AMB Cote d'Azur

While many expatriates on the Côte d’Azur have spent their summer sunning on the beach, sitting in sidewalk cafés, or strolling the streets of charming villages, I have spent mine at driving school.

Not because I don’t know how to drive (I’ve been driving for several decades), or because I was caught driving at some extravagant speed (I am an extremely cautious driver; to my ready-to-get-there family’s dismay, I almost never drive above the speed limit), but because, at the beginning of September, my American driver’s license will no longer be legal in France.  The only way for me to drive within the law in my adopted country after that will be to do so with a French permis de conduire. 

If you are staying in France for 90 days or less, then your American license is perfectly legal.  However, once you become a legal resident of France—staying past 90 days and acquiring a carte de séjour — the clock on your American license begins to tick.

You can escape this problem if you happen to have a license issued by one of the 14 states with whom France has that coup of international diplomacy the envy of negotiators everywhere, a driver’s license reciprocity agreement.  Those lucky states are:  Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia.  We, alas, came from Maryland.  The law is clear, in French and in English:  a year after the issue of my carte de séjour, my American license—and thus my American insurance—will no longer be valid.  If, heaven forbid, I should cause a traffic accident, I would have no insurance coverage.  Farewell, my childrens’ college funds.  Farewell, the house we still own in a leafy suburb of Washington, DC.

Now, in addition to being a cautious driver, I am extraordinarily law-abiding.  I never took a standardized test without showing up with two sharpened number 2 pencils.  I always sort my recycling.  If the grocery store parking lot is marked for customers only and I have to run an errand across the street, I have been known to move my car.  The idea of driving in a foreign country without the right paperwork inspires in me visions of being forced to join the French Foreign Legion, and spending the rest of my days patrolling the Sahara without sunscreen.  Or of being thrown into a Dickensian prison, becoming a Monty-Pythonesque crone who hunches over straw diagrams muttering about no left turn.  

Thus it came to pass that, a month or so ago, I enrolled at our local driving school.  Here is how you get a driver’s license in France:  first, you pass a written test.  Then, you pass a driving test.  Ah, the work of an afternoon, you say?  Mais non, I think not.  There is one school in all of France where Anglophones can take the test with the help of a translator, and that school is in Paris.  So unless your French is fluent, fluent—unless you can bounce between English and French without a care in the world, or without needing a nap afterwards—then you may find that there is some vocabulary that you don’t know.  Or that your translation of a particular verb tense is not precisely the same as French Academy’s.

The written test is made up of 40 questions, 35 of which must be answered correctly.  One French friend passed the test on her second try with 36 correct answers; my driving school instructor, who has worked at the school for 12 years, mentioned offhandedly in our first class that, out of 40 questions, he would count himself lucky to answer 38 correctly.  As for the driving test—well, like Scarlett O’Hara, I’m going to think about that another day.  After I pass the written test.

When I took the written driving test in North Carolina sometime during the first Reagan administration, I showed up after school at the Department of Motor Vehicles with a (No. 2) pencil.  The lady behind the desk handed me a piece of paper and a booklet, I shaded in some bubbles and, voilà, I was ready for my road test.  Three decades later, across the ocean and in another culture, there’s a different procedure.  Instead of reading the questions in a booklet and answering them in pencil—so twentieth-century—a DVD player projects a series of 40 images on a screen.  The images depict actual driving situations, clustered around the themes of (and I’m translating from my study guide):  signaling, rights-of-way, meeting and passing other cars, stopping and parking, rules of driving, driving in tunnels, driving economically, lighting for visibility, and, finally, questions divers, or, odds and ends that didn’t fall into the previous eight categories.  Most of the questions have four possible responses, of which as many as three can be correct.  If three are correct and you check only two as correct on your hand-held computerized responder, then your response is counted as wrong.  

It takes a while before you’re ready for the driving test.  I’m making steady progress, from 17 wrong on my first test, to 14, to, on one red-letter day, only nine incorrect out of 40, just four over the magic number.   It’s easy for me to remember how I do on the tests because, after every practice test that I take at my driving school, the school secretary asks me how I did.  The teenagers filing out who have just taken the practice test with me hand in their clipboards and slink off to sneak cigarettes, but I get to announce my grade out loud.  

It’s not only the system of taking the test that’s different, though; I could, I think, pass a U.S. driving test on the first try, even if it were given on a DVD and with a multi-colored handset.  It’s the system of thinking that’s difficult.  I know how to drive.  But driving in English, American English, is different from driving in French.  I’ve realized that driving is something that we begin to learn long before we ever get behind the wheel.  We start as toddlers, when we push our toy cars around the toy village with the toy traffic signs.  French toddlers have the benefit, then, of toy traffic circles, while American toddlers wait for the lights to turn.  As children we watch our parents drive, and listen to them telling traffic stories.  French children listen, too, and watch, as their parents yield right-of-way to traffic coming from the right.  And with all those hours of family car trips comes a habit of a certain kind of thinking.  A certain kind of French rationality—not better, not worse, just different from a similar American sense—becomes the norm.  A yellow diamond inside a larger white diamond comes to mean that you have right-of-way, and you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to resort to some mnemonic.  You just know.  And it never occurs to you to turn right on red:  why would a person do that?  It’s not part of the system.  You never saw your parents do it; no one ever talked about it; you didn’t learn to drive that way.  

So what have I learned this summer while my fellow expats have been sampling rosés and working on their tans?  I’ve learned that I’m not really learning how to drive.  I’m learning how to begin to think like a French person.  Which is not to say that there’s not still a part of me that regrets not coming from Virginia.               

For more information on driving in France as an American, go to:  

•    http://france.usembassy.gov/living_in_france.html;
•    http://www.ambafrance-us.org/spip.php?article376;
•    http://www.aaa.com/ppinternational/Int_IDP_apply.html;
•    http://www.aaro.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=101.