This chapter argues that, contrary appearances notwithstanding, France has made important contributions to the development of hermeneutics. The chapter focuses on the two centuries of which this is most true: the eighteenth and the twentieth. The chapter argues that French thought in the eighteenth century contributed one of the two main underpinnings of German hermeneutics: a recognition of anti-universalism that was subsequently adopted by Herder and his successors. The chapter then argues that in the twentieth century a whole series of French thinkers made further significant contributions to hermeneutics (albeit while usually avoiding the word), in particular Sartre, Ricoeur, Derrida, Barthes, Todorov, and Kristeva. Barthes’s contribution of a structuralist dimension to hermeneutics and his expansion of the hermeneutics of texts and discourse into a broader semiology are especially emphasized.