On the justification of states of exception in liberal democracies - A discourse analysis of how the Hollande Administration fixated the discourse on the State of Emergency in France after the 2015 Paris attacks

On the night of November 13, 2015, after the attacks perpetrated by the so-called Islamic State against France in Paris and Saint-Denis, President François Hollande decreed the state of emergency. This state of emergency is a state of exception which restricts certain civil liberties such as the freedom of assembly, as several NGOs and UN rapporteurs denounced. Since the September 11 attacks, several liberal democracies implemented permanent exceptional measures in order to fight against global terrorism, challenging the essence of liberalism and democracy. By using Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, this study proposes an analysis of the way in which the Hollande administration fixates its discourse on the state of emergency, based on official speeches and parliamentary debates. By deconstructing this discourse, highlighting its chain of equivalence, the author came to the conclusion that the Hollande administration justifies a prolonged state of emergency by articulating the nodal points necessity, security, liberty and the rule of law. By studying how the antagonistic discourse struggles to give a different meaning to these floating signifiers, it appears that they use the same nodal points. The Hollande administration's discourse is hegemonical because they justify the state of emergency by invoking security in the name of liberty