The cahiers de doléances, reopened

In 1789 France wrote down its grievances, parish by parish. This is the same register, open again.

The original cahiers de doléances were filled in by ordinary people in the months before the Revolution: what was wrong with their lives, and what they wanted changed. Their force was in being read together — a thousand private troubles turning out to be one shared condition, and the people carrying it turning out to be the majority. That is how a complaint becomes a political force. They were collected and carried upward, and they are still readable today.

It happened again in the winter of 2018. The gilets jaunes rose first — the first revolt along class lines France had seen in decades, made of households on about 1,700 euros a month, a third below the national median, from every political direction at once and many of them long done with voting. Then the registers were opened, and not by the government: in December the rural mayors put them on the desk themselves. Around twenty thousand cahiers gathered some 218,000 contributions.

Two hundred and thirty years apart, the same act: not a political camp with a programme, but a class writing down what its life had become — reaching for a register because nothing else represented it.

They were collected, digitised — and sealed for fifty years, on the grounds that nobody had asked the writers whether their words could be published. Yet the same consultation's online platform took 1.9 million contributions and published them at once as open data, and the government's own dataset page promised the town hall registers would follow, anonymised, under the same licence. They never did. Typed into a website, your words were public that year; written in the book at your town hall, shut until 2069.

There is no shortage of political frustration now. What is missing is somewhere to put it that is neither a comment section nor a news feed, and that organises what it collects by place rather than by outrage.

That is what this register is built against. What you write here is published as you write it, with your consent asked at the moment you give it — and the software and the data are open, downloadable at any time. There is nothing to release later, and nobody to release it.

Write your doléance