Introduction: Why Polemics?

Being in the habit of consulting regularly the French media, I was quite impressed, a few years ago, by the frequency of the “polemics” or public controversies (in French, “polémiques”) (The use of “polemics” and “public controversy” in French and in English will be explained in Chap. 3. We use here controversy and public controversy in the sense of the French “polémique publique”.) they report on weekly. Here are the results of a random survey for the month of September 2012 (when I first collected the relevant items): On the 20th, Le Monde titles «L’étude qui relance la polémique sur les OMG» (“The study that relaunched the controversy about GMOs.”) (All translations of media (newspaper, television, Internet) sources are ours as well as all translations of secondary source material unavailable in English. When there is published English translation of a secondary source, the translation is cited and referenced.) On the 19th of September, the headline runs: «Charlie Hebdo crée la polémique en caricaturant Mahomet» (“Charlie Hebdo is creating the controversy by caricaturing Mohammed.”) And a day earlier: «Polémique: les classes prépa vont-elles devenir payantes?».