Notaires online

It’s not much fun going to see a notaire. As a species they tend to be rather dull dogs, their finer emotions blunted by their chronic immersion in a sea of paper work. In the nineteenth-century Balzac wrote that “if a man is in the slighest degree an artist, an enthusiast, a lover, he cannot succeed as a notaire”. On the other hand, they are rumoured to make a lot of money (with gold bars stashed in their garages, according to one folk myth). In fact, most of what they get paid by their clients goes straight to the government.

Why’s that, you say? Because a notaire is not an independent lawyer like, say, a British solicitor, but a state appointee whose job is to carry out a limited range of administrative tasks related to such areas as the transfer of property, marriage settlements and inheritance. With some exceptions most of them will want to deal with you in French. But now it’s possible to do serious preparation for that encounter and so cut the time you spend in that paper-strewn office. The notaires have launched an English segment of their website which covers the main areas of family matters, real estate, inheritance and certain business procedures. We got several people to try out the site – at notaires.fr – and they all agreed it was easy to use and offered clear information.

And if you’d like to hear about a flesh-and-blood notaire see our profile of Me Lallamant. He speaks excellent English, by the way.

From Riviera Reporter Issue 126: April/May 2008