Speaking off-the-cuff – Macron in front of Notre Dame

As Notre Dame cathedral blazed behind him last Monday, French president Emmanuel Macron delivered a master class in how to improvise a speech.

His four-minute address to television reporters was unprepared but clearly structured, tight in its delivery, and to-the-point in its conclusion.

For any public speaker, an off-the-cuff speech is fraught with peril. The danger is that, without the time to prepare, and especially if you’re feeling tense or emotional, you will ramble, scramble for your words, and fail to make a clear point.  

As President Macron showed late last Monday evening, even though visibly shaken by the horror of seeing the 850-year-old cathedral burn, this needn’t be the case.

Here’s how he structured his speech:

·        First he addressed all the people concerned - the firemen, Catholics, Parisians, and all the French;

·        Next he expressed what Notre Dame stands for in France - “This is our history, our literature, our imagination, the place we have lived our great moments, our epidemics, our wars, our liberations, it’s the epicenter of our life, our pride…..”;

·        Finally he looked forward - “Together we will rebuild this cathedral. It’s what the French expect, what they deserve and it’s our destiny.”

The result was impressively powerful and showed President Macron, who can be rather patchy as a public speaker, at his best. (His set-piece performance on the same subject from the Elysée Palace the following evening was markedly less successful in terms of impact.)

However, you don’t need to be a slick, well-practiced national politician like him to deliver such clarity and impact when speaking from the hip. What follows is an introduction to the improvisational public speaking technique I call the Quick Questions approach.

It’s not rocket-science, but it’s effective. Next time someone springs a surprise invitation for you to “say a few words”, here’s what to do:

-         Say yes without demurring;

-         Select three interrogative words (quickly run “who, why, where, what, when and how” through your head);  

-         Prepare three rhetorical questions;

-         Improvise your speech as you seek to answer your own questions.

So, for example, President Macron could have used the technique by asking out loud:

1.      “Who do I think of as the cathedral burns? Cue: firemen, Catholics, Parisians…

2.     “What does Notre Dame mean to us all?” Cue: Our history, our literature….  

3.      “Where do we go from here?” Cue: We will rebuild this cathedral….

The questions themselves can be as simple as you like: Who should we thank? Why are we here today? What’s next for us all? You could ask more, but I recommend you limit yourself to three in order to remain concise.

I also recommend that you ask your questions out loud. This isn’t essential but it has the advantage of buying you extra time to think and also of clarifying the structure of your speech. Your audience will have the impression that you are a clear thinker, even as you grope for the right answers to your own questions.  

Click here to watch President Macron in front of Notre Dame (4’26”)

(And to hear the same speech in English, click here)

Charles Fleming, 22nd April 2019

Please feel free to tweet this article if you enjoyed it. How about this: “Macron’s Notre Dame speech was a case study of powerful improvisation. Read the latest article on rhetoric by @CWRF at https://bit.ly/2ILKrtP” 

You can read my other articles about rhetoric and public speakers in the news on the Expression/Impression blog, available here.