French woman spends three years trying to prove she is not dead

In the flesh, Jeanne Pouchain appears very much alive and well. Convincing the French authorities of this has proven another matter.

After being declared dead by a court, Pouchain has spent three years trying to have herself officially resuscitated.

The 58-year-old from Saint-Joseph, near Lyon, has not existed in the eyes of France’s administration since 2017, after a long-running legal dispute involving a former employee at her cleaning company.

“I went to see a lawyer who told me it would be quickly resolved as I had been to my doctor who certified that I was very much still alive. But because there had been a [legal] ruling, this wasn’t enough,” Pouchain told local journalists.

Her lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, was also astonished at her greatly exaggerated death. “It’s a crazy story. I couldn’t believe it. I never thought that a judge would declare someone dead without a certificate. But the plaintiff claimed Mrs Pouchain was dead, without providing any proof and everyone believed her. Nobody checked,” he told AFP.

The decision by the court of appeal in Lyon to declare Pouchain no more came in November 2017 after more than a decade of legal battles with a disgruntled former employee.

A 2004 industrial tribunal had ordered Pouchain to pay the former member of staff – reportedly let go from her job when Pouchain’s firm lost a major contract – about €14,000 in damages. As the case was against her company and not Pouchain personally, the ruling was never enforced. In 2009, the employee sued again but the case was thrown out of court.

In 2016, believing Pouchain dead, an appeal court ordered her son and husband to pay the damages. The following year, the employee informed the industrial tribunal her letters to her former boss were unanswered and she had died. Pouchain was scratched from the official records, invalidating her identity card, driving licence, bank account, health insurance and other official documents necessary to prove her existence.

As her lawyer sought this week to have her officially resurrected, Pouchain accused the former employee of inventing her demise in an attempt to win damages from her heirs. The employee’s lawyer counter-argued that Pouchain was the author of her own demise, and had played dead to avoid paying the damages, accusations she has denied.

“I have no identity papers, no health insurance, I cannot prove to the banks that I am alive … I’m nothing,” Pouchain said.

“It’s time someone said ‘stop’. If I don’t fight nobody is going to fight for me. My husband’s grandmother is 102 … she has lived through many things, including the war, but she says she’s never suffered anything as hard as I’ve been through.”