Our thesis deals with the emergence and the naming of the social object domestic violence within the discourse of the Council of Europe. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of French versions of official and preparatory documents ranging from 1985's first recommendation on family violence to the end of 2006-2008's Campaign to Combat Violence Against Women, Including Domestic Violence. Naming is apprehended as an activity of both reflection and construction of social reality. The social and institutional value of names is analyzed on the basis of a comparison between the uses and the distribution of frequencies of violence domestique and of other most frequent items such as violence au sein de la famille and violence conjugale.Names and definitions discursively construct domestic violenceŗ according to the role and the constraints of a universalistic international organization whose aim is to institute an area of respect of human rights both in the public and in the private sphere by going beyond the cultural and geographic specificities of each of its member states. The discourse of the Council of Europe is also influenced by the discursive memory of feminist discourses which first unveiled private violence as a consequence of masculine dominance over women.By intersecting lexical semantics and discourse analysis, the emergence of violence domestique in 1998 and its spreading as an official denomination between 2002 and 2008 are observed as a result of semantic features such as its vagueness and inclusiveness but also as an effect of linguistic interference of English over French which often occurs in the discourse of international organizations.
