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The public institution L’Épide (L’Etablissement public d’insertion de la Defense) is a public provision for integration into the workplace for young people without any diploma or other qualification1. Its uniqueness is putting social and educational measures into a boarding school realm with a military ideology. Making L’Epide an object of sociological enquiry allows us to understand why young people choose this constricting environment and why they join it. In order to do this, we draw upon material from the biography of an Epidean to understand socialisation into the Epide and to construct a typology of Epideans at the crossroads of military vocation and employment plans. We can see that keeping within the system cannot simply be put down to seeking a military career, because it depends on the conditions under which people dropped out of schooling and the tension between vocational and work logics.