The cahiers de doléances, reopened
Several times since 1789, France has written down its grievances. The people who wrote them have never once seen the whole. This register makes that view possible — and it is no longer limited to France alone.
1789
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 became one shared condition, and the people carrying it, the majority. That is how a complaint becomes a political force. They were collected, carried upward, and they are still readable today.
2018
It happened again in the winter of 2018: the gilets jaunes rose, the first revolt along class lines in decades, and the registers were opened — around 20,000 of them, for 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.
What became of them
Published does not mean readable: the 1.9 million contributions sent in online are open data all right, in multi-gigabyte files untouched since 2020, and the site that let you browse them returns an error. The town-hall cahiers have not been sealed since 2025, but reading one means travelling to a departmental archive and asking for the box. The texts exist; the register does not.
2026
It is starting again as you read. On 5 October 2026 the education minister Édouard Geffray launched Agora, an online platform to collect the demands and worries of school students in the middle of a mobilisation. Whether it is meant sincerely changes nothing: what is written there belongs to whoever hosts it, and can be closed, forgotten, left behind a server error, or disappear for any reason at all. Here, anybody can carry away the whole register — which is the only thing that makes a text impossible to delete.
What this register does
There is no shortage of political frustration. What is missing is somewhere to put it that is neither a comment thread nor a news feed: here every doléance is placed and attached to subjects, so that what recurs from one place to the next becomes visible.
This register is open by construction. Everything published downloads in bulk, with the subjects assigned to it: a corpus already classified, for the people who wrote it, for the humanities that want to study it, for the movements that want to use it. The software is open too — so the register can be checked, copied, rehosted elsewhere. Nothing to release later, nobody to ask for it; not an open data that is partial, or that comes with no practical means of reading it.
The difference is not our good intentions, and that is exactly the point. A platform can be meant sincerely and vanish all the same: a budget, a reorganisation, a minister who moves on. Here there is nothing to close that is not already elsewhere — what is written is public the moment it is written, anybody can carry away all of it, and the software serving it is open. This is not a promise to behave better than the others; it is a construction in which the promise is not needed.
What is collected
Nothing is collected without your knowing. Writing asks for no account, no address, and the site does not follow you. You give only what you choose to give: a place, a year of birth, an activity, all optional — and the place is rounded off before it is stored, never an address. What appears, appears anonymously.
What is refused
Not everything is published unread. A filter, then people, turn away spam, harassment and texts that go after people for what they are — racism is not an opinion, in French law it is an offence, and the same goes for supremacism in every form. Those texts are not shelved: they are deleted.
The line is simple. Radical views, yes — against a government, an institution, a policy, immigration: a doléance has every right to be angry, partisan, in the minority. Against human rights, no. That is the red line, and it does not move. The checking is automatic and human; the guarantee is that nothing and nobody can alter your text.
Who are we?
For now, one person. I work in IT, on systems that have to hold up at scale: it is my trade, and it is what I know how to do.
What I miss is elsewhere. People talking about what is wrong in their lives with complete strangers — I believe that is the most important ingredient for any real change to begin, well ahead of programmes and parties.
That is why I loved the gilets jaunes: complete strangers talked to one another, made a society of themselves, and voiced a single coherent demand — the RIC, a citizens' initiative referendum. I would like that same ferment, but visible to everyone and not confined to France.
The curators — the people who read what the filter could not settle — are added one by one, through a network of trust: people who share that view. And the trust is checkable: every decision, to publish or to refuse, is written to a full audit log with the name of whoever took it.
Can we be trusted?
That is yours to choose. What we can guarantee lies in what this project does not do and in what it lets anyone do: it stores no private data; the software and the data are completely open, downloadable and easy to use; and the code can be reviewed by anyone who cares to. You do not have to take our word for it.
And what is refused is public: every text turned away is readable for a few hours on a page of its own, with the ground it was refused on — and if you think a refusal is a mistake you can say so, which puts the text in front of a person. What was turned away
Open, and checkable
Doléances is an open register of grievances and proposals, organised by place.
Everything published downloads in bulk, with the subjects assigned to it, under a free licence. The software running this site is open too: this register can be checked, copied and rehosted by anybody, without asking anyone.
Writing a doléance requires no account and no email address.
Write your doléance