La construction d'effets émotifs des titres des Unes de la presse nationale française lors des débuts de la campagne de vaccination contre la Covid-19

This contribution aims to underline the construction of the emotional effects of the headlines of the front pages of the three most prestigious showcases of the French national press: Libération, Le Monde and Le Figaro. The corpus covers the period from December 28, 2020 to March 17, 2021, approximately two and a half months after the launch of the vaccination campaign in France. Analysis of this very difficult initial phase makes it possible to trace the argumentative construction of the different media emotions and to reveal the implicitness of the political nature which dictates a position for or against the actors involved in this campaign. Emotions (a generic term including affections and feelings) permeate the headlines, but with varying intensity and according to a breakdown between the affective registers that distinguish them. For several theorists of argumentation, the affective elements concur with the rational element to influence the reader's opinion. So, each newspaper tries to capture the reader through his or her emotionality and, at the same time, to orientate him or her politically. For this purpose, newspapers adapt their emotional communication according to the categories of readers they wish to influence and mobilize. Based on the methodology proposed by Christian Plantin, the comparison of the three newspapers will reveal the different strategies governing the use of affective rhetoric and the logics underlying the emotional content of the titles as well as the perlocutionary effect that each editor wants to produce on this reader by recurring to the appeal to emotions.