Death by drowning of boys aged between 10 and 14 years

E910 Accidental drowning and submersion

E954 Suicide and self-inflicted injury by submersion (drowning)

E964 Assault by submersion (drowning)

E984 Submersion (drowning), undetermined whether accidentally or purposely inflicted

Death by drowning and accidental submersion of boys aged between 10 and 14 years

The most serious flaw in my methodology, however, was that neither the lady from INED nor the lady from INSERM believed that it would be possible to track these statistics back to the individuals concerned.

I rang the British Foreign Office because I was trying to understand how the French bureaucracy dealt with death. Its filtering system was immaculate, and I failed to penetrate beyond assistant level in the department dealing with Deaths Abroad. However, the assistant was able to supply me with a list of undertakers specializing in international repatriation from France. I decided to settle for that.

The receptionist at the international undertakers was very forthcoming, and told me that when her company repatriated a corpse from France the job details were handled by the insurance company or by the French undertakers. The main French company’s representative, a very practical, direct man who spoke extraordinarily fast French, explained patiently that coroners did not exist in France, contrary to the advice of my dictionary, which translated coroner as ‘coroner’, presumably with a rolled ‘r’ and a rising inflection at the end. This explained why everyone I had so far interrogated had been completely mystified by my use of the term. Instead, he assured me, the police or the gendarmerie would file an initial report on a suspicious death for the Procureur de la République, the Public Prosecutor of that particular town or region. The Procureur would then decide whether to give permission for burial, or request a further investigation. The Procureur’s files are not open to the public; not even the undertaker is allowed to know the details of the death of its clients. The death certificate, he told me, is then kept on file at the town hall. There are some 36,000 individual communities, with their own town halls, throughout France and he laughed uproariously at the thought that I hoped to track down a thirteen-year-old boy with only a first name via this method. His laughter would return to haunt me during the months of research that followed.

When I reviewed my progress after the morning’s telephone calls, I realized that apart from learning that there was no such thing as a coroner in France, I had succeeded only in making a fool of myself.

Despite the absence of a coroner in the French system, I contacted one in London to find out about the procedure following death in France. An officer readily and helpfully explained that he often had to deal with deaths of UK citizens abroad, so he knew a little about it. He confirmed that there were no coroners in France, but rather an examining magistrate, the Procureur. He said that the French carried out far fewer autopsies and investigated incidents less thoroughly than in the UK. He then paused and added as an afterthought that perhaps the English investigate things too thoroughly. Anyhow, he was happy to show me a file dealing with a death in France, so that I could familiarize myself with the process and note any useful addresses and terminology. I thought it would provide a gentle introduction to the subject, a springboard from which to leap into unknown waters, so I accepted his invitation to come in and talk about the matter further.