A chapter of a collective work on the French parlements in the eighteenth century amd the invention of political discourse. It deals with the uses of patriotic language and gesture by the magistrates and lawyers of the Paris parlement from 1770 to 1789. Based on original research from mainly published sources but also archival. It argues that rather than the parlementaires being actually patriotic, they exploited the new but ambiguous discourse in sophisticated ways to create a space and influence the public
