Manon Pengam awarded by the CNRS

Opening the Notebooks, Discovering a Rich Citizen Voice

Manon Pengam’s investigation began in 2022 at the departmental archives of Creuse. There, the “citizen notebooks” collected during Emmanuel Macron’s Grand National Debate are stored. Inspired by the grievance notebooks of the Yellow Vests movement, these materials, made available in local authorities, invited citizens to express themselves—a paper link between ordinary people and elected officials, accessible to everyone.

As a linguist, Manon Pengam immediately recognized untapped potential. In the archives, she discovered a rich corpus: “I started consulting and opening these notebooks, and I realized the expressive richness, the semantic richness of this rather unprecedented corpus. Contributions can span several pages as a single paragraph. Some include newspaper clippings, others draw. The discourse is minimally constrained, which makes it very interesting to analyze.”

Participatory Research That Sets an Example

Soon, the researcher realized that making these materials usable required a long and delicate step: transcription. For this stage, she launched a call for participatory research in the local press: “I did not expect such a response; as soon as the article was published, I received about forty emails. From these forty people, we formed a team of around twenty volunteer citizens.”

These volunteers took part in the meticulous transcription of the Creuse notebooks: “Converting an image document into a textual transcription can take several hours. It must be done by hand because handwriting recognition software is not yet sufficiently autonomous. This manual process also allows us to immerse ourselves in the texts while preserving their original layout, coding elements such as strikethroughs, underlines, and additions—information that is all important.”

Understanding Democracy Through Language

Manon Pengam’s research demonstrates how these popular writings constitute an exceptional observatory of democratic concerns. Her work identifies two main types of contributions: programmatic lists proposing concrete actions, and personal testimonies, often addressed explicitly to the President of the Republic.

“The contributions are highly developed, argumentative, semantically rich,” she observes, far from the “venting” caricatures sometimes portrayed in public debate. These notebooks also reveal social tensions, perceived injustices, and democratic demands. They are invaluable for understanding “how citizens talk about their difficulties and life experiences,” as well as their expectations of the state. Beyond recurring themes such as pensions, taxes, or purchasing power, the linguist analyzes modes of expression: humor, anger, subjectivity, and personal narratives. She notably published a scientific article⁽¹⁾ analyzing how contributors address their interlocutors, comparing the 2018–2019 Grand Debate notebooks with the 2013–2014 Yellow Caps notebooks.

Her approach has inspired other collectives in France, particularly following the release of the documentary Les Doléances (2023), in which she appears: “The film helped publicize the issue. Many people then learned about the project, that the notebooks were in the archives, and what we were doing.” The National Association of Third Places, the Fondation de France, the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, and several departmental councils now support the participatory science workshops “in which we co-develop methods for investigation and data analysis.”

Toward a National Project Led by Public Research

In 2025, Manon Pengam was one of four scientists appointed to a “flash mission” by the Ministry of Higher Education to study the feasibility of making the notebooks available online on a large scale. This is a crucial challenge: protecting contributor anonymity, handling vast volumes of data, and making these traces of participatory democracy accessible. The final report was submitted on July 10, 2025.

The researcher emphasizes the need to strengthen public research: “We advocate for public research to be prioritized. In 2019, private firms were hired to synthesize the grievance notebooks, while researchers received no funding. Today, we hope to demonstrate the value of public research for managing such projects. But to study larger corpora, we need resources.”

For several years, Manon Pengam has worked alongside Magali Della Sudda, a political scientist at Sciences Po Bordeaux. Combining the Creuse and Gironde corpora and their respective expertise has enriched their analyses. The researchers, supported by a multidisciplinary human and social sciences network, now aim to create a national map of grievances and a comparative study between territories, using an approach that combines linguistics, literature, political science, sociology, geography, computational linguistics, and geomatics. “It is in this context that we submitted a research project to the French National Research Agency, currently under evaluation, as part of the 2026 Generic Call for Projects.”

DemoCIS: Understanding Contemporary Challenges in Our Democracies

Manon Pengam’s research is part of the scientific framework of the DemoCIS project, a France 2030 laureate of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. Coordinated by the University of Lille and funded with €9 million, the project brings together more than 300 researchers from 51 human and social sciences research units to study the democratic crises facing contemporary societies. Many members of CY Cergy Paris University’s scientific community, including several LT2D researchers, are participating in this large-scale project.

An Award Honoring Democratic Commitment in Research

On Wednesday, November 26, 2025, Manon Pengam and Magali Della Sudda received the Special Jury Prize during the CNRS Scientific Mediation Awards ceremony. This recognition highlights an open, collaborative, and deeply civic mode of research. Beyond scientific collaborations, the project also mobilized multiple citizen collectives eager to give voice back to the citizens’ expressions contained in the notebooks.

This award illustrates the importance of research serving public debate. By opening the grievance notebooks, the research also opens new perspectives for better understanding our democracy.

(1) Manon Pengam. S’adresser in absentia. Formes et fonctions de l’adresse dans les doléances contemporaines des Bonnets rouges et du grand débat national. Mots: les langages du politique, 2025, 137, pp.37-56. ⟨10.4000/13pcz⟩. https://hal.science/hal-05025455v1