Bonjour binge drinking

In the northern French town of Abbéville it was two 16-year-old girls, found unconscious in their school toilets after feting a birthday with the help of four cherry-flavoured alcopops each and a bottle of vodka. In the Ain département of central France, it was an 18-year-old student, found dead in his bed by his father following a Friday night spent celebrating the end of his baccalauréat.

And last week, in Paimpol on the Atlantic coast, it was a 16-year-old girl on a family camping holiday, hospitalised with an alcohol-induced coma after drinking three litres of spirits with a couple of friends. Her father is suing the supermarket that sold them the alcohol.

For years, the French have dismissed out-of-control teenage drinking, like hooliganism, as "a British disease". France, it was said (by the French but by us, too), had the right approach to alcohol and kids: start them off young, in early adolescence, with a glass of watered-down wine at family meals. That way they grow up understanding that a drop of Burgundy or Bordeaux over dinner is, generally speaking, preferable to 15 pints down the pub. France, we thought, had mastered the art of moderate drinking: being falling-down drunk was neither cool nor sexy; alcohol was just one of the many components of the great Gallic social experience; and leglessness was not synonymous with fun.

That did not, of course, mean that France did not (and does not) have problems with alcohol: while the influence of the wine lobby has left much of the nation in clear denial, a 2005 government study unambiguously classified 5 million French people as "excessive drinkers", and 2 million as chronically alcohol-dependent, estimating that booze was behind a third of all custodial sentences in France and more than half of all domestic violence. One way or another, the report said, alcohol is directly responsible for 23,000 deaths a year across the Channel, and indirectly for a further 22,000.

But this was long-term, adult drinking; a pattern of abuse and dependence in a minority - albeit a significant one - established, in most cases, over years of vinous overconsumption. Until very recently, beyond a few drunken British and German holidaymakers, the French had simply not been exposed to the phenomenon of young people setting out deliberately to drink themselves drunk. As recently as 2006, the psychologist Marie Choquet could tell a national conference on alcohol and drug abuse that alcohol was "culturally integrated" in France, and that such practices could never take root there.

Now, however, newspaper articles and TV documentaries are full of anguished reports on la biture express and la défonce minute, Gallic neologisms that appear to be fighting a losing battle against that very Anglo-Saxon import, le binge drinking.

"It is becoming an issue," says Dr Philippe Batel, an alcohol specialist at the Beaujon hospital in Clichy. "Statistics are never completely clear, of course, but it's clear there is a significant change in behaviour under way - there's now a real trend among French youths to drink more regularly, usually at weekends; to drink more; to drink outside, in the streets; and to drink in order to get smashed. All that is really quite new in France, and it corresponds quite closely to the British definition of binge drinking."

It has not yet, experts agree, attained the proportions seen in Britain or other, mainly northern European countries. But if you believe the statistics, it does indeed seem to be climbing at an alarming rate: according to a recent government survey of 30,000 French 17-year-olds, of the 12% who qualify as regular drinkers, 26% confess to getting regularly drunk, compared with 19% five years ago. Worse, while alcohol consumption among the population in general is falling steadily, fully half of all French teenagers now report having been drunk at least once in the previous month.

The figures have prompted the health minister, Roselyne Bachelot, to announce a string of measures aimed at curbing binge drinking among the young. A package of bills to be presented to parliament at the end of the summer recess and scheduled to come into force next year will, the minister told the Journal du Dimanche recently, include the "total prohibition of alcohol sales to minors", and a ban on alcohol consumption in the immediate proximity of schools. She also plans to end "open-bar" events, common at student parties, at which guests pay a flat fee in advance to drink as much as they want. (At present, French teenagers can buy beer and wine in cafes, bars and supermarkets from the age of 16; spirits are reserved for the over-18s.)

The ministry has also launched a hard-hitting advertising campaign, Boire trop (or Drinking too much) featuring a video of an apparently innocent beach party that, way too many drinks later, ends up in a drowning, a rape, a violent fight and someone collapsing in a coma. (Though the main response from France's youth to the clip on YouTube, unfortunately, has been a chorus of enthusiastic praise for the catchy Brazilian soundtrack by Silvano Michelino, and of regret that there seems to be nowhere that allows one to download the song for free.)

Some towns, especially those with high student populations, have clearly decided not to wait. To the outrage of bar and nightclub owners already hard hit by France's January 1 ban on smoking in public places, the university town of Nantes has banned happy hours, after two students stumbled out of a cafe and fell straight into the river Loire. The local council in Rennes, which is home to two major universities, has taken the even more radical step of buying up a number of bars on the cobbled Rue Saint Michel, better known to locals as the Rue de la Soif (Thirst Street) and turning them - among other things - into a DVD outlet and an upmarket restaurant.

So what's gone wrong? What has prompted France's youth to turn from sensible tipplers to full-on booze abusers? Experts, predictably, are as divided about what lies behind the problem as they are about how best to tackle it. Etienne Apaire, who heads up an inter-ministerial body aimed at combating both drug and alcohol addiction, has told French media that he believes the phenomenon is simply part of a "globalisation of behaviour" evident in all 27 EU member states, in which teenagers increasingly seek "instant intoxication" as an end in itself.

A leading social economist, Jean-Michel Reynaud, says the drinks industry is largely to blame. "It bears a major and absolute responsibility," he told Libération. The re-emergence in France of mainly British-made pre-mixed alcopops, which first appeared in the mid-1990s but were so heavily taxed by the then Socialist government that they were largely withdrawn from the market, "has made drunkenness among young people commonplace. The ever-mounting pressure to consume is meticulously organised."

Batel says a combination of both the above is probably the cause, plus "an ever-increasing pressure to perform" that encourages "weekend excess". But some influential figures, including government health advisers, are even beginning to question the wisdom of allowing children as young as nine or 10 to develop a taste for wine, arguing that this "authorises drinking" and noting that recent studies have thrown up convincing evidence that those who start drinking before they reach 18 are far more likely to consume to excess as adults.

Suggestions about how best to combat the latest Anglo-Saxon scourge are equally varied. One educationalist, Frédérique Gardien, says French parents have to get tough again; they no longer give the kind of strict guidelines they used to and that teenagers need, he says. But if many teenage drinkers seem to be cynical about the government's very un-French proposals, arguing that they can always find an adult to buy booze for them, most experts seem to approve - although some fear outright bans on teenagers are often counter-productive.

"The signal sent by a total ban on the sale of alcohol to minors is very important in a country like France, which has always tended to deny that alcohol can be harmful," says Batel. "But there needs to be a strong preventive strategy to accompany it. We need to be able to discuss openly with young people, without taboos, the dangers and the attractions of alcohol." Otherwise the Saturday-night city-centre streets of sensible, wine-sipping France could soon be looking the same way as those in Britain, parts of Scandinavia and eastern Europe and, most recently, Spain. Bonne chance, mes amis.