How I Narrowly Escaped French Arrest

A Riveting Tale of Confusion and What it Takes to be French

We were having a leisurely summer lunch in my grandparent’s kitchen of vegetables from the garden with a dressing and dark crunchy bread I had gotten that morning at the bakery. The air was warm and had the summer’s scent of the French rural region so close to the Alps. The regular noon silence was always unmistakable and fascinated me. That silence that happens when an entire village, town, city and nation, stop what they’re doing, return home or meet at a cafe and sit to have lunch at the same time. No cars on the street, no jack hammering or tractors headed to fields, just a peaceful silence and sharing a meal with those we love.

The large kitchen window to the court was almost always left open so if anyone entered we would instantly hear it. It was very unusual at this time of the day to hear the creaking gates open and the crunching of the gravel drive into the courtyard.

Being closest to the window I immediately ran over to look down at who was entering. Below me in the court there were two dark blue Renault 4L’s, each with a tiny light on top of them like a dark pimple. I recognized the cars but waited for the Gendarmes to come out to confirm. There were four of them, two in each vehicle and they were smartly dressed in their dark blue uniforms. They exited the cars and put on their distinctive caps. I was young and it didn’t occur to me that this could be a sign of something bad. I was excited to see Gendarmes and ran down the stairs to greet them.

“Bonjour.”

“Bonjour, monsieur.”

“Can I help you?”

Looking at a small piece of paper in his hand one Gendarme answered by stating he was searching for… and then pronounced my name. This was a bit of a shock. It had never crossed my mind that I would have anything to do with French national police. While I stood there frozen holding the door, trying to make sense of this, my grandfather, who was decades more astute than me, was waving the Gendarmes to come upstairs.

“There is nothing a small aperitif cannot resolve!” He sounded jolly but was actually concerned. His plan was to lighten the situation until he comprehended what was going on. “Come, come! What will you have?” The Gendarmes kept their serious looks but did not refuse and silently went up the stairs.

By the time they entered the kitchen my grandmother had partially cleared the lunch we had just finished and several bottles of aperitif were arranged on it. My grandmother was gathering small glasses and my grandfather was hunched over in the corner cabinet where he kept “the good stuff”. Out came one of several Armagnac bottles he had that dated back almost 75 years. In my grandfather’s experience, a tiny portion of this magical elixir seemed to solve almost all of life’s problems.

Introductions were made all around and my grandfather immediately asked where the leader of the four was from. My grandfather knew every nook and cranny of the region within a 100 kilometer radius and this was one of his tricks to disarming situations and people. He knew the villages, who lived in them, who was related to whom, who lost a cow last week, who was dabbling with making Comte cheese, who was planning to become a mayor, who was getting married, who had a new baby… It always astonished me that this man seemed to have some kind of omnipotent supernatural knowledge of the region and everyone who lived in it. The reality was that it was simply a result of him being a person who loved and cared for people, from all over, cheerfully greeting anyone and everyone as he traveled around every day. He simply cared about everyone and thus wanted to know everyone.

“Blamont.” The lead Gendarme simply said the name of his village in response, which of course my grandfather had absolutely no concern of being stumped about.

“Blamont! So you must know Berthe. She was our nanny! And her husband, Ciro?” The Gendarme was loosening up and my grandfather put in the final blow to the tension. “Amazing how he built that whole house by himself! Quite a mason, Ciro! Have you heard his son play the organ at the church?”

The Gendarme was now smiling. “Have you ever had Ciro’s polenta? You know he’s Italian?”

My grandfather was relieved and everyone in the kitchen was instantly relaxed and made little cheering sounds as aperitifs were poured, seats were chosen and talk ensued.

As the other Gendarmes revealed where they had grown up, my grandfather mesmerized them with his knowledge of people and place. Several of the Gendarmes realized who my grandfather was and his legendary generosity which only made the gathering even more agreeable. I sat and watched, enjoying every moment of it, as I always did. There were few things I liked better than hearing and watching my grandfather tell stories. 

The connections he had were always fascinating to me. One Gendarme discovered that my grandfather had served in the resistance with his grandfather during the war. Another realized that when his grandparents had found hard times after the war, my grandfather was the one who showed generosity and helped them get out of a dark place. It was a lovely afternoon filled with warm talking and much laughter. They had all forgotten what they had come there for.

The silence of the noonday break was dissipating and sounds were starting to awaken. The Gendarmes knew that they had to get moving onto their next assignment. My grandparents followed them down the stairs to see them off as they cheerily headed to their cars waving back with huge smiles, but then the leader quickly switched to a serious face and headed back to the door. He had remembered there was a reason they were there.

“There is a matter we need to…”

My grandfather leaned in and the Gendarme spoke quietly as if giving away an unmentionable secret. He pulled away and turned to me. “When you get back to New York, the next day go to the Consulate! Understood?” I nodded in agreement even though I had no idea what he was talking about. We waved and watched the Gendarmes leave the court and out the gates onto the main road. My grandfather looked at me with a serious face and waved for us to go back upstairs. He would explain what was going on and what was needed. I was about to find out that I had come very close to being arrested and jailed.

After we sat back down in the kitchen my grandfather went on to explain in some detail that the Gendarmes had been sent over by the government to arrest me for desertion of my military duties. This made absolutely no sense to me. My mother was French, of course, my grandparents were French, my cousins, but I was born in Brooklyn. Maimonides Hospital to be exact. I was American. My grandfather couldn’t explain. He didn’t want to dig any deeper with the Gendarmes and take any risks. His main objective was to defuse and resolve the immediate situation.

He explained to me that the Gendarme had told him that I should immediately go to the French Consulate in New York and tell them I needed a dispensation paper for military service. The dispensation would be granted as I was temporarily studying in America and would fulfill my military duties when I returned to the homeland, France. The only problem was that my homeland was Long Island!

When I returned to New York I almost forgot about the incident but my mother made sure I didn’t. One day I ventured off into the city to the French Consulate to see what I needed to do. The Consulate was in a very fancy old building on Central Park. The inside was luxurious and old and the people working there were serious and business-like.

I was eventually called and sat at someone’s desk. The man was rifling through papers and folders. This was before computers. I wondered what he could be looking at. Rules, procedures, special paperwork. It couldn’t be about me as I had never entered this building before and just to reiterate, I was born in Brooklyn and live on Long Island.

He closed the file and put it down. That is when I noticed my name neatly typed on the tab of the impressively fat folder. This was concerning. The gentleman put his hands on the desk and looked at me very seriously.

“What school are you temporarily attending?”

I hesitated but decided to comply. “Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken.”

“Hmmm.” He reopened my file and started writing things. “And how long until you complete this education?”

“Three years.”

“Hmmm.” More writing in the file. “What town are you from?”

“Babylon.”

“Babylon? What Department is that?”

I wasn’t quite sure what he was asking. “Long Island?” I asked as if answering an impossible question on a quiz show.

“Long Island?” He replied as if he was a quiz show host pitying me and giving me another chance at an obviously wrong answer.

I felt I needed to clear this confusion up quickly. “I was born in Brooklyn. New York.” There was no change in the man’s serious demeanor as he focused on me like an insect specimen on the tip of a needle. “I was born here. Not France.”

The man leaned back and folded his hands on his chest. It seemed he was finally getting the picture. I was relieved but that would soon be changing as the man spoke.

“Yes. Brooklyn, but where is your home in France?”

I remembered the Gendarmes and my grandparents and figured he was talking about there. “Beaulieu in the Department of Le Doubs”

The man seemed relieved and happy for some progress and got back to writing on the paper in the folder. I had no idea what he was writing. I don’t know why I felt I needed to throw a wrench in this situation after making a tiny bit of progress, but I did. “I was born in Brooklyn.” I repeated this realizing I must sound like a crazed parrot to the Frenchman. 

He didn’t seem amused by my outburst, squinted his eyes and leaned in over his desk as if to tell me a highly important fact. “You are French. It doesn’t matter where you were born. Your mother is French so you are French.”

“But I live on Long Island.” I even amazed myself with that silly response. It was one of the first moments when I realized I should think more about things before opening my mouth.

The man leaned back in his chair and had a small smile that made me think he was about to checkmate me or perhaps bludgeon me with a bat. “We do not recognize you as American. To us you are only French.” I was not going to argue any further. He quickly got up, spoke to a young lady nearby and they both left the room.

Shortly afterwards they both returned. The lady was holding a giant piece of paper completely covered in tiny fine print words. It reminded me of those huge diner menus at Greek places scattered across Long Island. She placed it in front of me, uncapped a pen and handed it to me.

“This is your dispensation paper. Sign it and…” He leaned over again as he had before, eyes squinting for effect. “Always, always have it with you.”

“Ok.” I smiled as all of this was surreal to me and I just wanted to get out of there. Hands were shaken, fake smiles exchanged and off I went with my valuable giant sheet of paper.

When I got home I was tempted to put the paper into a drawer and forget about the whole thing. The paper was huge and ridiculous. Thankfully I couldn’t get the image of the man’s serious face out of my head and proceeded to fold the movie poster sized paper about thirty times until it was a size small enough to fit into a pocket of my wallet. I put it there and almost instantly forgot about it.

A few months later I was off to visit my family again. They lived very close to the Swiss border so the usual path was to take a flight to Zurich and a small plane for the twelve minute flight over the beautiful mountains to Basel, which at the time was a small airport. I arrived without a care in the world and was very excited to see my family. I wasn’t prepared for anything bad to happen.

I approached the border to France. There were two customs points, one for leaving Switzerland and one for entering France. The officer in the Swiss booth took my American passport and looked through it. I just waited, looking over to see if I could see any family waiting. Suddenly the officer said something in German to another officer. He had my passport and a stack of papers with him as he got up to show something to the other officer. They kept switching their attention from my passport, to me and then the list. I could see they were growing concerned so I started to get concerned myself. I wondered if my passport had expired. 

Something clicked and that advice from the squinty eyed man at the consulate in New York blasted in my head. “Always, always have it with you!” I didn’t know what was going on but I had a gut feeling that the magical fine print movie poster paper might resolve it. I quickly reached for my wallet, took the thick lump that was the dispensation paper and spent several few minutes unfolding the huge sheet. The two officers looked stunned and watched me through the glass. They must have thought I was performing an elaborate magical trick. Then I plastered the sheet on the glass separating me and the officers like a Broadway poster. As I waited for a reaction I noticed that they were armed. One with a handgun, the other with a rifle strapped over his shoulder. The Swiss were very serious about letting people out.

The men approached the glass and studied the paper. There were further exchanges in unintelligible German until suddenly a long pause and one officer spoke to me in surprisingly good English. “You must show paper with the passport.”

I looked at the huge paper I was holding and the tiny passport he was holding. “Ok. I’m sorry.” I was still curious as to have an explanation for what had just happened. “Is everything ok?”

He did not even look up from his paperwork and just pointed towards the second half of the customs hallway. “La France was looking for you.” That made me glance at his desk, where the papers they had been studying earlier laid. I could see it was a list of names with numbers, countries and some other information next to each one. The top of the paper had a symbol with the word Interpol just below it. I realized that I had made it on an Interpol arrest warrant. Without that giant Greek diner menu sized dispensation paper, which I hadn’t even ever bothered to read and never did, I would be heading to a French jail.

I thanked the men and headed to the French customs, handing my passport with my left hand and covering most of the glass with the dispensation paper. No issue at all and I quickly was allowed to proceed. I took my things, carefully refolded the giant paper and stuck it in my wallet. I headed towards my family who were smiling and calling out to me. We hugged and kissed. I told them I had a wonderful story to tell on the way home.