France: where the official answers live

What you need to do

The French system splits the road in two, and confusing the halves is expensive.

The first half is admission. It is handled by the official operator for international students: it publishes programmes, runs the application procedure for candidates from outside the union and explains which route is provided for your country. The consular step is usually booked through it as well.

The second half is administrative life after arrival: residence permit, housing, insurance, a bank account. That is no longer about studying, and it belongs to the state portal of procedures, where each procedure has its own page and its own list of documents.

Where this is stated officially

• Campus France — the official operator for the admission of international students: programmes, application procedure, stages.
• Service-Public — the French state portal of administrative procedures: what to submit, where, and in which order.

How to check the requirement is still current

Both sources have a good habit: procedure pages carry dates. Look at the update date — it matters more than the wording. If a page has none, you are most likely not on the official site but on somebody's retelling.

Housing deserves a separate note: places in student residences are allocated in waves, and whoever is late gets nothing rather than something worse. The stages and dates are in the facts on the country page, with a source and a verification date, precisely because this is the kind of thing that changes every year.