Le Grand Débat: the return of the return engagement

ABSTRACT As anticipated, the 2022 presidential debate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen was a return of the 2017 engagement, echoing the Mitterrand—Giscard d’Estaing return engagement of 1974/1981. This article discusses the 2022 debate through the prism of this longer view. Focusing on the rules of engagement, it reconsiders the idea of winners and losers, the impact of ‘killer phrases,’ and the role of aggression in relation to presidential status, analysing the latter in the light of Karl Popper’s ‘intuition of factual truth,’ ‘intuition of injustice’ and the ‘theory of rationalist optimism.’ It argues that French presidential debates have not proved decisive in determining the outcome of the election, but symbolize the French presidential system metonymically as a piece of televisual theatre which impacts on the parcours of the respective candidates, while their significance is dependent on that attributed by voters to the presidential election itself.