Abstract
To understand how societies represent the people and act on the people to express the general will, Stéphanie Kunert, Frédéric Lambert, and Beatriz Sanchez investigate one of the most important moments in the democratic process: the results of the presidential elections in France. They are announced on television and enabled them to observe how a people as a being was constructed and staged using ordinary people, the television viewers who, for the most part, regularly watch this key moment in the political future of the country. By referring to the 2012 presidential elections, and also to the representation of the people during television broadcasts for the 2007 election result on two French TV channels that have similar political inclinations, but different enunciation mechanisms (TF1 and BFM TV), the authors aim to determine how the people as a concept is depicted in the media. The public debate taking place in public arenas is there to give the people provisional form. The people is commanded into being, it is the performative result of political discourse and mediated speech.
French Original Publication: Le peuple des élections à la télévision. L’annonce faire au public et à ses figures. In J. Dakhlia, D. Le Nozach, C. Ségur (Eds.) (2016). À la recherche des publics populaires (2). Être peuple. Nancy: Éditions universitaires de Lorraine.
Translation: Stephen Ward Butler
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Notes
- 1.
In a conference given on 10 January 1997 at the University of Paris 8.
- 2.
“Looking for popular publics” is a symposium that was organized by the Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM) at the Université de Lorraine (France) in 2012.
- 3.
- 4.
TF1 is a general interest private channel whereas BFM TV is a 24-hour private news channel.
- 5.
We have also used the news program of TF1 from 7 May 2012, which relayed a large number of the images and reports filmed and shown the day before. They were subsequently re-edited in such a way that, as we will see, they created counter-representations of “the people who won”.
- 6.
We will analyze the corpus from 2012 in greater detail, while the corpus of 2007 will allow us to highlight the differences and similarities in the way “the people” is represented on the screen.
- 7.
The figures mentioned in parentheses throughout the text refer to the timecodes of the program excerpts that we describe and use as examples. The programs are available and accessible in the audiovisual archives of the Inathèque in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France) in Paris.
- 8.
François Hollande, Socialist Party, newly elected French president in 2012.
- 9.
Ségolène Royal was also filmed at different times among the crowd. She is seen greeting people with a raised hand (but does not shake their hands like her rival). The left-wing candidate was thus shown on TF1 as being more distant from the people than the other candidate who shakes outstretched hands from the other side of the safety barrier.
- 10.
As Coulomb-Gully reminds us, the symbol of the rose for the Socialist Party was chosen in reference to the quote by Karl Marx (“There will be bread and roses for everyone”). She was referring to the gesture of F. Mitterrand (Coulomb-Gully 2001: 75). Among the images of the jubilant crowds (the “Hollande team”) during the TF1 news program on 7 May 2012, young couples were observed carrying red roses. There is thus a cognitive amalgamation (Breton 1996) between the rose as a symbol of love and the rose as a symbol of the Socialist Party. These images are recurrent throughout the program until the tone changes and contented left-wing people are then portrayed as being a bad omen, bringing the threat of an economic crisis (we will come back to this later).
- 11.
Black-White-Brown, so as to represent multicultural diversity. See infra “The people and diversity”.
- 12.
“The second region in France to have joined together around François Hollande and this hope that yesterday he said he was proud to have rekindled”.
- 13.
Just after the withdrawn face of the disappointed young woman, the face of François Hollande listening to Ségolène Royal appeared. In hindsight this image seems to be a kind of prophecy, since in his speech after the results were announced in 2012 (speaking as the winner compared to Royal’s defeat in 2007) Hollande insisted on the theme of youth. In the TF1 news program on 6 May 2012, among the crowd waiting for Ségolène Royal in front of Latin America house on Boulevard Saint Germain (the place chosen for her speech) there is a blue banner bearing in white capital letters reading “Change Is Royal”. In addition to the prophetic effect, looking back from 2012 there was a form of interdiscursivity with Hollande’s slogan: “Change happens now”.
- 14.
Among the images of the crowd listening to the speech of S. Royal who had just lost (20: 05: 20: 20), we see men and women of apparent North African and Sub-Saharan origins with frowning faces and disappointed expressions (20:06:30:01, 20:07:23:10).
- 15.
The negative symbol appeared just after L. Ferrari had finished presenting this part of the program. The reporter’s last sentence was “You will discover all of the images and behind the scenes footage of the evening”. The final image thus appeared during a second of silence by the presenter (her next sentence was “The new President’s team already at work this morning” with an image showing Hollande getting out of a car and waving to the crowd).
- 16.
Interestingly, when François Fillon made the statement and continued the theme of a united France, using terms such as “rallying together”, the image on the big screen behind him on the TV set showed the two, divided “peoples” of the elections, with the left-wing supporters on the left-hand side, those who are losing, and the right-wing supporters on the right-hand side, those who are winning (20:09).
- 17.
PPDA at 19: 56: 10 put into worlds the color division, stating: “As soon as it’s blue, it tends to be Sarkozy’s side and when it’s red, it’s Royal. This is just to help you and to help those among you who don’t necessarily know Parisian geography very well”.
- 18.
The voice-over of the reporter at 19: 46: 01 announced: “Tension is rising as the minutes pass […] Rue de la Boëtie where I find myself is filled with people, the supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy seem simultaneously meditative, focused, but sometimes over-excited. Whatever the case maybe, the foghorns and cameras are ready and are even already in action […]. It is an entire group of young activists who have met here tonight”.
- 19.
A commentary of PPDA further emphasizes this fact since he announced, at 15 minutes from the official declaration of results: “The heart on the left and the heart on the right, we will continue to attempt to switch between the two sides yet, it is rather complicated since you will have guessed through the faces of each side, we can already try to guess the result. Yet, we will try to be as neutral as possible and not show what we already know” (19:45).
- 20.
This goes to illustrate the declaration of François Fillon: “The campaign of Nicolas Sarkozy touched the people” (20:09:37) that he had made a few minutes after the results were announced.
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Kunert, S., Lambert, F., Sanchez, B. (2020). The People During the Presidential Elections on French TV: Announcement of the Election Results and Audience Representations. In: Ségur, C. (eds) French Perspectives on Media, Participation and Audiences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33346-1_4
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