Civic work

What I do

The website first. I built it, and I keep it fed: council speeches, analyses of municipal decisions, information for residents. It is a WordPress project like any other, except that the client is a town.

Then social media, which I run. And more broadly, I take part in the councillors’ communications — the kind that gets handed out and put up on walls as much as the kind that gets read online. In a small town, a leaflet is still the surest way to reach people who are not online.

I stood on the list at the March 2026 municipal elections and was not elected — but I still act on the group’s behalf. I keep the tools running, and that suits me: it is what I know how to do.

Why

This is where I actually started. Between 2001 and 2005 I worked as a youth leader at a holiday centre in Liévin and volunteered at the Georges Carpentier community centre. That is where you acquire a taste for collective work, and where you learn that a town holds together through what people do in it together. Since 2022 I have also given time to the parents’ association of the Jean Vilar secondary school.

What I care about takes few words: do not discriminate, and do not set people against one another. In Angres, that means there are not two camps — there are residents, in different situations. And it does not stop at the town boundary: for the country it is exactly the same idea, with far heavier consequences.

Pinning problems that never had a single cause on one convenient culprit is an old recipe. It is simple, it sells well, and it has never repaired anything. It works better than it used to. That has not made it any fairer.

The opposite is unspectacular: realistic projects, accounts anyone can check, and the habit of going to look before passing judgement. It makes poor slogans. It works better.

And a conviction that holds at work too: it is easier to criticise than to act.