Access to French nationality, publication of 21 January 2021

In 2020, the annual flow of acquisitions of French nationality by decree and declaration (weddings, ascendants and siblings) with 61,371 new French was down 20.0 %. Acquisitions by decree continue to decline (-15.6 %) and marriage acquisitions are down 27.9 % after two consecutive years of increase. The two methods of acquisition by declaration, created as of 1 July 2016, for the benefit of the ascendants of French, on the other hand, the brothers or sisters of French, fall by 31.3 %. Such a decline can obviously be explained by the COVID-19 health crisis and more precisely by the impact of lockdowns on the whole chain of investigation of acquisition files. It should be noted that these four methods of acquiring French nationality are in addition to other access routes followed by the Ministry of Justice, for which data for 2020 are not yet available. Therefore, all annual statistics on acquisitions of nationality for the year 2020 will be published in full in June 2021