The paper offers a reading into one of the first recorded reactions of a kuttab-then-Azhar-trained scholar (al-Tahtawi, 1801-1873) to a 19th-century European governance system (France, 1820s). The scholar, Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, is widely celebrated as one of the main architects of the Egyptian Renaissance of the mid-1800s. After returning to Egypt, al-Tahtawi published his memoirs in a collection titled: Takhlis al-ibriz (1834). In it, one of the chapters is devoted to the French governance system (tadbir dawlat al-Faransis); the author wanted to describe this odd constitutional arrangement to his contemporaries in Egypt, and experimented with language. He struggled to convey his impressions because—he seems to suggest and his later biography confirms—language fails him. The text also contains a true Rosetta stone: a translation of the French Constitution of 1814. Comparing al-Tahtawi’s first account of the governance system, with his translation of the Constitution, and its original text in French illuminates the analysis. The sections of the chapter on governance where al-Tahtawi struggles point us to the areas that will be later occupied by the semiotics of positive law. What role did al-Tahtawi play in that? He appeared to be quite dismissive of this godless construction, especially in the lines of poetry that he cited at the end of his account of the French governance system in Takhlis al-ibriz However, after his return from France, al-Tahtawi became heavily involved in kickstarting (and shaping) the translation movement that structured 19th century (Egyptian) Arabic. The translation movement set the foundations for the construction of the system of signs of positive law in Arabic that is still currently constraining the scientific, technical language of governance. The paper thus takes a step back and looks at what areas were identified by al-Tahtawi’s text as needy of a new semiotics of law. One such new semiotics was later devised under the influence of legal positivism, and came to constrain the discourse on governance along those lines.