How New is the New National Front? Mapping Out Marine Le Pen’s Rhetorical Turn With Digital Humanities Software
Speakers): Cécile Alduy
Since she took over the National Front in 2011, Marine Le Pen has carried the far right party to first place, winning an unprecedented 25% of the votes in France’s latest elections. What does she say that resonates with French voters so strongly? And how did she manage to turn the once infamous “FN” into an almost mainstream party that claims to be the last champion of French republican values?
Using text mining software and textual analyses, Cécile Alduy has ciphered more than 500 speeches and texts by Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen to pinpoint exactly how, and on what topics, the daughter’s discourse differs from that of her father.
In this talk, literary studies meet digital humanities and political science to crack the new National Front rhetorical code and uncover the deeper ideological and mythological structures beyond the stylistic polishing.
About the Speaker
Cécile Alduy is Associate Professor of French literature and culture at ɫƬ. She is the author of Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) and co-editor of the special issue “The Charlie Hebdo Attacks and their Aftermath” for Occasion. A specialist of the National Front and French political discourse, she is a contributor to Politico, The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Al Jazeera America, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Rue89, and Le Monde.