Entre «lèpre nationaliste» et populisme: l’émergence d’une subjectivité politique pathogénique sur Twitter à travers les hashtags #JeSuisLépreux et #Lépreux

In a speech pronounced in Quimper on the 28th, June 2018, the French president Emmanuel Macron highlights the dangers of a “nationalist leprosy” that is spreading around Europe. The expression triggers polemic reactions on the social networks by those citizens who feel concerned by the metaphor and who create two militant hashtags (Husson, 2016): #JeSuisLépreux and #Lépreux to engage in a polemic against Emmanuel Macron. In this article, a corpus of 146 tweet collected from June 2018 until September 2022 where these hashtags can be found will be analysed through the lenses of French Discourse Analysis in order to answer the following research questions: first, what are the meanings linked to the “leprosy” by those users of Twitter who perceive themselves as the target of the metaphor? Second, why the “leprosy” metaphor does not seem to be an effective argumentation strategy and leads to the alienation of some individuals? Third, what are the risks in using this metaphor and the underlying metaphor that conceptualizes society as an organism (Schlanger, 1971[1995])? Two main positions emerge from the corpus, signalling two different ways of relating to the metaphor used by the French President: a set of users contest the equivalence that is posited between “nationalism” and “leprosy”, acknowledging the negative value attached to this last notion and reacting polemically to redefine their nationalist identity in more positive terms; other users appropriate the metaphor and resignify it in a positive light, thus rejecting the underlying transvalorisation (i.e., the transfer of the axiological values from the phore to the theme of the metaphor) that connotates a “leper” as a dangerous subject to be marginalized. These users claim for themselves an identity of “leper” as a form of belonging to the “people” as a homogeneous entity that is opposed to the elites, thus modifying the theme, and transforming the original reference to nationalism in an allusion to populism.