About

The project

France does not lack analyses, it lacks conclusions. For decades, the same diagnosis returns without anyone touching the causes: governments change and the constraints remain. What this project calls into question is the building in which they work. And those who chose to let it crack.

This building has cracked progressively, through successive choices and negotiated renunciations. Currency, trade, borders, industrial standards - so many levers surrendered, sometimes against the explicit will of the people. When fundamental decisions are made elsewhere, the vote bears only on the accessory. Democracy survives in form but fades in substance.

This project does not propose one more reform. It proposes a system, built like an architecture where each part holds the others. This is what distinguishes it from programmes that stop where the real questions begin.

The referendum is not a consultative tool that governments convoke when it suits them and ignore when it does not. This project makes it the central mechanism of popular control over the king, over the government, over the strategic choices that engage the country over time. The people can seize it directly, without waiting for the agreement of any institution, without any chamber or any executive filtering this right. And what it decides, nothing can undo. Every strong power is revocable: king, government, Planning Commissioner. This is not a concession to democracy, it is the condition of existence of its legitimacy. The people recover there what they have been progressively dispossessed of: not the right to vote, which they never lost, but the right that their vote changes something.

The author

This text was not written by a political scientist, a jurist or an énarque. It was written by a developer, whose profession is to design systems that work, to identify critical dependencies and to ensure that components articulate without contradicting each other. It is with this analytical framework, and not with that of political apparatuses or grandes écoles, that this project was built.

It is addressed to no party, seeks the endorsement of no institution. It is a proposition for France, by someone who thinks that the real questions finally deserve real answers.