Government declared a woman dead for no good reason; she's fought for five years to prove she's alive

Five years ago a French court declared Jeanne Pouchain was dead.  That was news to her – and just the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare

The trouble began in 2016 when her application for a passport was declined.  She assumed she must have forgotten an important piece of paperwork.

Weeks later, at a doctor’s appointment in her home, both Pouchain and her doctor were perplexed when his computer rejected her government health-care card.  

France is notorious for bureaucracy, and its constant errors.  It was irritating, but Pouchain assumed it would eventually be resolved.

But when the former cleaning company boss received her bank statement and discovered her business account had been plunged into the red, even though she had paid in dozens of cheques, she started to become seriously concerned. “I knew money should have been going into my account, but there was nothing in it. So I went to the bank. It’s only a small branch; I’ve been with them for 27 or so years and they all know me,” she says. “The director came out and told me, ‘I’m sorry, you don’t exist.’ I said: ‘But I am here, you know me.’ He told me: ‘I don’t have an explanation for this. But what can I do?’

Despite having done business with her for years, he said there was no record of any accounts in her name. “They had all been closed.  As we were leaving he gave me an envelope full of cheques worth about €14,000 that should have been deposited to my account.  He apologised and said there was nothing he could do.

“All my life, I’ve been precise about everything: keeping records, documents, tax receipts.  Pierre-Jean, my husband, said there must have been some mix-up with papers and not to worry, we’d sort it out.”

Over the next few months Pouchain applied again for a passport, submitting even more documents. But in October 2017 her passport application was returned, marked “REFUSED.”

There was no explanation.  Simply, "refused."

Then on 12 November 2017, two bailiffs showed up at her home with a certified letter addressed to her husband.  It was a document announcing her death.

The letter informed her that a lawyer in a court case relating to her cleaning business had simply told the court that she had died 18 months earlier.  The attorney didn't produce a death certificate, but since neither Pouchain nor her husband knew about the event, no one appeared in court to represent her, and somehow the judge allowed the claim to go unchallenged.

Pouchain was shaken. “Someone said I was dead and the judge just believed them, with no death certificate.  But we thought it would be quickly resolved. I went to my doctor, who gave me a certificate to say I was still alive, then we went to the administrative offices at Saint-Étienne and reported there had been an irregularity. But they said it was impossible, that nobody can be declared dead who isn’t dead, so they didn't have the power to correct it.”

Since then Pouchain has spent more than three years fighting to prove she is very much alive.

"I have nothing despite having worked all my life. How can they have wiped me from the face of the Earth?"

For Pouchain, being officially declared dead means she has no access to the public health system and no medicines for her diabetes and thyroid condition unless she pays cash for them.  Her driving licence and passport have been cancelled, so she can't travel. During the Covid lockdowns, when people could be fined for not carrying identification papers, Pouchain was virtually housebound.  As things stand, she won't be able to get the French equivalent of Social Security.

As you'd expect, the stress has led to severe depression, including three attempts to take her own life.

Though she has only been "officially dead” for five years, the story of Pouchain’s demise began in 2000 when she was running her own business cleaning luxury homes and offices in Lyon. Pouchain estimates she employed a total of 120 people over the two decades she ran the business. She was, she insists, a firm but fair employer. “I never laid anyone off, had a good reputation, and I did well. Around 90% of my employees were women, often in difficult situations with little money and children; if they had a problem, I was there for them.”

In the fall of 2000 Pouchain lost a contract to clean an office complex.  The byzantine French employment laws demand that when a new company takes over a contract, employees of the losing company must be transferred to the winning company.  It's insane, which means the biden*harris regime and their controlling party will likely ram that into U.S. law soon.  Pouchain says she carried out 35 such transfers during her 20 years in the business and had a solicitor and an accountant to deal with the process.

In this case only one worker had to be transferred.  We'll call her madame H.  She had worked for Pouchain for just over a year.

“We had a good relationship. She was a hard worker.  I made the transfer, the paperwork was done and it seemed to go well. She officially stopped working for me on 31 December. From 2 January 2001, she was supposed to be working for the new company.”

Four months later, however, Pouchain says she received a timesheet from Mme H demanding payment for 200 hours of cleaning in January 2001. Pouchain responded that Mme H had been transferred to the new company and no longer worked for her, but when she failed to pay she was taken to an "industrial tribunal"--one of the endless, infinite number of bureaucratic offices that infest crappy governments (including ours).

Three years later the "industrial tribunal" ruled that the employee's transfer had not been carried out correctly, and ordered Pouchain to pay Mme H €14,000.  But because Mme H’s lawyer had brought the case against Pouchain’s company, and not her personally, the ruling was subsequently nullified by yet another bureaucracy.

Five years later Mme H made another claim, this time against Pouchain personally, but the industrial tribunal threw out the new case, saying the matter had been judged and was now closed. In 2013, Pouchain was informed that the case against her had been dropped.  After €100,000 in legal bills, she was just glad it was all over.

Of course it wasn't, and H's lawyer returned to court with a new scheme, claiming Pouchain had died and that the court must order her heirs to pay the amount demanded.

Pouchain's former attorney tried several times to correct the record, but each agency claimed it lacked the power to reverse the lower court's ruling that she was dead.  Pouchain says it took months to find a lawyer who would take on her case, before Sylvain Cormier agreed to take the case.

“When Mme Pouchain told me her story I didn't believe it,” says Cormier. “I said, ‘It’s just not possible.’ But I read the files and it is – everything she told me was unbelievable but perfectly true. It appears there was no certificate of death, the court just accepted the attorney's unsupported claim.  *Nobody bothered to check.*”

The industrial tribunal case had been reopened on 25 February 2016 without Pouchain’s knowledge, and, as she had supposedly died before it was resolved, her “heirs”, Pierre-Jean and their son Hugo, 28, were ordered to pay Mme H’s demand for almost €20,000 in back pay, plus another €15,000 damages.

Pouchain summarizes: “Mme. H. couldn’t win while I was alive so her attorney falsely had me declared dead.”  It was a masterpiece of cunning.

Fifteen days later, her husband’s and son’s bank accounts were frozen.

In August of 2019, bailiffs came to her home and seized her husband's Porsche Boxster, his pride and joy,  to settle part of Mme H’s claim. “It was worth €24,000, but they damaged it and sold it for just €7,000,” he says. He notes that when the couple married they did so under what the French call a “séparation des biens” agreement, meaning their personal belongings were owned individually.  So how could they take his car to pay his wife’s alleged debts?  

He shrugs. “No one ever explains.  No one has to.  Agents of the State show up and do whatever they want.  They say they're enforcing French law, so it does no good to complain.  They have even threatened to take our home,” he says. “They seem out to ruin us, and nobody cares.”

Any of this starting to sound familiar?  Think about 400-plus Americans thrown in jail after Jan 6th, held in solitary confinement to this very day, without charges filed, denied bail.  "They seem out to ruin us, and nobody cares."

In France, deaths must be confirmed by a doctor and must be registered with the local town hall and entered into the civil register within 24 hours. The town hall issues a death certificate. There is no record of any death certificate being issued on Pouchain.

Until last year, when the French statistics agency Insee began compiling details of deaths from town records, there was no central register, and only family members could request details from the town where the death was recorded.  Insee says its list is “exhaustive.”  It also initially says Pouchain is on the list of dead people “but has not died.”  When a reporter questions this, an Insee spokesperson replies: “Sorry, we made a mistake, she’s not on the dead list.”

The reporter then asks if she is on their list of living people. “No, she is not, and sorry, alas we have no more information on this subject.”

No one seems to be able to explain how Pouchain came to be declared dead, or why the judge who made that declaration appeared to do so without any proof. Or why, once the obvious error was made, it cannot be rectified. Pouchain has no idea who informed her bank, social security, and other administrative offices she was dead, and has been unable to find out how they were able to do it without any death certificate.

“It’s the sort of thing that sounds so ridiculous when you tell people – they think it’s impossible, idiotic – but that has been our reality for the last three years,” she says. “When the gendarmes came to take Pierre-Jean’s car, I cried and pleaded with them and explained what had happened, and the gendarme said it wasn’t possible that I could be declared dead, just like that. Then he looked on the central database and he said, ‘I wouldn’t drive if I were you, because you don’t exist. You don’t have a licence.’”

Pouchain’s lawyer, Cormier, has now filed a legal complaint for fraud and false declarations in the criminal court and a separate case in the civil court to stop Mme H seizing any more of Pierre-Jean’s property. The earliest hearing will be on 31 August, when Cormier hopes to have Pouchain administratively resurrected, but he says it could take another two years for an investigating judge to find out what happened.

Several courts, including the highest court in the French judicial system, have examined the case and conceded there appeared to be “irregularities”, but--astonishingly--ruled that it was beyond their power to correct the declaration that Pouchain was dead.

“My life will never be the same after this, even if I am resurrected," she says.

Okay, you don't live in France, so how is this tragic story relevant to you?  It's that insane, moronic bureaucrats infest all power structures, and the more power they have, the more errors.  Do you really want the gruberment controlling your health-care?  They're mere months away from that.

Want the federal monster to control your state's elections?  They came with a single vote of doing that with HR-1, which would have banned all photo-ID laws and made all-mail voting mandatory in every state.  But they haven't give up, and have introduced new bills to do exactly the same things but just in smaller bites.

Want the Democrat party to seize all guns from law-abiding citizens, while refusing to jail black thugs for possessing stolen guns?  They're mere months away from that too--and the Media is helping prepare public opinion by whining that the problem is "guns," when that is clearly NOT the problem.  It's thugs with stolen guns, but they don't want to publicize that.

Of course you think these things are all hyperbole, that the government would never order citizens to do dumb, fatal things like...wear a mask at all times, or be fined obscene amounts.  You can't believe the Dems would shut down all small businesses, while allowing huge stores to stay open, implicitly claiming one case was dangerous to health but the other was just fine.  You can't believe...oh wait:  All those things already happened.

Still think the other things aren't coming?

Source.