"Travailler plus pour gagner plus". Análisis cultural de un lema de la campaña presidencial francesa del 2007

2019

“Travailler plus pour gagner plus” (“Work more to earn more”) was a slogan of right-wing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential election, which proposed exempting overtime working hours from taxation. In this article, I develop a cultural analysis of this political slogan. Its linguistic interest lies in its poetic and theatrical dimensions. The slogan is embedded in a rich cultural context: it refers to a doxa in right-wing discourse, according to which the “social model” should be replaced with a liberal model that also rescues the “value of work”. It responded to voter economic and social concerns, which were supported by the media. Through such strong slogans, Nic…