Having a before-dinner cocktail or apéritif with friends is as French as baguettes and brie. So when groups of teenagers and young adults started using Facebook to organize giant outdoor cocktail parties across France, it seemed like a bit of innocent fun.
But the fun turned deadly in the western city of Nantes this month at a cocktail party that attracted 9,000 people to the city centre. One man who had consumed at least 10 ounces of liquor fell off a bridge and died. Fifty-seven people ended up in hospital, many with alcohol poisoning. Another 40 were arrested for drunkenness, theft or violence.
Now, French authorities are scrambling to try to contain “le binge drinking” – a problem they say has spiralled out of control.
“Our children are obviously suffering,” said Marc-Philippe Daubresse, the French minister responsible for youth. “They are expressing their unhappiness more and more by turning to alcohol.”
Binge drinking is a relatively new phenomenon in France, where people traditionally have grown up learning to drink in moderation at home. The government has tried to keep it in check by passing new laws that raised the legal drinking age from 16 to 18 and put strict limits on events like happy hour. But those measures seem to have had little effect.
Anonymous organizers put out the call for the first giant cocktail party, or apéro géant, last August, on a local Internet networking site in the southern city of Marseilles. The idea was to set a record for the biggest giant aperitif ever. About 2,200 people gathered with their picnics and bottles of wine, beer and liquor in a public square near City Hall.
Last November, a group of Facebookers took up the challenge with an invitation to an even bigger giant aperitif in Nantes. That party, in the city’s central square, attracted 3,000 people. The city sent dozens of social and health-care workers to try to make sure no one got hurt, but about 50 people were found unconscious and several had to be rescued after falling into the Loire River.
There have been 56 apéros géants in France since, each bigger than the last and all of them in public places. The organizers rarely come forward and since there is no way to know how many people will show up, each has presented potentially greater problems for authorities trying to maintain public order without infringing on citizens’ rights to gather in a public place.
Experts on youth and alcohol policy say binge drinking has moved south from Germany and the United Kingdom as the traditionally strong family has lost its central role in French society. They admit they have found no effective way to stop binge drinking and say that short of measures such as prohibition, they doubt they ever will.
Their only option may be to come up with policies to try to limit the damage, says Mark Burton Page, who is in charge of a Europe-wide project looking for the best way to control binge drinking.
Mr. Burton Page, 24, says the French coastal city of Brest had some success when it sent an array of social workers and mediators to a giant cocktail party there this spring. People still fought and vandalized public property, “but what they didn’t have was people fighting the police, which would have been quite bad,” he says.
After holding emergency meetings last week, the French government decided against a ban on giant cocktail parties. Instead, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said organizers would have to apply to their local city hall for permission three days before a party and promise that minors could not buy alcohol. He said organizers would also be held responsible for the cost of cleaning up.
The police in Paris took a tougher approach to a Facebook call for the mother of all giant cocktail parties in the Champ de Mars park at the foot of the Eiffel Tower on Sunday. According to the website, 50,000 people were expected.
The Paris police banned the event and set up their own Facebook page that reminded potential apéro-goers that drinking is illegal in the Champ de Mars. On Sunday night, they sent hundreds of police officers to the park charged with searching bags and seizing alcohol.
Almost no one showed up for the party. Those who were there said they just came to enjoy the good weather. A new Facebook page is calling for another apéro géant in Paris this weekend.
