Wednesday’s political event was of course the big interview with Emmanuel Macron, on TF1. Two hours of interviews, during which the President returned to the great moments of the five-year term, he outlined avenues for the future. What is shocking is that despite all this, Emmanuel Macron does not play politics at any time and it is not necessarily a compliment.
For two hours, the President took stock and also spoke a lot about him. He returned to his origins, his values and spoke of his meeting with the French. And, above all: he learned, we hear in this sequence: “I learned without a doubt that I am more sensitive to certain things than I was before / Yes, it is true, respect is part of political life and therefore I learned / I learned to to be / it’s also what I learned / I learned / I learned / I learned alongside the French / What have you learned? / Without doubt to love them better. “
“I have learned”, he tells us, his eyes shining and his hand on his heart. If these kinds of sentences resonate in the ears in a familiar way, it is no coincidence: they are political clichés. We remember, for example, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2012. At the time Minister of the Interior, candidate for the presidential election, he punctuated his meetings with high-sounding sentences in which he promised: “I changed.”
And this is no accident: from the point of view of ethos, that is to say of the image that the speaker constructs of himself, the cliché of change is a very convenient rhetorical tool. It allows to claim all the experience accumulated during the years spent in responsibility, while rejecting far from oneself, the personality traits that were perceived negatively. It’s butter, and silver is butter. And at the same time, we can ask ourselves the question: has he really changed, our president? There are still a few words that can make us doubt.
“Responsibility, merit, mutual aid, solidarity; a strong but just country; and even, to bring out the new, in a peaceful and harmonious way” : it’s beautiful, but the problem is that it doesn’t mean anything! All these little words are inspiring concepts. That is to say, vague, fuzzy words, without defined content, but which have a positive connotation. They say nothing… but make everyone agree! We are all for seriousness, innovation, or solidarity. But what does this mean? How does this translate politically? Emmanuel Macron does not say it, because if he did say it, he would start to alienate the voters!
It was already the type of words that Emmanuel Macron repeated from speech to speech in 2017. And it goes even further: as in 2017, mobilizing concepts nestle at the very heart of his sentences. Not only in the choice of concepts, but in that of verbs… Because these sentences all have a specificity: Emmanuel Macron uses transitive verbs in an intransitive way. Normally, when you talk about “transforming” you are supposed to say what you want to transform, why, and how: that’s the basis of politics, all the same. But not with the President of the Republic! He wants to transform… period! He wants “to transgress, to push, to move, to accompany”. And point! From the very grammar of his sentences, we understand that he has movement as his sole guideline. Basically: it is on the move, without however telling us where it is going. But since no one likes the status quo, this rhetoric allows him to speak to as many people as possible.