Pengam, Manon

The citizens’ notebooks of the Great National Debate (2019): from a depoliticising presidential gesture to citizen (re)politicisation - 2024.


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‪The article focuses on a participatory mechanism: the Great National Debate (Grand Débat National – GDN), and one of its modalities, the citizens’ free expression notebooks. Proposed by the executive in early 2019 following the Yellow Vests social movement to – officially – record suggestions made by civil society, the books are part of a historical and discursive memory linked to the Ancien Régime. In the context of the GDN, we hypothesise a double movement of depoliticisation/(re)politicisation: a movement marked both by a depoliticising presidential gesture, and by a citizen-led repoliticisation of the mechanism, whose expression we grasp from a discourse analysis perspective, through the development of an integrated model.‪