A question about top-end public speaking technique.

Say you’re President of France. You are visiting Bosnia a few months after the US President was there. He made a winning, moving keynote speech. You want to do the same. Or, ideally, do much better.

How to set about this task?

You are lucky today in having a stupendous example in how NOT to do it. Namely the visit to Sarajevo of President Chirac in Spring 1998:

A European leader has two ways to follow a U.S. President into town. One is to study closely what he did and then do something as different as possible. The other is to try to copy everything he did, down to the smallest detail.

The wise option is the first one: do something different! President Chirac’s team bafflingly chose the second unwise option, including an absurd prolonged security lockdown for much of the Balkans and, yes, a speech in the National Theatre to an invited audience.

However, the French did not have the resources or sense of showmanship to pull all this off effortlessly. They did come up with a clever and good new angle: to bring down to Sarajevo for the speech a crowd of young Bosnian Serbs. Voilà! La réconciliation! But this noble scheme was thwarted, of course, by the Republika Srpska authorities for “security reasons.” There was also undignified bickering in the margins over flags and whether wine should be served at the official lunch—to meet Bosniac/Muslim sensibilities it wasn’t, much to Bosnian Croat indignation.

President Chirac’s speech in the Theatre itself inevitably covered much the same ground as President Clinton in terms of urging Bosnians to bury their differences and build for the future, but he set out the issues in European terms, calling for “an open and tolerant Islam on our continent.” President Clinton’s speech had not mentioned the European contribution to rebuilding Bosnia. Pof! President Chirac hit back by not mentioning the Americans.

All in all the occasion felt and was “flat.” It did not help that the president’s earnest, long, and mainly humourless speech was in French, a language few in the theatre understood. There was none of President Clinton’s relaxed, almost sexy style, and, to use a French word, élan. No one felt any emotional engagement with either President Chirac or his message. No one had a good time.

More please? Zut alors, once was more than enough…

Read the whole thing. An extract from my book Speechwriting for Leaders, over at Diplomatic Courier in Washington.