The purpose of this book is both to evoke a ‘moment’ in the history of public argument in France and to connect it with a neglected tradition of argument about public affairs. It examines a determinate tradition in French political thought – the ‘state tradition’ – but considers that tradition to be all-pervasive in French political culture. It is therefore a tradition which needs to be studied in an historically specific context: we need to ask what issues, what problems, it formulates. Hence the ambiguous character of the book, for it began life as a D.Phil. thesis which took as its focus the debates on the problem of unionization in the French public services: did public officials have the right to form trade unions (syndicats) for the defence of their interests against their employer, the state; and if so, did they have consequent rights such as the right to strike? This problem of syndicats de fonctionnaires was hotly debated in France in the belle éypoque. Until, with the imminence of war in 1913–14, it was displaced by questions relating to military service, it was arguably the most lively and intractable issue on the political agenda in the post-Dreyfus era. One of the aims of this study is to explain why this was such a problematic issue.