Politics in the French Fifth Republic (FREN 111)
Textual Commentary Guidelines

Read the text several times after noting down carefully the origin of the document, the date of its publication and the name of the author. If necessary, number the lines of the text to make quoting easier.
During the first readings, pick out anything which will need to be explained (for your own benefit, for your reader or audience, and/or for an examiner). For example:

• dates (the historical dimension of a text is essential to its understanding)
• proper nouns, names of places, acronyms of national or international organisations
• concepts or keywords belonging to the political discourse (or jargon) of the time; themes which characterise the dominant ideology of the period
• historical, political and cultural references
• last, but not least, the title

Distinguish clearly between the information (statistics, the text of an act, a speech, historical fact, a specific event) and the comments or the interpretation offered by the author of the document. Bear in mind that, starting from the same piece of information, another author might have produced a different analysis of the same phenomenon.

This is where the knowledge you have acquired previously comes into play. When commenting on a text, the aim is not to roll off by heart whole chunks of a module dealing with the question raised in the document under study. Previous knowledge simply enables you to understand why the author adopts the approach he or she does. Above all, it enables you to spot – and therefore to underline and point out – the omissions (whether deliberate or not), or any distortion of reality for which the author is responsible. If any event is not mentioned by the author, or – on the contrary – if any aspect of a problem is stressed by the author, it is important to understand why that is the case. Through incompetence? Prejudice? Strategy? In this last case, what strategy? In other terms, commenting on a text consists in a continual interplay between the reader’s knowledge and a document which gives the reader another point of view on the issue or event under discussion.

The rhetoric of the author is also of prime importance. You should identify the different rhetorical modes, the level of language and the type of discourse used: in other words, all the technical means the author makes use of in the writing of the document in order to obtain a desired effect.

It goes without saying that no text is ever really objective, neutral or transparent. Every text and every reader shares in an ideology, a culture, a particular system of representations or values. Moreover, everyone reads and writes according to his/her own history. Having said this, there is nothing to prevent you from trying to understand how and why a given text operates as it does, at a given moment in time, for a given reader or audience.

You should refrain from passing any a priori value-judgement on the substance of the problem raised. If the text is biased, the commentary should show how the bias operates, but should neither agree nor disagree with that bias. It should uncover the workings of this type of discourse, study its coherence (or incoherence), its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness). To be indignant about Le Pen’s racism, for example, is irrelevant in the context of the textual commentary.

Once you have read the text several times, write (for your own personal use) a draft summary of the text. This summary obliges you to bring out the main issues raised in the text, to point out the main line of argument and to put it down on paper. The summary is not in any way the beginning of the commentary, but rather a preliminary stage preceding the analysis. It simply identifies and describes succinctly the document under study, as a means of enabling you to proceed with the commentary.

The introduction should briefly answer the following questions:

1. What is the origin and nature of the document?
What paper or what book was it taken from?
Was it produced by an official body, an institution or an individual?
Does it come from a private or a public collection?

Specify the leaning or the place, in national or international life, of the publication or body. For example, distinguish between dailies and journals (is it a paper with a large circulation, a scholarly journal, a women’s magazine?), between militant or partisan publications and official reports of parliamentary committees. Specify the nature or the status of the document to be studied. Is the document private or public? Anonymous or collective? What is it we are dealing with? Is it a speech, an interview, a newspaper article (for a given occasion? by a given leader?), a pamphlet, memoirs? Is it part of a constitution, the text of an act or a treaty? Is it a primary or a secondary document, although the distinction is not always apposite: some texts will be both scholarly comment on the issue or event (so, a secondary document) and evidence of the issue or event (a primary document). 

2. Who is speaking? Where from? At what precise time?

Specify the status of the person who is writing. Is s/he a public figure, an ordinary citizen? Is it a group or a sect? Do not forget that the gender and age of the author can be as important as his/her social position. Who does the author address, and for what purpose? Is the aim to convince, persuade, inform, intimidate, harangue, entertain?

Do not forget that any text, any document inevitably has a bias, that every author, wittingly or unwittingly, is caught in the mesh of a certain culture, and a certain ideology. You must therefore clarify everything that can help to understand the rhetoric of the text in order to avoid levelling unjustified accusations at the author regarding his or her motives. Is the date of publication important? (Any chronological data needed to explain why a particular document was produced at a particular moment in time should be kept very short.) The context should also be given briefly, and only the main features indicated (does the text refer to a political crisis, social unrest, an election victory, etc?). Does the text play on the distance in time between the date of the event and the date of the publication of the text? If so, point this out and explain in what way the time-lag can re-orientate the nature of the commentary. Any biographical indications deemed necessary to identify and understand the author’s intellectual, political, or social itinerary (and this only in order to throw some light on the text) should be kept to a minimum. 

The introduction therefore has only one aim: to specify what is strictly necessary to identify and to read the text in an intelligent way. 

The introduction should be followed by the announcement of the main points of the commentary.

The number of parts which will structure the analysis is not really important. What is important is that these parts should bring to the fore the line of argument within the document. You may wish to use a title for each part to enable you to structure your ideas. Whether you use one of the author’s expressions or whether you invent your own, the ideal thing would be for the sequence of titles to give the gist of the themes in the document. When pieced together, the different parts of your commentary should aim to provide a coherent overview of the development of the ideas of the document.

It is preferable to avoid a running commentary. Beware of the dangers of empty paraphrasing!

The commentary should be organised around the internal logic of the document. That said, do not forget that an author’s line of argument does not only manifest itself through the progression of ideas and the logical organisation of a text. It manifests itself also through a choice of style which aims at convincing the reader or, on the contrary, at giving the reader the means to build his or her own opinion from information put at his or her disposal. Hence the importance of spotting and analysing the rhetorical devices or the discursive strategies mentioned above.

Very roughly, we can say that a written document falls under one of the two following headings:

A. Texts of a ‘linear’ type: i.e. very coherent texts in which the linking sentences are sometimes emphasised by the use of subtitles. These texts have a clearly established starting-point, a middle section which develops arguments and ideas, and a conclusion.

In this case the commentary can easily be organised around two (or three or four) of the main ideas of the text (not necessarily those which the text itself employs). Give each part a pertinent title. Within each part, reconstruct the author’s development of ideas. This does NOT mean repeat what the author says, but rather explain how the author moves from one idea to the next, why arguments are used as they are, and why the author includes or omits relevant contextual information. Comment on the type and register of the language used (see the Departmental Handbook for advice). This is where the detailed study of the text carried out during the preliminary phase enables you to understand how a certain meaning is produced.

B. ‘Circular’ texts: contrary to the ‘linear’ texts, other texts analyse the same problem starting from different or convergent angles.

Should you follow the ‘circular’ movement of such a text you would run the risk of repeating yourself over and over again. This can be avoided by adopting a deliberately synthetic approach, i.e. by gathering together the elements scattered throughout the text which are linked to specific issues or themes, or which link to the different approaches adopted by the text (e.g. cultural, political, economic, sociological, historical, symbolic). Within each of these sections, adopt the same methodology as for ‘linear’ texts: i.e. explain the details, show how and why the author reasons and writes as he or she does.

For both types of text, you must:

• Study the keywords
• Clarify the allusions
• Analyse the rhetoric, the images, metaphors and symbols: what effect do they have on the audience?
• Classify the text: is it polemical, lyrical, melodramatic, didactic, etc.?

The conclusion should answer the question: where does the interest (or lack of interest) of this document reside? What constitutes its originality? This document had an aim (which you have already identified). Has this aim been achieved? If so, how? If not, why not? In other words, the conclusion should describe the line of argument of the document and its significance.

In the document studied, a certain effect has been produced, a certain meaning has been conveyed. This meaning can be assessed in different ways:

1. An assessment of the quality of the internal coherence of the text. Is the document useful, serious, incomplete, tendentious?
2. An assessment of the text ‘within the context’. Is this document truly representative of the paper it is taken from, or of the institution that published it, or of the atmosphere of the period, or of the culture – in the widest sense – of the time? Is it, on the contrary, atypical, marginal, premonitory? Have there been successive reinterpretations of this document? If so, what conclusions can or should be drawn?
3. Knowing what today’s reader knows (it is precisely at this stage that hindsight may rightfully be drawn upon) what place should be given to this document within a long-term historical perspective? Has it, for instance, provided the mould for a mode of thought or a tradition still in existence in the country or the culture being considered? If this is the case, if may prove useful to compare it with contemporary events in order better to describe the lasting significance of the text studied. But you should only do this on the express condition that these final comments remain brief and in no way overshadow the specificity of the document which you had to study.