Nothing is more exciting and at the same time disappointing than the debate between the two rounds of the French presidential election.
Exciting because the supreme moment of the face-to-face between the two candidates promoted by the first round, a moment from which we hope for revelations, muscular exchanges which we think would make the difference.
Disappointing because we do not hear manages substantive arguments, nor an enlightened defense of political projects. You only have to hear the after-the-fact comments and read the next day’s press to realize this. But French-style debate, one would have to say, because for anyone who has observed and analyzed political debates for years, the presidential debate in our Hexagon is characterized by a strong “polemicity” which, ultimately, suits a French mind that does not love nothing more than to hear the candidates “stuffed up”.
Besides this very French cultural taste, what is it due to? To the device. Comparative studies carried out, with various researchers, at the end of the 1990s (things have hardly changed), relating to the forms of talk shows and other debates in different countries (France, Spain, Italy, North America) allowed to show to what extent the system structures the exchanges of a televised debate.
First, the common point. The device of a televised debate is doubly triangular: a triangular relationship in the internal space of the stage, between the two debaters and an instance of animation; triangular relationship in the external space, between the two debaters and a spectator audience, present-absent, which constitutes the real target of the exchanges. In each of these spaces, the device determines the issue of the words that will unfold there. But the scenarios are different.
A direct face-to-face
In the French device, the debaters are placed in a direct, frontal face-to-face, and the visual staging will show, in a variable way according to the instructions of the candidates (cutaways or not), the faces, the expressions and attitudes of each of them in shots, sometimes overall, sometimes, and most of the time, with a tight framing on the face so as to capture as closely as possible the emotional reactions of each, as an attempt to penetrate the intimacy of their personality.
At the other end of the triangle, a duo of journalists, man and woman, presenting the themes of the debate and playing the role of “master of clocks”, as it is said, which allows them timid calls to order when the candidates do not respect their speaking time. In addition, this mediation body proceeds, sometimes after negotiation with the candidates, with a thematic division of the questions that will be dealt with during the debate.
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