Business as usual on the French road network yesterday: in the early morning a coach overturned on the A71 near Vierzon, killing a 15-year-old British schoolboy and badly injuring four other people. French police are considering the possibility that the Scottish driver fell asleep at the wheel.
Then at two in the afternoon, for reasons as yet unknown, a heavy goods lorry ploughed through the central safety barrier of the A7 outside Valence and slammed into a truck travelling in the opposite direction. The drivers, both French, were killed instantly, as was the young daughter of one of them who was riding with him in the cab.
A couple of hours later, the driver of an army truck carrying 20 foreign legionnaires apparently lost control of his vehicle and drove into a tree near Castelnaudary in the south of France. Four young soldiers died and seven others were seriously injured.
These were dramatic accidents, and the one involving the British coach -- which was carrying 38 children and eight adults from Scotland and Essex to a week's canoeing, raft-building, abseiling and windsurfing holiday in southern France -- made headlines here as well as in Britain.
Armand Jung, a French socialist MP, has renewed calls for an outright ban on overnight coach journeys, citing statistics that show the worst road accidents occur between 2am and 7am. "Tour operators just want to save a night's hotel bills, so the passengers sleep on the coach," he said. "Unfortunately, so do the drivers, even if they take shifts at the wheel."
But French road accident statistics show a lot more than that. The busiest weekend of the year, when July holidaymakers returning home cross August vacationers heading south, was relatively accident-free this year thanks to some 400 miles of tailbacks around the country.
The three spring Bank Holiday weekends, however, clocked up 271 dead and more than 5,000 injured. On average, one person (1.037, to be exact) dies every hour on a French road. Since 1945, almost as many French people have been killed in cars as died in the second world war.
In fact, France's roads are more dangerous than those of any other country in Europe except Greece and Portugal, where surfaces tend to be lousy and cars old. In 1998, there were 144 French road fatalities per million inhabitants, compared with 117 Italian, 93 German and 58 British.
Even Isabelle Massin, who heads the government's inter-ministerial working group on road safety, is not optimistic. "The average French person does not take driving offences seriously," she said. "We have never had such tough road legislation, but French society just does not react. Murderous driving is a French disease."
The main cause of this mass slaughter is well known: the French still drink and drive, and they do it more than anyone else in Europe. Alcohol is the most important factor in more than 30% of fatal French road accidents, a proportion that has not changed in 20 years. In Britain over the same period, it has halved.
According to the statistics, the French also gaily ignore speed limits, red lights and stop signs more frequently than all their European neighbours, and somehow neglect to fasten their seatbelts as often.
University sociologists looking for an explanation for such behaviour have seized on one interesting fact: the worst danger on French roads is posed not by the young hothead but by the middle to upper-level executive, aged 35 to 50 and driving a fast, expensive car.
The authoritative daily, Le Monde, recently argued that with people like this -- adult, responsible citizens -- heading the accident statistics, France was clearly grappling with a problem that was about more than just bad driving. Maybe, it suggested, driving represented a subconscious desire by the French to escape from their nannying, ever-present state, to thumb their noses at the forces of law and order. In protestant northern Europe, it suggested, people tended to have a much better developed sense of collective responsibility.
Jean-Pascal Assailly, a psychologist who specialises in driver behaviour, says the French tolerate dangerous driving because "it's a kind of agreed escape valve for violence. In America, everyone has a gun. In France, we speed. We love speeding. Speeding is a positive value in French society, like confidence, competitiveness and a stylish disregard for danger. The car satisfies that".
Sadly, for some 8,500 people a year, that "stylish disregard for danger" means the end of their lives. And until there is the will to change French attitudes, through effective anti-drink driving campaigns, better traffic policing, road safety education from primary school up, and maybe (why not?) a ban on overnight coach journeys, accidents like yesterday's will continue to happen.
