The private sector seized the digital. The Republic stacked the sites. The Empire opens a single door, reduces the number of clerks at the window, and gives back to the people the questions of society, which are not the trade of the sovereign functions.
The idea
The Citizen portal gathers, in a single place, what the State already holds.
The Citizen portal is the single counter of the Empire. Every Frenchman finds there his personal information, sees his rights calculated without paperwork, and votes the questions of society. The administration ceases to send him from site to site.
The private sector seized the digital age long ago. The State, for its part, multiplied logins, queues and forms. The Portal does not invent a police of private lives. It opens a single door onto the data the administration already holds, and which it now makes one beg for, file by file.
Those whom the gathering frightens have the wrong target. The State already holds civil status, the tax, health, the career and the licence. It files them badly, on ten silos, and it uses them to milk. The Portal lets the citizen find his way. It gives the Treasury no power the Treasury has not already.
Simplification
The Portal calculates rights and suppresses paperwork.
The centralisation of data is not a fetish. It at last allows one to determine automatically what is due: family allowances, housing aid, student grants. The citizen no longer stacks the papers. The counter no longer loses the file. The appeal no longer lasts a year.
The Portal reduces the sending of paper documents and of administrative e-mails. That efficiency allows an unprecedented reduction in the number of civil servants needed for errands. This is not a modernisation designed to hire project managers. It is less State on the backs of those who produce.
The French, already loaded with obligations, find there a source of simplification. Administrative stress is not a fatality. It is the product of a Republic that loves the form.
Plebiscite
The people ratify the questions of society. They do not sit.
The Portal is not an Assembly online. One does not resurrect 1789 under another name. The State takes charge of its only mission: to protect the people, that is the border, the money, justice and the army. The subjects of society return to the citizens.
Every four months, the Portal opens a societal plebiscite. The people pronounce on the death penalty, cannabis, tobacco and the other questions that are not the trade of the sovereign functions. The Agora proposes the text, the lawyers put it in form, the Emperor decides what belongs to the Empire, and the plebiscite settles the rest. Napoleon governed thus. One does not govern by caucus.
The rhythm imposes at least one plebiscite a year, and fifteen at most over five years. A single poll may carry several questions. This is not a five-year term of parties. It is an imperial rhythm.
The ballot
Each vote rests on a triple authentication, a public hash and anonymity.
The citizen votes from home, by a three-factor authentication. Town halls keep terminals for those who have no network. Nobody is obliged to go to a village hall on Sunday, unless he wishes it.
The ballot offers four options, and nothing else. The citizen may vote yes. He may vote no. He may vote blank, and add a comment. He may postpone the poll by four months, if the debate is not ripe. When postponement wins, the poll is sent back four months. One postpones only twice: at the end of a year, the people decide.
Each poll generates a unique identifier, a hash, for each citizen. At the close, the Empire publishes a public table of three columns: the hash, the vote, and the comment. Each man verifies that his ballot has been recorded. Nobody reconstitutes the identity behind the hash. An artificial intelligence then reads the comments, extracts the recurrent demands, and remits them to the Emperor and to the Agora. It does not vote in their place. It synthesises the content.
Doctrine
The Portal is not a therapy of the State.
The Portal is the future of French citizenship: a single door, readable rights, a safe ballot. It is neither a social network of the Nation, nor a ministry of morals. Peterson* said to tidy one's room first. The Empire does not send the gendarmerie into the forums. It merely ceases to make the citizen run towards ten counters for a paper the administration already holds.
What one finds there
The Portal gathers the following services.
- —The citizen consults his civil status and his address there, without hunting them across three sites.
- —He finds there his tax returns and his notice of assessment.
- —He opens there his health file — history, vaccinations, prescriptions — accessible to the one who treats, and not to the one who watches.
- —He reads there his employment history and his career statement for the pension, without fifteen funds.
- —He keeps there his reports and his diplomas, instead of losing them in a box.
- —He holds there his driving, hunting and fishing licences on a single partitioned card.
- —He accomplishes there his errands, his enrolments and his declarations, without a queue and without a form.
- —He reads there the calendar of local events, the health and safety alerts, and the hours of the public services.
- —He votes the plebiscites there, he takes part in the consultations, and he opens the digital library.
The Portal offers a door, a ballot and less paper. The rest is not the trade of the Empire — and it is precisely for that reason that it will become yours again.