La bien-pensance comme stigmate discursif : analyse des usages médiatiques contemporains d’une hétéro-catégorisation polarisante

Anotacija

Over the past several years, the labels bien-pensants ʻright-thinkersʼ and bien-pensance ʻright-thinkingʼ have experienced renewed circulation in the French media sphere, particularly in controversies surrounding “wokeism”. Originally carrying a positive connotation, the term has undergone an axiological reversal and now functions, in certain conservative or reactionary media discourses, as a polemical stigma. Used as a form of hetero-designation, it attributes to opponents a moral stance perceived as dogmatic or hypocritical, while simultaneously enabling speakers to construct for themselves a dissident and lucid ethos in opposition to what is presented as dominant thought. Drawing on an enunciative approach to discourse analysis, this study examines how the lexicon of bien-pensance ʻright-thinkingʼ becomes a tool of ideological disqualification in editorials and opinion pieces. The analysis combines a semantic approach with a pragma-enunciative perspective attentive to modalization, dialogic phenomena, and the symbolic construction of boundaries between us and them. The central hypothesis is that bien-pensants ʻright-thinkersʼ functions as an antidoxic operator producing three major effects: the moral disqualification of opponents, dissident self-legitimation, and the polarization of public debate. These expressions thus appear as markers of rupture that reveal contemporary axiological and ideological tensions within the French media landscape.