ABSTRACT
In the case of France we find, perhaps more than anywhere else, a particular way of organised expression, both written and oral, in which the dissertation stands out as an exemplary cornerstone. This tradition reaches at least four centuries back in time, even if the dissertation only found its present form around the emergence of the Third Republic in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. These concrete practices of forms of expression and their concomitant value system in the shape of literary Cartesianism, inculcated through the entire schooling system and reproduced also as standards for adequate expression in public life, have been relatively consistent over a very long period, coinciding with both the modern French state and “being French in practice” since the seventeenth century, but are also today constitutive across the different fields of power and identity in French society as their common, concrete and basic medium.
