Appointed Prime Minister by Emmanuel Macron, François Bayrou will see his first speeches scrutinized in the coming weeks. With perhaps even more attention than the others…
François Bayrou ended up having his place at Matignon. Forgotten in 2017, then in 2022 by Emmanuel Macron, refusing to follow the Attal line at the start of 2024, then missing his turn again last September, when Michel Barnier was chosen, the boss of MoDem was finally named Prime Minister by Emmanuel Macron this Friday December 13. He will thus have overcome one of those stutters which political history has the secret of, managing to get around the wall against which he has come up against all these years.
The three-time presidential candidate, former Minister of Education (under Chirac) and Justice (under Macron), among others, will therefore have the heavy task of leading a government, threatened from its first day by the ax of the censorship. In addition to the choice of ministers who will surround him, his first speeches, and in particular his general policy speech, will be scrutinized. Perhaps a little more than for those who preceded him. Because François Bayrou has always fought against a speech defect that few people know about.
François Bayrou, “a very clever little boy, but who stuttered very, very badly”
The latter was only really mentioned from the 2007 presidential campaign, when the Béarnais came to play spoilsport between Nicolas Sarkoy and Ségolène Royal: François Bayrou overcame a stubborn stutter which disturbed him throughout his youth. “The boys called him Shakes… because he couldn’t say Shakespeare,” a former school friend told Le Parisien a long time ago, when a teacher described “a very clever little boy, but who stuttered very, very strongly.”
In high school, François Bayrou’s stuttering stuck and attracted “mockery and sarcasm”. But some speak of the courage with which he faced it. “One day, he amazed us by still daring to speak in public in front of an audience, despite the risk of tripping. It was one of his first victories,” reports a comrade, still in Le Parisien.
It is through hard work that the new Prime Minister, literary at heart (he is originally a literature teacher), will get through this. Helped by a French teacher and his wife, a morpho-psychologist and doctor in clinical psychology, he will work every first Saturday of the month to get rid of this scourge. Individual sessions at home are also added to his schedule. A constant work of patience, when ideas and words come jostling at the gate.
“He worked like crazy, learned dozens of poems by heart, training alone, until he no longer stumbled. He had developed intellectual gymnastics to avoid pronouncing too complicated words in advance “, details a nearby MP in 2007. The Bayrou case is such a success that it once served as an example among professionals, assure several press titles. Associations and even some university studies on the subject also mention the victory of the former deputy, MEP, mayor of Pau, against this speech disorder.
“Very often, in my speeches…” A stutter not completely eliminated
François Bayrou even prefaced a work to raise awareness and testimonies, “Be a stutterer and shut up”, by William Chiflet, in 2014 (L’Archipel). “What was easy becomes difficult, what was easy becomes blocked, and we see the worry in the parents’ eyes. Many people say “it will pass…” And it does not pass,” he said. notably explained about his young years. “No doubt because it is not the consonants that block, nor the lips, nor the palate, but the secret child who remains within us, and undoubtedly was injured, without us knowing by what injury.”
When you pay attention to him, during television interventions or at the end of tiresome debates, you will notice that he still sometimes stumbles. “Very often, in my speeches, avalanches of synonyms emerge, words that play with each other. These games do not come from a poetic muse, nor from an innate love for the richness of French vocabulary and the skills rhetoric. They come from stuttering which requires you to pass ten words through your mind to be able to say one or two without stumbling”, he also had the opportunity to explain in the work.
However, politics is ruthless and if he has sometimes been praised for his career (“I admire how he was able to overcome his speech problem. It denotes a real strength of being”, commented François Mitterrand), François Bayrou has not escaped a few nicknames linked to his stuttering. “The stutterer, I’m going to kill him!”, a certain Nicolas Sarkozy even dared in 2015, in full preparation for the right-wing primaries for the presidential election the following year, according to Le Canard Enchaîné. The two men have been irreconcilable since François Bayrou attempted a rapprochement with Ségolène Royal in 2007 and especially called to vote for François Hollande five years later.
If the words of the former head of state had been denied at the time by Nicolas Sarkozy’s entourage, the mayor of Pau had decided to react: on LCP, François Bayrou had then welcomed a tirade “of very great elegance”, full of “sympathy, distinction and finesse”, ensuring that it “contributes to raising the French political debate”.