Paradoxes of Political Conflicts. Case Study: The Eclipse of the Belgium First Prime Minister (Belgium 1830)

Abstract

While trying to understand paradoxes of political conflicts, the reading of an historic document could be revealing. What seems to be an apologetic letter, happens to be an incitement to a political revolution through dictatorial regime.

The meteoric fall of the Belgian first Prime minister, De Potter, reminds a mystery. Why does a national hero fall from the tops of Politics to an exile position? And why is he subjected to the worst sanction for a political figure: to be forgotten, erased from the national history?

No Belgian nowadays remembers the name of the first Prime minister.

And yet, only 33 days elapsed from his triumphant entry to Brussels, the 28 September 1830, and his famous resignation letter from the provisional government.

In the present paper we will be on the look-out of his mysterious fall. Our study is based on a close up lecture of his resignation letter, in light of his whole political writings. From the rhetorical-pragmatic analysis we will try to understand the Politician loss of power.

Beyond De Potter interesting case, our objective will be to reveal some profound characteristics of the Belgian political culture and to think on a more general level about the contribution of a pragmatic analysis to the understanding of political conflicts.

Our methodology develops two of the models proposed by Marcelo Dascal, about moves and counter moves and roots metaphors, by adapting them to the specificity of political discourse. We propose to enlarge the complete classical rhetorical analysis based on rhetorical intentional strategies, by a study of its implicit and unconscious rhetorical forms, which are different from the declared intentions and sometimes opposed to them. We propose to designate the latter by the term rhetorical mold.