2023-11-11 14:00:08
The president of MoDem, François Bayrou, upon his arrival at the trial in the parliamentary assistants affair, in Paris, November 7, 2023. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
“Now enjoy the show!” » The injunction is, in principle, innocent. It is less so when you are warned, questioned at the bar of a criminal court, and when you ask a public prosecutor to stop asking questions and sit down again. However, this is what François Bayrou said on Tuesday, November 7, to the prosecutors of the 11th criminal chamber of Paris who were questioning him as part of the trial of the MoDem parliamentary assistants.
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Facing a court is, for the majority of litigants, a difficult, trying moment, which can make one lose one’s means, forget one’s words and one’s arguments, especially if they are poor and one has little. It happens – it is often a strong moment of a criminal trial – that the maieutics of a presiding judge changes the course, when a defendant, pushed to his limits, admits a contradiction, recognizes a fact. But there is also a particular category of defendants, who from the courtroom remember above all the second term, “audience”, and excel at transforming a hearing into a platform, even a spectacle, in which they can deploy all their art of the speech. This is the case for many elected officials of the Republic when they parade at the bar.
François Bayrou had been waiting for his interrogation for days, pawing impatiently on the folding seat reserved for defendants. And he knew how to make it last, long explanations in bursts of blood, demonstrations carried out graphically in support and laser pointer in hand in small barbs intended to make the audience smile, to the point that a day was not enough. Like lawyers, politicians (many of whom come from their ranks) are professionals of speech, experts in winning, through their words, conviction and votes.
Seduction and aggressiveness
When they are also, like François Bayrou or Nicolas Sarkozy, whose appeal trial in the so-called “Bygmalion” affair also started this week, experienced in presidential campaigns, they have a keen sense of room animation, interaction with an audience, even a hostile one. You must have seen, in December 2022, Nicolas Sarkozy go virtuoso from a witticism to an angry outburst, from a solemn proclamation to a humorous anecdote during the appeal trial of the so-called “Bismuth” affair. having heard him draw laughter from the room by miming the gesture of closing an airplane door, hand on his ear to represent the fact that he is then on the phone, to measure the gap that separates him from the ordinary defendants.
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