The issue of precedence attracts the attention of Russian and foreign linguists. Each person is a representative of a particular national culture, including language, history, literature and national customs. One of the linguistic ways of expressing the values of society are precedent texts and precedent phenomena. The system of precedent texts is a national linguistic and cultural value that stores the information about the language history and the society.

There is regarded the realization of influence potential of the lexical unit Discrimination in the texts of the leading French mass media, oriented at different social groups in the aspect of historically established attitude of the French towards equality. The analysis is held taking into consideration not only the national mentality of French people, but also the system of social values of the readers contingent of a particular publication.