In a short video address shared on his Twitter account on Monday October 3, Emmanuel Macron returned to the great national debate. A vast consultation of citizens launched in 2018, in response to the crisis of yellow vests, which had passed in particular by the opening of notebooks of grievances in all the town halls of France. At the time, more than 16,000 of these registers had been made available to citizens, and almost 2 million online contributions had been collected. All that for nothing, according to Marine Le Pen. “Where are the yellow vests’ notebooks of grievances?” asked the leader of the National Rally deputies on BFMTV on Tuesday, October 4. According to them these notebooks are “in a trash can of sorts since they have never been used, they have never been made public, nothing has ever come out of these notebooks of grievances.”
There is a bit of truth and a bit of falsehood in the assertion of the former presidential candidate. What is true is that these notebooks were to be put online, on the website of the great debate so that everyone could consult them and that today this is still not the case. On this site, there are indeed the summaries of the contributions on the various themes, the reports of the local meetings but no trace of the famous notebooks.
But then where are they? The originals, in paper version, are kept in the archives of each department. For example, to consult the notebook opened at the town hall of Brest, you can go to the departmental archives of Finistère. There is also a digitized version of each of them at the BNF, the National Library of France. But these are only photographs of the pages: not very practical for searching for a specific word. Another problem is that some contributions include their author’s personal data (name, social security number, tax number, etc.) and are therefore not accessible to the public.
However, we cannot say that nothing came out of the great debate. There are many measures adopted by the government that can be directly linked to this consultation. The abolition of the ENA, the possibility for the departments to return to 90 km / h, the multiplication of “France service houses”, these one-stop shops which accompany you in your administrative procedures, the Citizens’ Convention on the climate – even if it was hotly contested thereafter-, or even the creation of new sub-prefectures announced by Emmanuel Macron on Monday. But indeed, many other measures resulting from the great debate have (at this stage) been completely set aside. The restoration of the ISF, the taking into account of the white vote, the referendum of popular initiative, or the reduction in the number of parliamentarians in particular.