The current interrogations on citizen relationship toward politics - high rate of abstentions, volatility of the electoral behaviors, distrust with regard to the politicians and of the traditional parties - caused reflexions of sociologists and political economists but also from specialists on the history of democracy in France. Our project ambitions to enrich the knowledge on relationship between French people and the State during the long period from the Restoration to the end of the Third Republic. We wish to explain the passage from the statute of subject to that of citizen, how the democracy of mass occurs , how is perceived the national representation? With these questions another dimension is added: the long century over which our work will go is also that of the construction of the modern State which guarantees personal liberties but whose increasing prerogatives constitute as many empietements on these same liberties. From there is born another series of questions: which protests these constraints have they caused, but also which requests for protection are they expressed? Many historical studiestackled these questions by the study of electoral consultations, popular demonstrations, adhesion to parties, trade unions, associations or by the approach of the public opinion which prefects reports enable. To look further into these questions and to try to insert them in the long duration, we propose to analyse a source which, until now, was the object of only partial work: petitions addressed to the assemblies. Recognized under the Revolution, the right of petition allowed citizens as non citizens - women during all the appointed period, immense majority of the men until 1848 – to adress the representatives to express complaints, claims, individual or collective, and to obtain an answer. Indeed, under two monarchies, the assemblies were required to discuss petitions during the meeting, and to discuss it in committee with publication in the J.O under the Third Republic. The absence of thematic classification made difficult the use of this source, preserved at the Archives nationales, which was the object of only partial treatments on behalf of the historians (but also of political economists or lawyers). The source represents a considerable corpus which one can estimate at nearly 2.000 paperboards ( eachone being able to gather several hundreds of petitions). The ambition is to start a vast qualitative and quantitative investigation, aiming at a form of exhaustiveness in the census of the petitions. The current state of the data-processing tools placed at the disposal of the social sciences seems today to make possible such a project. It will be materialized thanks to the establishment of a vast interactive data base. That explains why, besides historians, (ACP EA 3350), a researcher of the Laboratory of Data processing of the Institute Gaspard Monge (UMR 8049) and engineers of the data processing department of the University of Marne-la-Vallé are part of the project. This data base will reiterate the main part of information concerning the authors, the requests and the answers. It eventually must constitute an instrument of research placed at disposal of the scientific community via Internet site of the University. It will enable a research according to the particular interests of each project, which should open many prospects. In parallel, the team intends to undertake specific studies – on delimited periods or according to particular topics - and a global reflexion on the relationship between French people and State, Regimes and national representations.So we will try to tackle the question of public opinion, mentalities and representations, elaborated by historians since the last twenty years, completed by the contributions of contemporary sociology. This collective work will be based on deeply examination of all the proces of petition (considering their parliamentary treatment) and on a statistical analysis aiming at working out, starting from the base, essential outlines of the evolution of the claim. Who petitions, why, in which form, since which area, as many questions which will be the subject of a collective work, conceived at the same time like the conclusion of this project and as the starting point of other uses of the Pétitions base.