‘The part played by jurists in French history’, wrote Sir Henry Maine, ‘and the sphere of jural conceptions in French thought, have always been remarkably large.’ Likewise Maitland once referred to France as ‘a country where people take their legal theories seriously, a country where a Prime Minister will often talk law without ceasing to talk agreeable French’, and he went on to contrast the Frenchman's interest in legal theory with ‘our wholesome English contempt for legal technique’. One of the purposes of this book, as explained in the first chapter, is to explore the cultural foundations of political argument, and one of its principal contentions is an emphasis upon the importance of law and legal doctrine to French public argument. Historians and political scientists have often enough been willing to acknowledge the cultural importance of legal theory in France, but with the exception of a number of studies in the fashionable field of nineteenth-century criminology they have rarely studied this theme in detail. The studies that have been undertaken of the role of jurists in society have been disappointingly limited. There is a contrast here with the renewed appreciation of the historical significance of law amongst historians of Germany. And yet there are good grounds for regarding French political culture as more profoundly juristic than its German counterpart.