Alexandre Farel’s suicidal crisis

Alexandre Farel’s suicidal crisis is the concealed rupture beneath his exceptional academic record: after the military training imposed at École polytechnique overwhelmed him, he attempted suicide, then returned to the world of elite competition determined that employers should never learn what had happened. Years later, preparing for interviews at Stanford, he still cannot describe that episode—or speak openly about his mother’s cancer—as the defining hardship of his life. The crisis thus persists not only as a past act but as a secret that governs what Alexandre believes he can disclose.

Achievement and the breaking point

Alexandre’s crisis emerges against a life organized around performance. A precociously capable student, he had excelled from primary school onward, attended a celebrated Parisian lycée, entered the most sought-after scientific preparatory class, and joined École polytechnique at nineteen, third in his year. He later secured a place at Stanford, where he had been studying for six months. This public record of distinction stands in sharp contrast to his description as an overly sensitive, withdrawn, shy child and to his experience in preparatory school, where he constantly felt challenged and defeated.

A few weeks after arriving at École polytechnique, Alexandre suffered a severe downturn. He hated the compulsory first month of military instruction: its abrupt discipline, new brutality, demanding hierarchy, and daily exercises at the La Courtine military camp under superiors he despised. After two years of intensive intellectual work in preparatory school, he was suddenly required to become a body in motion, continually tested through physical effort. Three weeks into the training, he attempted suicide. The change of regime—from achievement through study to submission to military discipline—forms the immediate setting of the crisis; the narrative does not reduce it to a single diagnosis.

Secrecy and institutional pressure

Alexandre was hospitalized in a state of complete exhaustion and distress, then left with the assurance that no one would find out. The secrecy mattered to him because reputation could be made quickly, and prospective employers were already identifying future entrepreneurs through LinkedIn. His parents were present throughout this period and, the account adds, overprotected him. Their support offered care, but it did not dissolve his fear that a history of mental collapse would disqualify him in the professional world he hoped to enter.

The crisis is placed within a wider culture of pressure in elite schools. In less than two years, three students at grandes écoles had died by suicide; the account describes suicide as a major taboo in institutions that produced the country’s elite, despite measures organized to prevent students from taking their lives. At American universities, even long-haired white Polish sheepdogs were made available to offer students affection and comfort. These details set Alexandre’s private breakdown against institutions that recognized the danger of pressure yet surrounded it with silence and remedial gestures.

Recovery, service, and performance

After his month at the military camp, Alexandre undertook a six-month placement at a high-performing boarding school in southern France, where he taught intensive mathematics to gifted students from disadvantaged backgrounds. He initially chose the placement in part because he thought its social dimension would impress future recruiters, especially in the United States, where diversity was a significant concern. But the experience exceeded that calculation: although his own social world had been confined to a few Parisian districts and two regions of France, he came to value the work and kept in touch with students he had taught.

On a later visit to France, he helped those students polish their résumés and write applications to international universities. His attention to their limited access to paid guidance—some could ask their parents for money or help, while others could not—echoes the care with which he had fashioned his own record. Alexandre had treated his résumé like an elite athlete treats his body. He now rehearsed oral interviews in English, using questions prerecorded on his computer; he had grown fluent through lessons from early childhood, private tutoring, regular travel to England and the United States, and expensive summer camps at Oxford and Harvard. His preparation presents recovery not as release from the performance system but as a return to it, now equipped with a socially valued account of service.

The ordeal he cannot name

When a recruiter’s practice question asks for his greatest ordeal, Alexandre sees no safe answer. The honest one would be his suicide attempt, which he believes would disqualify him. He considers whether to talk about being paralyzed by the possibility of losing his mother since her illness, but rejects that too: he cannot say the word “cancer” without trembling and does not want to speak about his mother. The interview exercise turns the crisis into a test of self-presentation. He is not merely withholding a past event; he is trying to construct an employable self from which both the attempt and his fear of bereavement have been removed.

The concealment has a further consequence: Alexandre’s experience of his mother’s illness remains entangled with his unspoken account of his own ordeal. While practicing, he worries that speaking too much about her will make him seem dependent and calls himself, in effect, a son too attached to his mother. His inability to tell the story is therefore not simple forgetfulness. The interview demands a polished narrative of adversity, but the truth he carries is precisely what he considers professionally unusable.

Loss, memory, and the limits of control

Alexandre often rereads Steve Jobs’s 2005 address to Stanford students, given when Jobs knew he had cancer. Its reflections on death as an agent of change and on the brevity of life are among the few lessons Alexandre feels he has drawn from his own ordeals. The words do not resolve his fear; instead, they give it a framework. His mother’s illness makes mortality immediate, while the speech insists that everything can change at any moment.

A later recollection identifies his breakup with Yasmina Vasseur as the ordeal he would give recruiters. Their intense relationship began in spring 2015, during Alexandre’s internship in the economy minister’s office, and ended after Yasmina discovered she was pregnant, had an abortion, and left him. Alexandre told the psychiatrist he had consulted since his suicide attempt that the breakup felt as though blood were coming from every pore of his skin. For six months, he swung between total despair and a façade of serenity, and months later he had still not recovered. The earlier attempt and the later heartbreak are distinct crises, but both expose the same divide: outward composure and achievement on one side, distress that Alexandre cannot safely convert into a public account on the other.