Le Storytelling : cercle de la narration au service de l’ethos du leader

As a researcher in Communication Studies, my perspective is to analyze candidates’ speeches during presidential elections through the art of telling narratives or storytelling (Marti and Pélissier, 2012). I wonder about the reason for using stories, but also the manner of telling them. During campaign speeches, the orator tells himself, alternating personal and collective stories, but also the citizens’ ones. The candidate simultaneously builds and conveys his own story and identity. Here, the notion of ethos has been essential (Charaudeau, 2005). During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama used stories in a significant way. Hence, I have decided to undertake a comparative approach between the American candidate and Nicolas Sarkozy’ speeches during the 2007 campaign. The analysis has been done on a selection of speeches given during the candidates’ meetings, focusing on storytelling. The discourse analysis software Tropes has been used to enlighten what remains impossible to see to the naked eye. Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy did manage to gather their peoples using elements of a popular imagination (Girardet, 1986). Collective stories run through autobiographical ones and those last narratives nourish the first (Bruner, 2010). The orator uses what I call a « narrative circle » which helps the transmission and the construction of the identity. The question is to know how the presentation of himself enables a candidate to fit into the History of his country. I wonder what is the relation between stories and identity and ask the question: how and why a candidate should communicate thanks to ethos during his campaign speeches and in his whole communication strategy