In this chapter, I analyse some of the metaphors employed in the gender-fair language debate in France. These metaphors express the language ideologies (Woolard 1998) that underlie the debate. This article combines critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics (Charteris-Black 2004) in order to examine three of the metaphors and one of the metonyms identified in a corpus of French online newspapers: THE GENDER-INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE DEBATE IS A BATTLE, LANGUAGE IS A PERSON, LANGUAGE FOR NATION, and THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IS A WOMAN, A corpus of just over 2000 newspaper articles (approximately 1.5 million words) was built from French online newspapers, dating from 2000 to 2022. A corpus linguistics approach was used in order to extract keywords, followed by a closer critical discourse analysis (Baker 2014), in particular a critical metaphor analysis (Charteris-Black 2004). The results show that the metaphor THE GENDER-INCLUSIVE LANGUAGE DEBATE IS A BATTLE is used by both supporters and detractors. For supporters, the battle is against gender discrimination, whereas detractors are fighting an existential battle to save the nation from the influence of “foreign barbarisms”, promoted by “woke ideology”. In this battle, language is frequently conceptualised as being under attack, which is based on the metaphor LANGUAGE IS A LIVING ENTITY and in particular LANGUAGE IS A PERSON. Language has played such an important role in the French nation-building project, that it is intimately bound up in questions of national identity, which thus gives rise to the metonymic relation LANGUAGE FOR NATION. Nations are frequently conceptualised as women needing to be protected, which, along with the metaphors LANGUAGE IS A PERSON and the metonym LANGUAGE FOR NATION, result in the metaphor THE FRENCH LANGUAGE IS A WOMAN. Examples found in the corpus confirm that this interpretation is coherent in the gender-inclusive language debate in France. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that these metaphors and metonym are part of a network of ideas, that need to be understood in relation to one another rather than separately. Baker, Paul. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2004. Corpus Approaches to Critical Metaphor Analysis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn. A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.), Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, 3–49. Oxford: Oxford University Press.