Ceauşescu et les avatars de la tyrannie

Abstract

The imaginary of oppression has always fascinated political thinkers. During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the figure of President Nicolae Ceauşescu was incontrovertibly included in a world pantheon of tyranny. Starting from these historical considerations, this article explores the symbolic construction of Ceauşescu's "tyranny", as an effect of the interaction between exogenous and endogenous representations. More precisely, the author studies the historical setting and the rhetorical instruments that contributed to the prevailing discourse about Ceauşescu's time in power. He maps the evolution of Ceauşescu's image of "tyrant" on two complementary lanes. In the first instance he studies the conceptual evolution of the term "tyranny"; secondly, he explores the symbolic composition of the tyrant's image; finally, in the conclusion, he scrutinizes the symbolic reversibility of these political representations.