I’ve been working on\u00a0a paper about the failure of left-wing internationalism at the “European counter-summits” (at least the two that I was able to observe\u00a0in 2010 and 2011), and I’ve gotten interested in\u00a0this love letter to the organizers of\u00a0the 2011 Dijon counter-G8 university summit. A student left it on the ground in marker as they left the event, which was politically pretty unsuccessful, as my paper explains.
\n
\nThe letter reads as follows:<\/p>\n
Camarades, merci de votre accueil, c’\u00e9tait sympa, on a bien ri, ici, il fait beau, pour une fois!<\/p>\n
Votre fac c’est joli (si on regarde Bron) mais c’est un peu mort quand m\u00eame. C’est vrai qu’on peut pas tout avoir. Si vous\u00a0venez pas le 14, je sais o\u00f9 vous habitez.<\/p>\n
Je n’oublierais pas de vous inscrire sur le ML de XYZ.<\/p>\n
Voil\u00e0. Je me casse et je rentre \u00e0 ma maison. Gros Bisous.\u00a0\ud83d\udc98<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Which\u00a0one could translate loosely as:<\/p>\n
Comrades, thanks for having us, it was\u00a0chill, we laughed a lot here,\u00a0for once it was nice out.<\/p>\n
Your campus is pretty (if you\u00a0look at Bron) but there’s\u00a0not\u00a0much going on here.\u00a0I guess you can’t have everything. If you don’t show up on the 14th, I know where you live.<\/p>\n
I won’t forget to add you to XYZ’s mailing list.<\/p>\n
Voil\u00e0. I’m out of here and I’m going home now. Big hugs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This text\u00a0is more or less straightforward, though there are always a few references that are hard to figure out from a distance. For instance, I think the comparison to Bron must be referring to\u00a0the Universit\u00e9 de Lyon 2’s campus\u00a0in Bron<\/a> (a suburb of Lyon); I haven’t seen that university, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was indeed less pretty than the Dijon campus. In any event, details aside, I like this text because of the obvious affection and warmth it shows among French student activists.<\/p>\n
But there’s\u00a0another part of it that I find more puzzling: the huge red writing overlaid on the letter that says DIJON VOUS CRAIGNEZ.<\/p>\n
Craindre<\/em> is the French\u00a0equivalent of the English verb\u00a0to fear<\/em>. Normally it’s\u00a0a transitive verb, and if it were conjugated in the third person here (Dijon vous craint<\/em>), the sentiment would be something like\u00a0“Dijon fears you,” that is,\u00a0“Dijon is afraid of you, the protesters.”\u00a0But here it’s\u00a0conjugated in the second person plural, craignez<\/em>, so\u00a0vous<\/em>\u00a0has to be the subject rather than the object. Apparently\u00a0there is a more colloquial sense of craindre<\/em>\u00a0that’s\u00a0intransitive \u2014 Larousse<\/a>\u00a0glosses this\u00a0as “ne pas \u00eatre \u00e0 la hauteur de la situation, \u00eatre nul, mauvais, d\u00e9testable<\/em>,” which comes to “not being up to a\u00a0situation, being good for nothing, detestable.”<\/p>\n
So maybe if Dijon is being weirdly addressed in the second person as vous<\/em>,\u00a0we could understand this as something like “Dijon, you’re no good,” or even “Dijon, you suck.”<\/p>\n
Which\u00a0might indeed be a fitting sentiment for someone who had just been to a\u00a0disappointing, heavily-policed protest.<\/p>\n
But I wonder if any Francophones\u00a0can shed more light on this?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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