Can the French Republic Be Digital? Lessons from the Last Participatory Experience on the Law-Making Process

A new law on the Digital Republic was voted in France at the end of 2016. It focused on the definition of digital rights, Net neutrality and the idea of a public service of data. The law was coproduced by the citizens as it was possible to amend the bill proposal on the Net. In fact, it was the first time in France that a bill was digitally amended by citizens. The chapter aims at analyzing the participatory method as a law-making option in France. The question is to understand whether or not this participatory method challenges the traditional way of governing in France. Is it the implementation of a citizen control of the law-making process or a single communicative tool? The first part of the chapter describes the relations between the European and the national contexts of this law. The second part of the chapter explains the participatory tool, introduces the actors and analyzes the impact of the method on the law-making process. The third part of the chapter studies the emergence of an open government data in France. This digital strategy is promoted in order to win the competition of digital nations (Premat, Smarter as the new Urban Agenda: a comprehensive view of the 21st century city, 207–224, 2015). Moreover, the last part of the chapter confronts this new open data strategy with the surveillance laws voted in 2015 that control the Internet to trace suspicious behaviors.