Lancé in January 2014, with the support of a large part of the press and radio of the French public service, the website tell the vie.fr, initiated by Pierre Rosanvallon, hosts a collection of small books published on paper and in digital (paid) format, and stories published by ‘ordinary people’ and in free online consultation. These stories, which speak of experiences of ordinary lives and very often of work, fall within the scope of ‘counter-literatures’ (B. Mouralis, 1975). The “political” display of the project is ostentatory. Pierre Rosanvallon aims to tackle a democratic deficit: politicians are cut off from the bottom, social actors are poorly represented and socially invisible. Raconter’s editorial platform, providing a better understanding of unique social situations, would offer the opportunity to exit the ‘society of distrust’ in which we would have entered, by organising an ‘invisible parliament’ that could rebuild democracy. But is it enough to say that a project is political for it to be political? How does the publication of a narrative on her work in Raconter life have a political dimension (or not)? How do these publications on work have a political significance, in the narrow sense of positioning in today’s French political field as in the broader sense of action in the city? This article shows that, despite a proclaimed (self-) political display, and interesting to some of them, these work stories — and this project — do not manage to invest convincingly in political issues, due to their production, publication and reception constraints.