In 1802 Madame de Staël was quickly bored by German society. Germans simply took too long to finish their sentences. Back in her Paris salon, she claimed, everyone chattered at once while understanding each other.
The French have been chattering about their democracy for two months. To get some consensus the administration put in place three types of listening post: municipal complaint lists, local citizen debates and a national online platform.
Public complaints’ list
The Cahier de doléances was the complaints’ list used during the French Revolution. In December President Macron asked for a cahier in each town hall. Some 16,000 municipalities responded. Close to a million handwritten pages have been photocopied to be sent to an information analysis consultancy and the national library for archiving.
