The rhetoric of neo-racism in the French immigration debate: analysis of Le Figaro opinion articles

• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Frederico Rios Cury dos
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1909
• topic: Neorracismo; Imigração; França; Imprensa; Le Figaro; Neo-racism; Immigration; France; Press; Le Figaro

The present work, product of part of a more comprehensive research not publicized yet, aims to investigate the rhetorical traces of neo-racism in opinion articles in the French newspaper Le Figaro inserted in the debate on immigration in France in the time lapse between the country's presidential elections in 2012 and 2017. At first, there was an attempt to quantitatively describe, through the Excel program, the 345 articles consulted from Le Figaro, according to some variables, questioning, in the present work, which is the main social group targeted in the rhetorical strategies of neo-racism and whether the article presents or not traits considered theoretically related to this type of rhetoric. Then, a qualitative and critical analysis of the results was carried out, with the help of categories from social sciences, such as the concept of neo-racism; as well as from language sciences, with the typology of the retort and ad personam argument, the concept of ethos, metaphor and epithet, and the contribution of the theory of faces. In the part of the research that concerns this article, some constants in the language of neo-racism were found (which may in the future be tested by other researchers through other corpora), such as “differentialist” and hierarchical reasoning, the retort argument, the denunciation of a supposed anti-white racism and, not necessarily, to a greater or lesser degree, other rhetorical traits, such as the use of manichean metaphors, the absence of polite strategies and a base anti-intellectualism/anti-academicism.