Chronicle of a “Lie”
This article examines the controversy surrounding the French government’s alleged “lie” about the usefulness of sanitary masks at the beginning of the pandemic crisis. The study rests on two complementary approaches. The first is a diachronic analysis of the authorities’ public interventions in March and April 2020. The second approach consists in identifying and analyzing the reactions to the government’s changing discursive line. This double investigation, based on a press review and on the analysis of a corpus of 1239 testimonies of ordinary citizens collected during the first containment, leads us to consider the notion of technical-discursive agency to account for a changing articulation between discourse, available material resources (masks) and scientific knowledge.