Parole de pr\'esidents (1958-2022)

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 9,200 speeches from eight French presidents spanning 66 years, characterizing their styles through vocabulary and grammatical patterns, and visualizing their similarities and differences using intertextual distances.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive linguistic analysis of presidential speeches over six decades, highlighting stylistic evolutions and interpresidential relationships.

Findings

Distinct vocabulary and grammatical patterns for each president

Identification of typical speech sequences per president

Visualization of stylistic similarities and differences

Abstract

En plus de soixante ans, huit pr\'esidents se sont succ\'ed\'e \`a la t\^ete de la Ve R\'epublique fran\c{c}aise (de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron). Apr\`es avoir pr\'esent\'e le corpus de leurs discours -- soit 9202 textes et plus de 20 millions de mots \'etiquet\'es -- le style de chacun des pr\'esidents sera caract\'eris\'e \`a l'aide de leurs vocabulaire (vocables et cat\'egories grammaticales). Une analyse plus approfondie r\'ev\`ele les s\'equences typiques de chaque locataire de l'\'Elys\'ee. Bas\'ee sur les distances entre l'ensemble des allocutions, une figure illustre les similitudes et diff\'erences entre les diff\'erents pr\'esidents. Over the past sixty-six years, eight presidents successively headed the Fifth French Republic (de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing, Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Holland, Macron). After presenting the corpus of their speeches -- 9,202 texts and more than 20 million labelled words -- the style of each of them will be characterized by their vocabulary (lemmas and part-of-speech). A deeper analysis reveals the typical sequences of each tenant of the Elys\'ee. Based on an intertextual distance between all presidential speeches, a synthesis can be drawn reflecting the similarities and differences between presidents.