The « Parliamentary Wedding »:Rhetoric, Semiotics and Law. Convincing in a case of societal justice

Abstract

The context chosen is that of the final debate session in the French National Assembly on 23 April 2013, before the vote establishing in law "marriage for all" understood as a work of societal justice. This new law will be the major achievement of the socialist government of the time. Even though the outcome of the vote was a foregone conclusion, given the state of political forces and the dominance of the left, the preliminary debate took place with all the force of its contradictory arguments. We then analyse a few short extracts from the speeches made in the Parliament by deputies in favour of or opposed to this law, questioning the relevance of such a debate, which we know will have no pragmatic effect. This remarkable episode leads us to question the three pillars of classical rhetoric — the judicial, epidictic and deliberative "genres" — from the semiotic point of view of veridicality and the horizon of legal discourse in the legislative ritual which is responsible for the creation of Law. This discourse, far from being exclusively concerned with the judicial genre, is rather situated at the crossroads of the famous generic tripartition. Between attested truth (the judicial), exalted truth (the epidictic) and projected truth (the deliberative), it is in the intertwining of the pathemic that the discourse of Law constructs its modalities of enunciation in order to impose its normative statements and thus contribute to the construction of the collective. Our hypothesis then consists in seeking in this generic syncretism the reason for the relevance of 'circumstantial' political and legal speeches: their aim, far from the primary pragmatic effect of a success at the ballot box, would be to bring out a 'point of rightness' whose effect is to consolidate the collective and contribute to its institution through an enunciative ritual that seems to have its own end.