A 23-year old student was found dead Sunday in a lake in Saulxures-sur-Moselotte, in the Vosges mountains.
The gendarmes recovered the young man's body after a search that mobilized men and a helicopter. The coroner is conducting an autopsy to determine the precise circumstances of death.
But the general outlines are already known: the deceased was one of about a hundred students who took part in the Nancy dental school's integration weekend.
What's an integration weekend? It's a semi-official, school-sanctioned, student-run effort to incorporate entering students. It can be a lot of fun.
It can also involve binge drinking. I suspect that heavy drinking played a big part in this death, because the deceased was not himself a dental student, which suggests that he sought out the event.
Integration weekends can also involve hazing. In France, hazing traditionally involved the entire incoming class of professional schools –medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering– and military academies. After a 1998 law outlawed hazing, initiation practices were reformed and became integration weekends. Of course, abuses still occur. Hazing doesn't seem to be an issue ere, because the deceased was not a dental student.
This having been said, binge drinking and hazing deserve to mentioned together because in both cases authorities –schools, law enforcement and the courts, parents and student leaders– have turned a blind eye to them. Deaths are ruled accidental, living victims are deemed to have gone through something totally exceptional and rarely speak up.
