France is generally thought of as the home of Theory with a capital T, the country that spawned such intellectual giants as Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, with Paris the vibrant epicentre of a movement that revolutionised the teaching and study of literature in the last few decades of the twentieth century. However, it is in the home of Theory that this most contentious object is the least subject to scrutiny as such. Theory is everywhere, one might almost say, part of the very fabric of life for anyone who anxiously walks the floor of academe, but its presence is implicit rather than explicit in the classroom and it is almost never taught as a subject per se at either under- or postgraduate level.