那天，我们一家成了法国人

那天，我们一家成了法国人

宣传短片、演讲、马赛曲，走完这一系列流程后，我和我的家人变成了法国人。作为一个由英国人和美国人组建的家庭，入籍法国给我们带来了什么？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

restrain抑制，阻止，束缚[rɪ'streɪn]

drone单调低沉地说，过着无聊的日子[droʊn]

cosmopolitan世界性的[ˌkɑːzmə'pɑːlɪtən]

dowdy寒酸的，懒散的['daʊdi]

naturalise使加入国籍，使归化['nætʃrəlaɪz]

crypt地穴，（教堂的）地下室[krɪpt]

patrol巡逻，巡查

bureaucratic官僚的[bjʊrə'krætɪk]

The day my family became French（850 words）

By Simon Kuper

It was Marine Le Pen's nightmare: 221 people of all colours, sitting in the Panthéon in Paris, waiting to be made French. My American wife and children were among the new elect. When my wife began applying for Frenchness years ago, I didn't bother. After all, as a Brit, I was already European. Then came Brexit. Now I spend my leisure hours collecting the lifetime's worth of documents required to become French.

I grew up all over, and only moved to Paris in 2002 because flats there were cheap. Theresa May calls people like me “citizens of nowhere”. But in the Panthéon, the place where France buries its great, I saw that she was wrong.

The ceremony was unmistakably French. At 8.30am, we stood outside the Panthéon in the rain, everyone pushing to squeeze in first, restrained by officials eager to remind us that they were the State and we mere citizens. Then we sat waiting for nearly an hour, while an official tested the sound system by endlessly droning out the days of the week: “Lundi, mardi, mercredi … ” The 221 had clearly become Parisians, because they didn't speak to each other. I suspect that after an American citizenship ceremony, you go home with everybody's life story.

May was mocking a rootless cosmopolitan elite, but our crowd visibly wasn't that. Though they were wearing their finest, most looked dowdy and old. Many immigrants only naturalise decades after their arrival, once their French children are grown and they realise they will die here.

Finally, a speaker welcomed us to the Panthéon. He told us that everyone from Voltaire to Marie Curie was buried in the crypt beneath our feet. “Some of them, like you, were not born French,” he added encouragingly. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire, for instance, was originally the Polish-Italian Wilhelm Albert Wlodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, but he fought for France in the first world war.

We were shown a short film covering the key French themes: demonstrators, fighter jets, praying Muslims, vegetable shoppers in a market, armed soldiers patrolling train stations. Next, a bureaucrat made a bureaucratic speech, and then we sang the Marseillaise. My Parisian kids knew it by heart. They sometimes sing it at birthday parties with their mostly immigrant-origin friends.

The bureaucrat listed everyone's home nation: Argentina to Bangladesh, Russia to Senegal. “Two hundred and twenty one new French people,” she said, and the crowd applauded itself. Especially those from poor countries, who now owned a life-changing piece of paper.

The moment the ceremony ended, just as we began basking in the miracle of transformation, functionaries shooed us on to the street. I later learnt that though ours was the first-ever group to become French in the Panthéon, we were only the warm-up act. The next group got live music, and one of them, a 25-year-old Chilean named David, made a speech about being taken hostage by terrorists attacking the Bataclan nightclub in November 2015. One terrorist had asked, “What do you think of François Hollande?” and David replied, “I don't think anything, I'm not French.” When the terrorist discovered he was Chilean, recalled David, “I sensed a loss of interest, something that disconnected in his glance.” That saved his life. He decided to become French anyway.

By this time, my family was celebrating over croissants in a nearby café. They were now French-American dual citizens. I interviewed them about their feelings. My daughter said, “I don't feel different at all. I just feel that it's a waste of time while he's checking the sound system.” I told her that in a century, her great-grandchildren in Rio or Sofia would be desperately searching her papers for her certificate of naturalisation.

My wife hadn't noticed any extra Frenchness either: “I was hoping I'd be thinner.” But she was pleased she'd become French during the sales, because the shoes she had bought for the occasion were 40 per cent off. One son said he felt “normal”, and was disappointed President Macron hadn't come. The other son shrugged, “I was already French. No need to become any more French.”

That was it: they were all already French, but also American and British. The other people at the ceremony won't stop feeling Peruvian or Tunisian, but their faces were glistening after becoming French. These people aren't citizens of nowhere. Nor are they what the author David Goodhart calls “Anywheres”. They are attached to multiple specific places.

As a child I used to worry about belonging, until I read Judith Kerr's semi-autobiographical children's novel, When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. It's about a German-Jewish family that flees Berlin for Paris and then London. At one point the daughter asks her father: “Do you think we'll ever really belong anywhere?”

“Not the way people belong who have lived in one place all their lives,” he says. “But we'll belong a little in lots of places, and I think that may be just as good.” Today Kerr, aged 94, is a great British author. I'm happy for people who belong in one place, but I think our way is fine too.