“We demand that the Great Debate Complaint Books be placed on a national platform”

LOn April 15, 2019, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, had to appear on television to fulfill his “duty to follow” after organizing a major national debate. Unfortunately, the fire at the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary prevented this key moment from happening and pushed back on the President’s promise to make the list of grievances public. Where are we five years from now?

Notre Dame is on the verge of being restored to its former glory, but to the chagrin of the French, who are also a “national treasure”, it has not yet been the subject of major national restitution. However, going into one of the 101 departmental archives and studying the complaint books of 2019 is a real democratic change.

There, all the people express themselves: we find proposals for democracy, health, public spending, ecological transition, but also the demand to end wage inequality, the drive for fair taxes, sensitive and reasonable calls for public services, which are happening again. A guarantor of equality and justice, bitter life stories, cries of grief… This is a testimony of a living area that urgently needs to be heard, because, in a way, it represents the “ideal political program for Georgia. French”.

Today, these complaints and the ideas they convey are not available to the women and men who wrote them. In the digital age, mediation of access and relevant information is a fundamental pillar of our democracy. Attached to the values ​​of transparency and equal access to public archives, which are essential for trust between citizens and elected officials, but also to the duty of responsibility and memory, we ask for complaints to be placed online on a national platform. A digital platform that allows reading across the country, department, or even municipality.

Use this democratic vessel

The availability of this corpus is not anecdotal. This is a condition of using the democratic pot of 19,899 citizen notebooks containing 217,910 individual contributions. The complaints also include 15,420 letters and e-mails, the same number of individual contributions submitted directly to the Élysée or Matignon, but also 11,258 reports of local work carried out during local initiative meetings. Ensuring the availability of these thousands of contributions means recognizing their true value. This is to restore the dignity of citizens’ speech.