'Main destination' for Schengen multiple entry visa

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You will not be compensated. Even if they made a clear-cut mistake, the standard for compensation is much higher and French immigration law is generally painful to deal with.

But it's not even clear to me that the French consulate disregarded the rules or the handbook. You said they “refused” and you appealed. If I am reading this correctly, they did therefore consider your application and issued a negative decision. Whether that's warranted depends on details you did not disclose but is in any case extremely unlikely to open any right to compensation.

By contrast, if the consulate hadn't considered your application, it would have neither granted nor refused the visa and simply refunded the application fee and invited you to apply to the Netherlands. By considering it and then deciding they were not satisfied with your application, they have “dealt with it“ and fully satisfied the obligations you mentioned in your question.

Incidentally, your comments also suggest you are somewhat confused regarding the rules surrounding multiple-entry visas and where you should apply. The “main destination” rule only applies for a single trip. Multiple entry visas fall under a separate set of rules; you are supposed to apply to a country to which you have a need to travel regularly (e.g. for professional or family reasons - not coincidentally, the example from the handbook is about family trips, not repeated touristic visits).

Consulates do frequently issue them more broadly for convenience reasons, especially to UK residents, but you are not free to chain together what are in effect unrelated trips, tally the days and declare one country to be your main destination. Under a strict reading of the rules, a consulate is perfectly entitled to demand that you apply for a single entry visa for the first trip, come back and then apply for another single entry visa for the next one, etc.

As distressful as it might be, you simply won't be able to get anything out of the French state for all this.

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