Translating the printemps érable

Pierre Breteau              June 24, 2012

Original French Text: http://www.franceinfo.fr/societe/les-parisiens-manifestent-en-soutien-aux-etudiants-quebecois-655879-2012-06-24

On the occasion of Quebec’s national holiday, St-Jean, between 200 and 300 people marched in Paris today. They mean to offer their support to Quebec’s students who are battling against rise of university tuition fees. 

PHOTO CAPTION: As in Montreal, protesters in Paris took out their casseroles and wooden spoons. 

In the rain and under low-lying clouds, Spanish, English, Russion or French can be heard being spoken in a multitude of accents. This march in support of “fighting” québécois students brought together all kinds of nationalities. The hundreds of demonstrators strolled about, their red squares pinned to their shirts, like in Montreal.

The march, called for by organizers SoDé Québec (Solidarité Démocratique), moved peacefully between the Porte Dauphine and the Human Rights square at Trocadéro. As in la Belle Province, they are asking for the “preservation of the accessibility of education” but also “the right to protest”, challenged by the Quebec government with their law 78, qualified as a “special law”. 

PHOTO CAPTION: In France too, protesters “don’t give a damn about the special law” [transl. note: popular protest chant at demonstrations: La loi spéciale, on s’en câlisse.]

The parisian demonstrators took advantage of the occasion to “denounce police violence” in Quebec. In the march were found all the attributes of a Montreal protest: casseroles, wooden spoons and blue and white flags donning the fleur de lys. 

Last Friday, after two weeks of relative tranquility, at least twenty thousand students and citizens from all walks of life were again in the streets of Montreal and Quebec, across the Atlantic. 

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Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable.

*Translating the printemps érable is a volunteer collective attempting to balance the English media’s extremely poor coverage of the student conflict in Québec by translating media that has been published in French into English. These are amateur translations; we have done our best to translate these pieces fairly and coherently, but the final texts may still leave something to be desired. If you find any important errors in any of these texts, we would be very grateful if you would share them with us at translatingtheprintempsderable@gmail.com. Please read and distribute these texts in the spirit in which they were intended; that of solidarity and the sharing of information.