CORMOLAIN, France — In a large, bright village hall in a small village in deepest Normandy, 50 angry people want to decide the future of France. They are by turns passionate, funny, deadly serious, rambling, misinformed, confused, concise and intelligent.

In a political variant of the Tour de France, a nationwide series of “great debates” are taking place across the country. Unlike the Tour de France, the ones performing are life’s spectators.

Threatened by the Yellow Jacket movement’s ever-mutating anger and demands, French President Emmanuel Macron dreamed up the “Great National Debate” in desperation last December. The goal? To allow the French to air their grievances and discuss what has gone wrong in France. To take people away from their internet anger factories and reconnect them to democratic institutions. It has taken off like nothing else in his 21 months in office.

In Cormolain — a small town east of Bayeux in Normandy, population 411 — a small crowd gathered in its new salle de fêtes one recent evening to stage their own debate.

Denis, 61, a retired council worker, takes the microphone. “All you people in Paris, you say you didn’t see the Yellow Jackets coming,” he says. “Where were you then? Why didn’t you know? Is there no internal intelligence service in France? Are there no local politicians? These problems are not new. The poverty and misery and lack of opportunities in rural areas are not new. Why didn’t you see it?”

Macron certainly seems to have been released from the panic of the early weeks of Yellow Jacket protests.

“Macron has been in government for five years. He’s been president for nearly two years. Why didn’t he know about all this? What is his excuse? Why did he take money — in diesel taxes, in new taxes on pensions — from people who have a little and give it to people who have a lot?”

The debate — like the almost 3,000 that have already taken place — is being recorded and transcribed. The results will be given to a committee to be translated into three or four issues for possible legislation — or maybe, a referendum in June or September. At least 3,000 more meetings are slated to take place before then, and 1 million suggestions or complaints have been posted online. If nothing else, the transcripts will provide a rich seam of material for historians of the future: a kind of French Domesday Book, in which all the county’s most trivial and profound sources of anger or anxiety in 2019 are revealed.

Some have suggested that part of the reason the Yellow Jackets rebellion erupted last November was that the French no longer have many places where they can voice concerns, moan or gesticulate out in the open. There are fewer factories, cafés and bars. The Great Macron Talk-In has presented them with an opportunity. It has become a gargantuan radio phone-in: a nationwide orgy of group psychotherapy.

'Life-crushing'

The grand débat was widely mocked by the French media. The gatherings were boycotted by members of the Yellow Jackets. Perhaps they were right to be skeptical. The debates — where the four official subjects are taxation and spending; the organization of the state; democracy and citizenship; and the “transition” to a more ecologically friendly economy — have helped to noticeably take the wind out of the sails of the movement.

Macron has attended half a dozen meetings himself, taking questions in impressive, seven-hour, shirt-sleeved sessions. Psychotherapy for the head of state? He certainly seems to have been released from the panic of the early weeks of Yellow Jacket protests.

French national media have given plenty of coverage to this Macron-splaining. They have taken less interest in local debates like the event I’m attending in Cormolain.

The first speaker doesn’t give his name. He is 56 years old. We know this because he mentions it several times. It seems to haunt him, as if he has suddenly realized that he is facing the scrapheap. He lost his factory job more than a year ago and has not found another.

“You contact the unemployment people for help, training or something,” he says. “They say it may take a year before they can do anything. Fine, but you break the 80 kph speed limit and you get the response through the post from government in two days.”

“I’ve always worked. I’m 56 years old. Now there’s nothing at all. No jobs. No factories. It’s all tourism. What is there for me in tourism? I’m 56 years old.”

He goes on and on. There are cries of anger from the hall. “OK. We’ve got the picture. You’re not the only one.”

“People blame Europe, but the problem is in Paris" — 40-year-old woman at Cormolain meeting

A woman in her early 40s, one of youngest people in the room, stands up. She is an organic farmer. She wants to talk about how “life-crushing” it is to deal with the French bureaucracy.

“They don’t apply their own rules. They tell you one thing is the law, and then they do something else,” she says. “People blame Europe, but the problem is in Paris. There are people sitting there with nothing better to do than to make our lives a misery. They have a great talent — a talent for splitting hairs 14 times. Lengthwise.”

'We obey the rules. Others don't.'

An old man near me takes the microphone. His name is René, a retired farmer in his late 70s, maybe early 80s, and looks like an older Jeremy Corbyn. He has brought a sheaf of hand-written notes.

“I have a pension of €1,000 a month. I’ll show you the details. You can’t live on €1,000 a month. And I see all these retired politicians on fat pensions from the state. All the old presidents and prime ministers. That should be abolished for starters. Edith Cresson — how long was she prime minister? And she’s on a fat pension. I worked hard all my life, but I get €1,000 a month.”

He starts to ramble. The meeting grows restless. He finally gives up the microphone, and it goes to an imposing man named Roger, 74, who is a retired farmer.

“I don’t know if the Yellow Jackets are right or wrong,” he says. “But I’ll say this: Without them, we wouldn’t have got anything. We would have been ignored. The little bit Mr. Macron has conceded we would not have had without the Yellow Jackets. People say they’re violent. I don’t know. I was a farmer. I went on demonstrations, and we knew that there had to be a little bit of violence or no one listened.”

“In all my years I have never seen a president as arrogant and as ignorant as Mr. Macron,” he adds. “He comes from a world that doesn’t know suffering and doesn’t understand hard work.”

Others want to talk about rural transport — how it’s impossible for poor people to switch from diesel to electric cars; how night work and shift work makes ride-sharing impossible; how there aren’t enough buses.

There’s talk about farming — specifically, how worried farmers are about the weedkiller glyphosate, and how impossible it is to farm without it. Other countries will cheat when it’s banned in France from 2022, they say.

“We obey the rules. Others don’t. We’re like a man running a 5-kilometer race with a 20-kilo sack on his back,” says one participant.

'Envy and jealousy'

Most everyone agrees Paris is too remote, that it refuses to understand the problems of rural areas. Members address the local Macron-supporting MP, Bertrand Bouyx, as “you people from Paris” even though he is a pharmacist from Bayeux, a town some 25 kilometers away.

The mood is one of anger and anxiety. People talk about the complexity of modern life, of feeling perpetually cheated. There’s an impressive understanding of some issues, an impatience with others.

The subjects that don’t come up are as instructive as those that do. There is none of the anti-Semitism or the outlandish conspiracy theories that proliferate on Yellow Jackets social media feeds or “anger pages” online. There is little mention of Europe, no mention of immigrants. One of the main Yellow Jackets demands — that professional politicians be replaced by a system of popular decision-making on the internet — doesn’t come up at all.

Françoise, an auxiliary nurse in her 50s, is one of the last people to speak.

“Yes, there is misery, I see it ever day in my work,” she says. “But there’s also a lot of envy and jealousy in France. People looking over their shoulder at what others have got. I feel worried for France. This is a wonderful country. I’ve seen what other countries are like. We don’t know how lucky we are sometimes.”

She makes a plea to those in the room. “Please no more violence. The shops in town centers are at the end of their tether with all this violence. We need to come together. We need to be grateful for what we have. And yes we need Europe, because a small country like France can’t win on its own.”

Macron will have to cope with the success of the monster he has created.

She receives a round of applause — the only one of the night.

As the meeting wound down, it was clear many people were doubtful whether the grand débat will change anything. And yet, they were relieved to have delivered their fragment of the truth.

Macron will have to cope with the success of the monster he has created. How to synthesize 6,000 meetings? Should the debates be institutionalized, like the citizens’ assemblies that precede referendums in Ireland? How do you synthesize the grievances of thousands of people into legislation or a single referendum question?

The government will inevitably be accused of using an elephant to give birth to a mouse. I speak briefly to one of the organizers at the end of the debate. “A fiery meeting,” I say. “No,” he says. “That was calm. I’ve been to others where the shouting never stopped.”

John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.