The place left to citizens in modern democracies is still an ongoing debate. Do they participate and how in France is the topic of this article. Some scholars point out the declining level of turnout and consider that representative democracy is under pressure. Other argue that citizens participate differently through protest. In this article, we investigate how participation has evolved since the 1980’s and demon-strate the major impact of generational replacement in these matters We demonstrate how the participation repertoire evolve between citizens born before World War 2, Baby-Boomers and Post-Baby-Boomers and how these transformations interact with social inequalities, particularly among the recent cohorts.