamental to the French legal system, which likes the idea of a single expert with an official affiliation to the government, rather than two private adversaries each representing a client, as in Anglo-Saxon legal systems.  For instance, in criminal proceedings, there is an investigation by a magistrate as to whether the facts are sufficient to bring charges.  The attorney for the defendant only comes into the picture after the magistrate presents his conclusions to the court and recommends sanction. The defense attorney's job is to point out the deficiencies in the magistrate's report to the criminal court.

          In real estate transactions, the notaire drafts the documents, determines whether there are any outstanding liens on the property, or any environmental problems with the land.  At the closing, the notaire is responsible for registering the new deed and disbursing the purchase price to the sellers, as well as calculating the taxes on the transfer.  The notaire is a government official appointed by decree of the Minister of Justice and his fees are paid by the buyer.

         Stories of notaires using their thorough knowledge of an area to do prospective purchasers out of a land or house purchase are legion in French literature.  With all this knowledge of real estate transactions, and what property is for sale in an area, it is not surprising that many notaires are also real estate developers.  Of course, this is not a conflict of interest.

          If you go  to a French bank for a loan to buy your house, the bank will only lend against an easily-seizable and guaranteed stream of income in France.  A bank will not make you a loan against a first house in France, or assets outside of France.   The bank will determine the length of the loan term by looking at your age, the average loan term being ten years.

          If you are able to meet these standards, you will be offered a loan at a low rate of interest, say 2.85% fixed rate with a pre-payment penalty of 3%.  You may take out a variable rate loan at 3% with no pre-payment penalty.  Before the closing, you will be asked to take out a life insurance policy in favor of the bank, the cost of which will be borne by you.

          This aspect of the transaction illustrates how risk-averse French banks are: if you die with the mortgage still outstanding, the bank does not seize the house or have to execute the mortgage against the assets of the estate, but gets paid immediately by the life insurance company.  It is also good for the life insurance business.  (A similar rule in the U.K. was struck down a few years ago.)

          Finally, the bank wants to know who your next-of-kin are.  The reason for this is that no one other than next-of-kin can inherit real property in France.  This restriction on free alienability of property is absolute: even if you detest your relatives, they will get the property if you own it when you die, whether you die without a will or make a will leaving the property to a non-family member or a charity as part of your estate.  In theory, the goal of the law is to protect the children of a marriage, but in operation, the results can be onerous, as where the children of a first marriage take, forcing the second wife out of the house; or, where a property was jointly owned by a couple and on the death of the first spouse, the survivor remarries, bringing the new spouse to live in the house.  Any children of the second marriage are without rights to any part of the house, whatever the couple's wishes.  If the parent from the first marriage dies before his second spouse, his children take, while the wife and the children of the second marriage do not.

          In case you are having trouble keeping these rules straight, it may be comforting to know that in France when a child is born a livret de famille is created to certify which children are whose, and of what marriage.  This facilitates keeping real property in the hands of one "family", defined as a husband and wife and the children of that marriage.  It also makes bigamy difficult, as the livret de famille is an important identity document, along with the national identity card (which should be carried on one's person at all time).  In a real estate transaction, the contents of the livret de famille are incorporated into the record of the real estate transaction.

         In a sense, this obsession with maintaining the original outlines of a family structure by mandating descent through a restricted bloodline illustrates the difference between the French way of thinking and the American: the French believe that the family unit takes precedence over the individual's intention; they also want property to stay in the hands of people who are likely to be French and likely to internalize the mentalité of the community into which the original husband and wife settled.  Later spouses and children are, because of their remoteness from the marriage that spawned the purchase of the family home at issue, "new" relatives, and  implicitly suspect.

        Of course, the French are no stranger to multiple marriages.  There is even a term, la famille recomposée --the reorganized family-- that encapsulates the reality of multiple marriages and children.  Former President Nicolas Sarozy --married three times, with children from each marriage, is the pre-eminent paterfamilias of the famille recomposèe.  It is one more reason to dislike him, in French eyes.

        On the other hand, François Hollande, who never married his compagne (companion) and the mother of his children, Ségolène Royale, is now in a relationship with Valerie Trierweiler, a twice-married divorcée and the mother of three children.  (Hollande's children with Ségolene Royal were legitimized by Hollande's formal acknowledgement of them as his.)  Hollande's romantic triangulation --Trierweiler covered both Royal and Hollande as a journalist-- made barely a ripple during Hollande's succesful presidential campaign against Sarkozy.  

        The Hollande-Trierweiler relationship does not a famille recomposée make, but it does reflect a trend in France, the increasing reluctance to marry or re-marry of many.  In the case of those who have lived together for many years but never married, as retirement age approaches, many tie the knot to protect each other's pension rights.  However, many couples live together as husband and wife without ever marrying.  Inheritance rights are set by law and cannot be superseded by a will --which is why few are made in France.   There is also no reason, after divorce or bereavement, to wed the new compagne.  Anyway, the idea of "living in sin" is an oxymoron from the French point of view.

        This can lead to gaffes, as when an American assumes that the lovely lady working side-by-side in the butcher shop with the butcher is his wife and speaks to her of votre mari (your husband).  One hundred years ago, Bostonian Henry James wrote many novels about Americans flummoxed by the subtleties of European morés.  The crux of the elaborate architecture of deception and surface James revealed so strikingly was always property: in France, it still is.