Le Soleil Paywall: How to Read Quebec City's Le Soleil for Free

Le Soleil is the French-language daily of Quebec City. Founded in 1896, it covers the provincial capital, the National Assembly, the regions east of Montreal, arts and science, and its columnists on personal finance and politics are read across Quebec. Since 2019 it has belonged to the Coopérative nationale de l'information indépendante, known as CN2i, the cooperative group formed when the former Groupe Capitales Médias papers were rescued, and its sister titles include Le Nouvelliste, La Tribune, Le Quotidien and La Voix de l'Est. Le Soleil stopped daily print in 2020 and is now digital-first, so its website is the newspaper, and a reader who follows a link from social media or a search result soon meets the subscription prompt. It should not be confused with Le Soleil of Dakar, the Senegalese daily of the same name, which is the one that appears first in most digital newsstands. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Le Soleil paywall works

Le Soleil runs a metered paywall on the Poool platform, a French paywall vendor used by a number of francophone publishers. As far as we can tell a non-subscriber can open a number of articles before the body of each new one is replaced by a prompt to subscribe, and the count is stored in a browser cookie. We have not verified the size of the allowance or the current subscription price, so we do not quote one.

The gate is enforced in the browser. The article text is delivered in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then decides whether to show it or to swap it for the subscription box. A reader that fetches the page without running that script receives the complete article. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why that distinction matters, and Le Soleil sits on the softer side of it.

Our tests on 30 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• An 832-word Le Soleil personal-finance column by Daniel Germain, "Payer sa carte de crédit: se presser, mais pas trop", loaded in full, all 20 paragraphs.
• A 627-word Le Soleil arts piece, "Le feu roulant de P.-O. Forget", loaded in full, all 18 paragraphs.
• An 837-word Le Soleil science piece asking whether speed bumps work, "Les dos d'âne, est-ce que ça marche?", loaded in full, all 18 paragraphs.

Read a Le Soleil article in full

• Copy the article link from your browser's address bar. Le Soleil links begin lesoleil.com, followed by the section or date and the headline as a slug.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and full text.

The reader shows the article in French, exactly as Le Soleil published it. If you want it in English, your browser's built-in translation works on the reader page in the normal way.

Other approaches

• Newsletters. As far as we can tell Le Soleil sends free email bulletins that summarise the day's stories and link to them. The links still lead to the paywall, but the summaries themselves are free.
• Library access. Take care with digital newsstands: the Le Soleil listed on PressReader is the Senegalese paper, not the Quebec one, so check your library's catalogue before relying on it. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec holds back issues of the Quebec City paper.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets the count, though any pieces reserved for subscribers stay closed.
• Related free sources. La Presse, Montreal's largest French-language daily, has been a nonprofit since 2018 and is free to read. Radio-Canada's news site is also free, and National Assembly proceedings and Quebec court rulings are published without charge.

How it compares with other Quebec papers

Le Soleil's neighbours fall into two camps. Le Devoir, Montreal's independent daily, runs a metered paywall of its own and loads in full through the reader, with a guide of its own. La Presse dropped its paywall when it became a nonprofit and needs no reader at all. We have not tested Le Soleil's CN2i sister titles or the Quebecor tabloids Le Journal de Québec and Le Journal de Montréal, so this guide makes no claim about them. The full list of sites that work is kept current.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Le Soleil was saved from closure by its own employees, who still own it through the cooperative, and it has no print edition to fall back on. If you read its coverage of the capital and its columnists every week, a digital subscription is the right way to keep that newsroom going.