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Taking place in a climate of tension, the 2017 French presidential election has been marked in history by its negative tone. Some candidates saw the opportunity to be particularly offensive by denigrating one or more competitors; others, by contrast, sought to (re)shape negative effects, while nonetheless mobilizing the same codes of negative effervescence. Based on a field observation of the main candidates’ rallies and an analysis of complementary sources (archives of campaign accounts, press reports), this article studies negativity as a strategy within the mechanism of rallies. The aim is to combine the discursive dimension of negativity, through the identification of certain argumentative processes, and its ethnographic dimension, in order to understand how the production and diffusion of these processes works in a given social environment.