From the Greve Front

Right, so I watched the last hour of "Bend it Like Beckham" with my Premiere students because there was only three of them from my group that showed up. We went with the rest of the students, combined with others from another class, to the teacher's classroom and I got paid to sit and watch a movie in English.

Here's a translation I made of this article from Le Monde describing what's happening:

Hundreds of thousands of youth march against the CPE

The youth mobilised against the CPE have maintained pressure on the government, this Thursday, March 16th, through dozens of manifestations that have brought together 247,500 to 500,000 people, according to our sources, but have occasionally been followed by violent incidents, particularly in the Latin Quarter in Paris.

By way of comparison, at the time of the first large days of mobilisation against the First Job Contract (CPE) – presented by the Prime Minister exactly two months ago – between 218,000 and 400,000 people marched February 7th, and between 396,000 according to the police and 1 million according to the CGT March 7th. But these mobilisations were comprised of both students and workers.

Faced by this mobilisation, Dominique de Villepin declared himself “open to dialogue” within the framework of the law to better the provisions of the CPE, and has indicated that he would receive the presidents of the universities on Friday.

On the national level, the mobilisations against the CPE have often been large: 25,000 people in Bourdeaux according to organizers (6,800 according to police reports), 15,000 in Marseilles (7,000), 12?000 in Lille (6,500), 10,000 in Clermont-Ferrand (4,000) and in Angers (4,200), 8,000 in Lyon (5,000).

Gérard Aschieri, secretary general of the FSU, Principle Federation of Education, and the president of Unef, the United Federation of Students, Bruno Julliard, have found the same words to hail “a real tidal wave of youth.”