Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and ...

Neo-Bonapartism? A parallel between Nicolas Sarkozy and Napoleon III
brought by the contemporary trends in that domain. First of all, he inherited from “the growing
standardization in the ‘image politics’ of Western democracies of national political leaders”
(Barisione, 2009). As a matter of fact, the successive and bouleversing innovations and
modernizations of the communication media and tools this sector is knowing since more than a
century, and more recently the digital revolution, compelled the politicians to adapt their
political communication to the new imperatives and expectations of their societies in terms of
political leadership. The earlier forms of modern political communication were for instance
pioneered in the US and UK political tradition, with a large-balaying continuum of political
communication, encompassing the traditional press, but also broadcast news (radio and TV),
and the new forms of information technologies (phone texts, internet…etc). New patterns
emerged: as explained by Mazzolini, right-wing populism positioned itself “firmly in advanced
industrial democracies media and is on the conservative reactionary spectrum of political
ideology” (Stanyer, 2007). Politicians are nowadays profoundly engaged in a process of political
branding that imposes its own rules and diktats. A brief historical overview of contemporary
trends of communicated politics, as detailed by Sanders (2009), reveal that its evolutionary
path followed several steps. Initiated by the 1953’s presidential campaign of Eisenhower “with
a revolutionary use of TV advertising campaign coupled to the extensive use of polls”, this trend
was accentuated and developed in the 1960s with the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race
(Sanders, 2009). Later on, the equation politics-communication was scrutinized under a variety
of perspectives, among which Mc Combs and Shaw ‘s agenda setting effect of the media or
Stuart Halls’ encoding/decoding paradigm. The theoretical framework under which Sarkozy’s
political communication will be studied is the one defined by Johnston in 1990 and according to
A website dedicated to this project is available starting Dec 7 th 2010 at: http://www.aui.ma/personal/~Y.Assaoui/
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