In October 2015, documentary film maker Elise Le Guevel and her crew flew in from Paris to visit Stanford. Their goal: to understand better how Marine Le Pen has reformed her discourse by interviewing the team behind Marine Le Pen prise aux mots and the vast corpus of texts and analysis they produced.
The resulting documentary, which expands on this analysis and interviews scholars on laïcité, political discourse and digital humanities, came out on January 14 on prime time television and was watched by millions of viewers. The National Front and its leaders issued public statements condemning the documentary as "delirious propaganda" (Deavid RAchline, on Twitter). On social media, the attacks were offensive and personal against Elise Le Guevel and Cécile Alduy.
Here is the documentary:
"En quelques années, la présidente du Front national aurait réussi à crédibiliser son discours, à s'éloigner de l'image "extrémiste" associée à son père, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Certains disent même qu'elle serait la seule à parler "vrai".
Comment s'élabore ce discours et de quoi est-il fait ? Au-delà des petites phrases, que dit réellement Marine Le Pen ? Dit-elle autre chose que son père ? Nous nous sommes plongés dans les discours de Marine Le Pen depuis son investiture à la tête du parti, en 2011.
Un reportage d'Elise Le Guevel, Ghislain Delaval, Frédéric Poussin, Zacharie Naciri, Luis Marques et Séverine Gustin.