Comment: Macron's Grand Débat for French 'yellow vest' protests was pointless
Columnist Nick Inman considers the outcome of France's national debate over the gilet jaune demonstrations
President Macron attempted to resolve the gilets jaunes demonstrations with a national debate
Mo Wu/Shutterstock
Whatever happened to Le Grand Débat (The Great Debate)? How did it end? What purpose did it serve? Or perhaps you are rather asking: what was it, why do I want to talk about it and why should I even care?
When he had more prestige and authority than he has now, Emmanuel Macron launched a great national debate in December 2018 in response to the gilets jaunes protests that had disrupted France for several months.
The intention was for the political class to hear from the little people in what was announced as “a consultative tool to resolve the crisis,” its aim being “to invite the people to speak”.
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France in crisis
These two phrases give the game away. If it was meant to fix a crisis, it obviously did not work because France is still in one. (The same crisis or another? You decide.)
And is not the purpose of democracy to provide ample opportunity for people to address those in power with their concerns?
Any premier who has to introduce an extracurricular session of democratic talking and listening has perhaps missed the point.
A cynic might say the purpose of the Debate was not to home-in solutions but to pretend to listen to the grumblers, and thus distract them from their marches and protests.
It was a magician’s sleight of hand; a deliberate act of misdirection.
More than one commentator in the media drew a parallel with the cahiers de doléances that Louis XVI’s subjects were invited to submit to his government-in-crisis in 1789.
The purpose of that exercise was not to own up to mistakes and ensure there was a political and moral reset on behalf of the Third Estate (everyone who was overtaxed and deprived of power). It was to provide a sort of functional catharsis; to get the moaning out of the way so that the real business could be got on with: raising more taxes from ordinary folk to reduce the national debt.
The Third Estate opted for the reset, and national conflagration, of the Revolution.
Mr Macron’s debate, you could say, went up in a different kind of smoke. It ended officially on March 15, 2019 and the bureaucratic collation of conclusions began.
A month later, the process was all but forgotten when Notre Dame went up in flames. As one commentator put it recently: “The machine of state moved on to other things.”
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What was the Le Grand Débat about?
The debate was organised into four areas of discussion:
There were 10,000 local meetings and 1.9million people made their feelings known online. Some data was collected in response to closed questions. Participants were also able to make spontaneous propositions.
The results of the Great Debate were collated and syntheses published on the official website – but critics believe this is insufficient. Useful conclusions could be drawn from any politicians willing and brave enough to act on the findings. But the political class has been reluctant to respond.
Was it all worth it? There have been no radical and fundamental changes and little has happened that would not have happened anyway without the Great Debate.
Virtually nothing has been done with the information gathered to justify the expense and the effort. Those who contributed have publicly expressed their frustration.
Mr Macron has limped on since then with diminished authority, and nothing about how the French are governed has become any clearer.
The grievances of 2018 – notably the cost of living and the lack of services in rural areas – were stored up and funnelled into the elections of 2024, when voters opted en masse for extremist parties that say they feel the people’s pain whether or not they have any solutions to offer.
