200 notebooks stacked, that's a little more than two meters of documents, kept in the Landes departmental archives. The notebooks of grievances, or “cahiers of citizen proposals”, established during Emmanuel Macron’s “Great national debate”, have been stored there for five years. Inspired by work done in Gironde and Corrèze, the Departmental Council of Landes decided to initiate a collaboration with a scientific laboratory from the IEP of Bordeaux to analyze the content of these 200 notebooks, from 200 Landes municipalities.
“Better understand the ills from which our society suffers”
“It is our responsibility to seize it,” believes President Xavier Fortinon, who regrets that the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron – who had nevertheless put in place these collections – ended up “bury relatively permanently”. “It's breaking their word, not to dig, continues Xavier Fortinon. I don't know the content or the material so I can't tell you today what we will do with it. But the words of citizens and their proposals make it possible to better understand the ills from which our society suffers. Why, sometimes, protest movements end, at the ballot box, with a desire to go to extremes. Particularly in our rural territories”.
More or less full notebooks
Since 2019, these 200 notebooks have been stored in a departmental archives room. They are more or less complete, sometimes contain long texts, or simple key words, are signed, or not. Some, like those of Aurice, Rivière-Saas-et-Gourby or Tosse, are downright empty. Nobody contributed to it. Others, for example those of Peyrehorade, Saint-Julien-en-Born or Saint-Sever, will only be able to be consulted by the general public from the year 2070, in the name of the protection of privacy; these are those where the first and last names of the contributors appear. On the other hand, those which are anonymous can be consulted by any citizen, in the departmental archives. To read them, simply present your identity card. Some have already done it, assures the person in charge of the reading room: a curious resident, a few students… no elected officials or political leaders to date.
