Les slogans de l’élection présidentielle française de 2017 : des « petites phrases » potentielles ?

This research deals with political slogans widespread during the French presidential elections campaign in 2017 and with the way they circulate in the web. Based on an approach inspired to studies about enunciation and French political discourse analysis, we will identify political slogans presented by the eleven candidates to French presidential election and put their full words in the web to see how journalists and political opponents use these slogans to talk about the candidate who carries them. Our attention will be restricted to slogans that seem to be more suitable for an alteration of their original form and meaning in terms of simple formulation to create a joke or rather of a real modification of their message in a polemic attitude and modifying the candidate’s message. Hence, we will analyze these alterations and examine them in order to see if they show the characteristics of a potential “petite phrase”, that is a phenomenon typical of politics which originates from real declarations pronounced by politicians or by their staff and then widespread by media in a way of changing their original meaning. In particular, our analysis will concern political slogans by François Asselineau, François Fillon, Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron and their alterations by blogs, press articles and speeches of their opponents. As a result, we will show that some deformations receive a greater attention and that each alteration has to be considered in its context, which is fundamental to understand the reasons and the way an original slogan is deformed.