At the end of this weekend rich in meetings, let’s come back to that of Marine Le Pen in Reims, Saturday February 5. She gave a very classic speech, at least until the last ten minutes, during which she stopped talking about France, to talk to us about herself instead. Marine Le Pen advances to the front of the stage and, in the dark, thus addresses the voters.
“Now my friends, I am going to take a few minutes to tell you about myself. Because I believe that the election to the presidency of the Republic is first and foremost a meeting between the people and a man or a woman, and in this case a woman.”
Marine Le Penduring its meeting in Reims
Everything in this sequence constitutes a rupture. The musicality of the speech is suddenly much more restrained. Gestures also: Marine Le Pen speaks with her arms dangling, in the middle of the stage, abandoning the support and protection offered by her desk. The effect produced is that of a voluntary vulnerability, of a moment of confession within an exercise, the meeting, which is usually devoted to the staging of the triumph.
Marine Le Pen chooses to evoke specific moments in her biography, which testify to the sacrifices she made and reveal her weaknesses. This is how she tells us about her parents’ divorce, her years as a single mother or, again, the attack on the Le Pen family apartment in 1976.
“There was this attack. I was eight years old. The silence first. The silence of the explosion which makes deaf. Then the smoke, the voices which call. And then the question: who is dead? Who is living ?”
Marine Le Penduring its meeting in Reims
This is what is called, in rhetoric, a diatyposis, that is to say, a brief description which, in a few details, should suffice to give us the image of a scene. It is a process used very traditionally by lawyers, and Marine Le Pen handles it with undeniable talent: in one question, “Who is dead, who is alive?”she manages to make us aware of the horror of the situation.
Here we find a strategy that she began to deploy ten days ago: explicitly assume her fragility, to change her ethos, her image. But what is new is that this work on the image goes hand in hand with a political discourse. “Very quickly, I experienced political violence when I was a little girl at schoolsays Marine Le Pen. They made me pay for my father’s commitment. Persecutions that the mind of a careless child cannot quite comprehend. Persecutions which today make me despise any idea of discrimination. I measure the injustice, I know the suffering.” The lexical field is deliberately very harsh: persecutions, political violence. We find this desire to attract compassion. But here, Marine Le Pen goes beyond. From the story she tells us, she articulates a rise towards a broader teaching – in this case, the rejection of discrimination. This is one of the processes specific to storytelling, which consists of presenting your argument in the form of a story, possibly personal.
It is part of a strategy directed against its main competitor: Éric Zemmour! This one claims strength? Marine Le Pen assumes her flaws. He seeks admiration, by his display of quotes? She now arouses sympathy. Does he reason from generalizations? It is committed against all discrimination. We have confirmation of what we have suspected for a while: Marine Le Pen relies on the radicalism displayed by Éric Zemmour to complete the process of demonization by returning, by contrast, a less firm image, perhaps be, but more reassuring.
Let’s not lose sight of the essential, that said: if Marine Le Pen insists so much on her image to mark an irreducible divergence with Éric Zemmour, it is because their political proposals remain largely compatible.