L’analyse argumentative en diachronie: le pathos dans les débats parlementaires sur l’abolition de la peine de mort

The aim of this paper is to examine the discursive construction of emotions in a series of French parliamentary debates concerning the abolition of death penalty (1791-1981). In the first part, I set out the methodological tenets of this research. I begin by discussing the choice of the corpus. The challenge is to set a corpus which despite being chronologically scattered, is strongly coherent, in terms of theme and genre. This kind of coherence is essential, I will argue, as it allows for diachronic comparisons. I then turn to the sciences of language, where I attempt to examine the descriptive resourcesthey provide in order to grasp how emotions are constructed in discourse. What is at stake here is to identify the main “observable phenomena”. Scholars working in the field of linguistics and discourse analysis strive to determine the various types of relationshipbetween emotions, on the one hand, and language data, on the other: they offer a set of categories,and claim, for instance, that emotions may be “expressed” or “aimed for” by speakers. The question of what constitutes relevant material is also the subject of much interest: when it comes to emotions, scholars tend to highlight the significance of the paraverbaland the non-verbal material. I engage in a critical discussion of the main categories and try to determine which are the most useful considering the characteristics of the corpus. The second part of the paper is devoted to a case study. I look at France’s first parliamentary debate on the abolition of the death penalty, which takes place between May 30 and June 1, 1791 at the Assemblée Constituante. Here, my objective is to bring out the main features of pathos, which orators who oppose the death penalty use during this debate. I suggest that this pathos relies on a particular topos, which depicts the execution as a “spectacle”.I describe this specific use of pathos in some detail. In conclusion, I attempt to look at it from a diachronic perspective and compare it with other uses of pathos which are found in the later debates (1848 and 1908). Such a perspective allows us to identify significant alterations in the way abolitionist orators construct emotions in their discourse.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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