A Democratic Turn?

How did the democratisation of French society affect uses (and abuses) of the classical tradition in public discourse? Looking at daily newspapers, this project will develop a longitudinal overview of references to Graeco-Roman antiquity over the course of the Third Republic (1870-1940). To do so, a series of qualitative and quantitative methods, combining close and distant reading, will be implemented.

This undertaking will involve the programming of a ‘reference extractor’ in Python language, which will aim to identify ancient author names, works, citations, concepts, and locutions, in selected journalistic writings. The matched items will then be subjected to a number of statistical analyses to evaluate the influence of different variables on the frequency of their occurrence (target audience, political tendency, and geographical location of the press titles, degree of canonicity of the references, etc.), thereby shedding light on the role of antiquity as a reference culture during a major turning point in the history of French democracy.