Les stickers en français comme « discours transgressif » dans l’espace urbain napolitain.

This article examines stickers written in French found in the historic center of Naples—an understated yet omnipresent and meaningful form of expression within the city’s visual multilingualism. Falling within the realm of “transgressive discourse”, these signs transform urban furniture into a platform for political, cultural, and identity-based expression. French—both an immigrant language and a transnational vehicular language—appears in Neapolitan public space in various forms: shop signs, posters, graffiti. However, stickers offer a distinct analytical perspective, thanks to their brevity, graphic expressiveness, and high potential for diffusion. Through a linguistic, typographic, and symbolic analysis—understood as the conveyance of cultural and identity-based imaginaries — this article highlights the prevalence of antifascist slogans, revolutionary references, and activist codes, pointing to a transnational circulation of contesting values. In this context, the French language — whether used for expression or for its cultural and political resonance —acquires a certain iconicity within the urban landscape. Typographic choices contribute to shaping varied visual identities — ranging from militancy and humor to art and self-promotion — while the strategic placement of stickers in culturally dense, pedestrian areas (rather than in neighborhoods with a high concentration of Frenchspeaking immigrants) underscores their anchoring in translocal networks tied to counterculture and European mobility. The article proposes a first typology of French-language stickers in Naples and invites further reflection on the symbolic, aesthetic, or political dimensions of these practices. This study contributes to a broader reflection on the configuration of fluid linguistic spaces, shaped by mobile, ephemeral, and visual forms of expression in the urban environment.