Mémoire et ‘déboulonnage des statues’

This article analyses a corpus of French-language press (France, Belgium, Martinique, Quebec, Africa, International) collected after the polemic on the déboulonnage des statues (debunking of statues) in June 2020. We first situate déboulonnage in relation to the notions of memory, polemic, formula and discursive event. We then analyse the lexicalisation and syntactic arguments of debunking (subjects and objects), the qualifications and the definitions attributed to it, in order to bring out the common features of the treatment of the polemic in the different areas and the local specificities.