Contenu du sommaire : Michel Pêcheux. Analyse de discours. Mots dans l'histoire : individu, subsistances, patronat, honnêtes-gens

EARLY STEPS OF INDIVIDU: SCHOOL, NATURE AND POLICE It seems that Individu occupies a prominent position in the French socio-political system although its connotations are strongly contrasted : positive value attached to individual freedom or property, derogatory meaning for the Individu as refered to by police reports, for instance. However as a specific term, it appears much later than it is often believed by historians and sociologists. A sharper analysis of lexical specificity will reveal a change in internal semantic values and a transformation of the contextual lexical system, which inserts the Individu into new networks. Two landmarks appear in the course of this evolution : One is an ideological relay (The vocabulary of natural science extends and enrichies the socio-political vocabulary during the 2nd half of the 18th century). Individu will be used by Vitalists and not by Mechanists. The other is a linguistic relay, originating in the redefinition of debate on Freedom which shifts from a metaphysical to a political plane. The speech areas in which Individu occurs (Registry Office documents, trials, elections, civil rights) allows the delineation of the egalitarian seme which marks the strength and the weakness of Individu at the end of the 18th century.

SUBSISTANCE(S) AND PUBLIC DISCOURSE DURING FRENCH ANCIEN REGIME (1709-1785) When the discourse analyst attempts to deal with the historicity of texts, he is confronted with a series of obstacles which he now tries to bypass whilst keeping the description of the text firmly anchored in the linguistic space. Thus the empirical characterization of the theme of « subsistances » within French public opinion in the second half of the 18th century implies a specific methodological choice : that of showing the impact in terms of results, of a description of the linguistic horizons which constitutes any given theme, prior to any formal analysis of series of utterances and/or words. At the stage of the corpus, here the geographical an linguistic catalogue of proper names in Galiani's Dialogues, the discursive event can be grasped in its strategic reality within a thematic trajectory.

PATRON ET PATRONAT: SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF PATRONAT IN FRANCE IN THE 19th AND 20th CENTURIES The signifiers Patron and Patronat are analysed in relation to the social, ideological and institutional history of the «patrons» in the 19th and 20th centuries. The frequency and scope of the use of the term Patron in all kinds of discourses (general and colloquial discourse and the language of the Patrons themselves) are much greater than the use of more or less synonymous terms (such as chef d'entreprise, chef d'établissement, entrepreneur, etc.). This term is also the only one to have produced two derivative terms : patronal and patronat. It was only from the second half of the 19th century that Patron (which had been used since the 12th century) became closely linked (as did its derivative terms) with the social, ideological and institutional history of the french «patronat».

RHETORICS OF NATIONAL POPULISM Racism was used to disqualify the «right». 50 years later, the word is carefully avoided. Ideologies which relied on «scientific» references to racial unequality again speak today of differences. This new formulation tries again to capitalize on the populist xenophobia exacerbated in times of economic crisis. The «national-populist» speech of the Front national draws on the stock of polemical commonplaces about decadence; but, as it rejects nazism and antisemitism, it follows the most elementary rules of propaganda ; the result is the equation foreigners = unemployment = threats to law and order, metaphorical figures involving sickness, the 5th and 6th columns, wreck, apocalypse, anti-tax, anti-communist stereotypes, avoiding the use of taboo words excepts in phrases which effect a reversal: «Anti-French racism», «red fascism». The migrant of North Africa origin has become the major enemy, within the wider scope of the soviet conspiracy. The extreme right wing tries to reintegrate the political mainstream in the name of patriotic self-defense.

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: TEXTUAL DESCRIPTION STRATEGIES Within the framework of the use of DEREDEC in Discourse Analysis, this article presents those formal properties of the program which correspond to the aims of a morphological description of texts. The structural identity of DEREDEC objects permits an interaction between the different phases of the actual description of a text: description both linguistic and discursive, and exploration. For example, any syntactic analysis can be modified or sharpened on the basis of new or pertinent information for a particular type of description. The EXFAL structure encodes various kinds of co-textual information and enables practically any word or phrase to be considered as a node in a intratextual or interdiscursive network. Description and exploration are not confined by sentence boundaries. Finally, the use of a bottom-up strategy allows a constructivist approach.

WORDS AS STAKES AND REFLECTIONS OF THE POLITICAL FIGHTS: HONNÊTES GENS DURING FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY YEAR IV (1795-1796) Honnêtes gens finds an unprecedented success in the republican press from the royalist riot's defeat of October 5th 1795 to the unsuccessful babouvist's plot of may 10th 1796. The occurrences of the term are initially few in number, originate in various political horizons and are always pejorative; they become more abundant, more uniform and strongly devalorised, as the democratic movement gains momentum. A polemic about the definition rises and splits the republican party. The lexical orthodoxy supporters try to keep to the word the cultural sense (honnêtes gens as a plural of honnête homme. On the contrary, most of the unitary republicans play with the ambiguity established in 1793-1794, (honnêtes gens = aristocrats), conceal the intrarepublican antagonisms and try to make h.g. an equivalent of chouans or contre-révolutionnaires. However, pressed on by the democratic faction (Babeuf, Lebois) the social connotations (h.g. = the rich) become preponderant during the spring of 1796. From then on the moderates, unable to control the shift in meaning, choose to abandon the phrase which is used by true patriots exclusively.