A call to make the books of grievances from the great debate, a “national treasure”, accessible to all citizens

2023-11-15 22:49:45

And “national current treasure”, and “living heritage”, “a photograph of France” which deserves to be made public to all citizens on an Internet site. This is the idea that brought together local elected officials, researchers, data scientists and associations, Wednesday November 15, at the National Assembly, at the invitation of the environmentalist deputy for Drôme Marie Pochon.

The subject ? The 19,899 notebooks of grievances and the 464,748 pages that nearly 2 million French people worked to blacken during the three months of the great national debate (early 2019), while Emmanuel Macron was looking for a way out of the crisis of “yellow vests”. An unprecedented democratic exercise. At the time, the head of state insisted on the necessary “transparency” of the process, committing to ensure that all contributions are “ gradually and regularly put online under a free license », we could then read on the website of the great debate – which is no longer accessible. The idea was to allow the widest possible consultation and appropriation.

Accessible only to researchers

“Five years later, the presidential promise has still not been kept”, deplores Marie Pochon. Or partially. The notebooks have been digitized and are kept in the national archives – around ten researchers have access to them. Their handwritten version lies dormant in the departmental archives.

Read also (an archive from 2020): Article reserved for our subscribers Great debate: in search of lost grievances

” This is not enough “, regrets Fabrice Dalongeville, mayor (without label) of Auger-Saint-Vincent, in Oise, who reports a “ Republican anger that these notebooks are not made public. “This is a new example of contempt”, considers Hervé Despujol, who was one of the lawyers of the “yellow vests” in Bordeaux. The association Rendez les doléances!, represented by Rémy Goubert, has been campaigning for this restitution for years. Seeing a “material of public utility capable of irrigating the democratic debate and working towards the resolution of crises which remain of burning concern”, Marie Pochon intends to wear a “transpartisan resolution” on the subject in the National Assembly.

Also read the column: Article reserved for our subscribers “The government must make all open source “citizen notebooks” available online”

Coordinator of a group of researchers working on the notebooks, sociologist Sabine Ploux regrets that this corpus is ” under-exploited “calling for a “democratic arbitration” regarding its opening. Certain themes are more present in the handwritten notebooks than in the online contributions, rural issues for example. Cédric Szabo, director of the Association of Rural Mayors of France, mentions two major subjects: “access to care” et ” mobility “.

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