While the reference to ‘active citizenship’ has come to occupy a central place in recent transformations of public policies in many European countries, it has not been a highlight in the French case. A recent internet search for the term ‘citoyenneté active’ showed results that referred either to campaigns for voting (being an active citizen means using one's right to vote) or to youth training programmes launched by the European Union. Such results tend to confirm that the notion is directly translated from ‘European English’ into French. And although the notion of ‘choice’ is currently high on the government agenda (when, for instance, official political discourses stress the need to give employees the choice of whether or not to work longer hours, or to work on Sundays, or to retire at a later age), it is not related to issues of citizenship.

It could be argued, then, that in the French context, the very notion of ‘active citizenship’ would be seen as pleonastic, with the dominant political culture viewing the citizen as being already active. But while the term as such has not been used in launching campaigns and framing policies, some citizens have been called upon to be more active in particular ways. In contrast to other chapters of this volume, in which the participation of service users in service design or policy development is addressed, my focus is on the mobilisation of citizens to participate in local decision making.

In France, the ‘activation’ of the citizen became a central policy theme in the late 1970s when inhabitants of derelict popular neighbourhoods were summoned to actively engage in their renewal. ‘Poor people’ had to show their ability to be actual citizens (Madec & Murard 1995) by participating in neighbourhood councils and all the other devices created within the framework of the politique de la ville, a set of urban public policies launched in the 1970s with the general aim of enhancing urban renewal and redeveloping social links in derelict neighbourhoods. Reconstructing social cohesion was seen as a requirement to revive these neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants were depicted only through their lack of all kinds of resources. As far as their citizenship was concerned, these inhabitants were – in that period and still are in a large measure – perceived as immature individuals unable to act as responsible citizens (Carrel 2004) and who needed to be ‘taught’ good citizenship practices.