Between public and private: Conversationalisation in French politicians’ blogs

The article shows that while public discourse is claimed to be undergoing a process of conversationalisation – i.e. adopting features of casual and informal communicative situations – this process does not apply to any great extent to French politicians’ blogs. The parameters investigated in a corpus of 80 politicians’ blog posts during September 2007 are private and informal topics, and conversation-like interaction. The main focus of the study is on the minority of blogs in the material which are in fact conversationalised. These blogs are examined from the point of view of persuasion, as devices in constructing a credible image of the author. The results show that while these few conversationalised blogs construct an image of the author as an ‘ordinary’ person close to the public, the majority of the blogs create an authorial image as a remote political expert. The extent to which the construction of a lay image is successful, however, is questioned in the analysis. Keywords: Conversationalisation, politicians’ blogs, genre, ethos, peopolisme