The Declarations of Principles on the Occasion of the French Presidential Elections

The aim of this article is to show how the research works about the discourses at the time of the French presidential elections explore the genre of the electoral declarations of principles, seen as texts of self-promotion. These research works privilege the methodology of discourse analysis to study three of their dimensions. At first, they are interested in their staging of the candidates, through the image which they elaborate about themselves by means of linguistic and iconic processes. Further, they elucidate the political positionings revealed by the lexical contents and the argumentative strategies of these electoral declarations of principles. At last, they analyze their communicational device which oscillates between a self-centred communication and a strong interactivity in their request of the public opinion.