A CRACKDOWN on drink-driving in France entered new territory yesterday when a couple went on trial for allowing an intoxicated dinner guest to drive away from their home and cause a crash that killed him and four others.

The case of Angélique and Jean-Sebastien Fraisse, who face up to five years in jail and a £50,000 fine, is being closely watched because a conviction could open the way to a flood of prosecutions and civil actions for indirect involvement in drink-driving.

Safety campaigners are hailing the case as a sign that the state is getting serious with the alcoholic driving that plagues France. Motoring orgnisations are depicting the Fraisses as victims of a new “blame culture”.

The defendants’ situation is particularly poignant because they met at a rehabilitation centre after they had both been victims of drink-drivers. Mme Fraisse, 29, has been confined to a wheelchair since being run over at 16. Her husband, 30, an unemployed metal worker, recovered from his injuries.

The couple are charged with “failing to prevent a crime or lesser offence causing bodily injury”. The prosecution arose from a night in February 2000 when Frédéric Colin drove away at 3.45am from dinner at the Fraisse’s home at Maizières-les-Metz in Lorraine.

He went the wrong way up a motorway and collided with a car carrying a family of five. M Colin died, along with the parents and two children in the other car. The grandparents of a surviving five-year-old boy applied for proceedings against the Fraisses when Colin was found to have a blood alcohol level of 2.4 grams a litre. The legal maximum is 0.5. An investigating judge later dropped the case, but it was reinstated by an appeal court.

The Fraisses said that they did all they could to prevent their friend driving home. “We tried to take his keys but he wouldn’t let us,” Mme Fraisse said. “I suggested that he spend the night with us, but he didn’t want to. The prosecutors think I should have called the police but that is not realistic. I understand the suffering of the grandparents of the victims. I also hated the reckless driver who made me a paraplegic at 16. I have started having atrocious nightmares in which I see car accidents and I wake up screaming.”

Bruno Zillig, the couple’s lawyer, said that they were faulted for not notifying the police after their friend left. “This type of denunciation does not exist in French law,” he said. “This is the first time that people are being asked to be responsible for others’ behaviour.” The couple could be found guilty only if they knew that their friend intended to cause bodily harm, which was clearly not the case, he added. Lawyers for the victims’ family said that they had brought the case to prove the principle of responsibility.

Geneviève Jurgensen, a leading road safety campaigner, called for a guilty verdict that would set a precedent, even if the sentence was light. “It is a good thing that the case was brought. It will open a debate on the question of whether we are responsible for the acts of others. Should this couple have done more to prevent that man from taking his car?”

Christiane Cellier, the president of another road safety foundation, said: “It is high time that everyone realised that even if we do not drive while drunk, we are responsible if we let others do so.”

French road deaths have dropped by 15 per cent over the past two years in a national drive to curb France’s culture of dangerous driving. But the death toll remains one of Europe’s highest.

The authorities have been displaying a new toughness. A woman in Lyons was fined £14 last month for smoking a cigarette while driving because she had only one hand on the wheel. A café owner in Burgundy was given a two-month suspended prison sentence last year for “complicity in drunk-driving” because he had served a bottle of wine to a client who was intoxicated. The man later caused a fatal accident.

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