Contenu du sommaire : Discours post-attentats

‪The succession of terrorist acts on European ground since 2015 has led to questioning the permanence of relations between State, civil society and the media, and to questioning the social-political stakes of media narratives. The media narratives relative to the illegitimacy of terrorist violence and the legitimacy of reparation actions are studied in this contribution, which proposes a diachronic perspective from the attack of July 1995 in Saint-Michel, Paris, to the attack of Nice in July 2016.‪

‪Based on a contents and discourse analysis of November 13 and 14, 2015 TV “breaking news” programs, this article analyzes how the heterogeneity of TV discourse about the terror event shapes distinct narrative schemes. Since live stories and comments partly rest on prediscursive processes, they include traces of past and future narratives, thus showing to what extent the French society can conditionally be conceived as a “post-attack” society.‪

‪After the attacks of November 13th, 2015, Le Monde initiated an online memorial as a portrayal tribute to the victims. Based on interviews with journalists and creative directors, this article analyses the creation and writing process related to these portraits. The analysis supports the hypothesis of a trend towards empathetic journalism as it takes into account letters to the editors. The article concludes with a reflection on the online memorial as a lieu-de-mémoire-in-motion.‪

‪This article studies the media process of co-construction of a collective and consensual performance of grief and solidarity following the terrorist attacks of January 2015 in Paris, as a continuation of the myth of national unity shown by French politicians. Through intensive coverage of mass demonstrations and various staging techniques, the media have helped to shape a “people-as-emotion” around two complementary poles: the crowd and the individuals.‪

‪This article analyses the work conducted at the Élysée Palace to prepare and stage the French President's responses after terrorist attacks. Little is known about how Presidential communication is developed in practice. The article compare the events of January 2015, November 2015 and July 2016. The study is based on interviews with Élysée staff between March 2015 and April 2017 as well as on internal documents and notes produced during the period to which we were given access. It highlights three main dimensions in the writing of the speeches, each of them corresponding to different images of the president. The President first appeared as the leader who reassures its people and tries to make sense of what happened. He then put himself forward as the father of the nation, unifying the citizens and providing a safe space for expression. Finally, he more strongly impersonated a politician defending his term record. More broadly, the results show how the President's public speaking was constrained by a number of factors such as the repetition of attacks, the electoral agenda, or the reactions of other actors including the opposition. Those indeed impacted quite substantially the common framework one can draw from the analysis of the speeches.‪

‪Our contribution proposes a semiolinguistic approach that accounts for the issues raised by the emergence of a language of revenge in response to terrorist attacks. Based on a comparative study of civil reactions in 2004 Madrid and 2015 Paris, our approach aims to understand the linguistic strategies (speech acts, redefinitions, projections, imaginations) that are used to express the desire for revenge, in spite of revenge generally being considered socially inappropriate. In this perspective, we focus on the semantic role of the agent by exploring the construction of agency (the real or imagined ability to act) in the conflict zone between wanting to act (a desire for revenge motivated by suffering and anger) and not being able to act (determined by social, moral and legal norms).‪