Using the term “€œUniversal Petitioner”€ certain letter manuals belonging to the now forgotten sub-genre known as the petitioning handbook try to impose their hegemony on the normative field of the petitioning practice. By drawing a comparison between British and French “€œPetitioners,” this paper attempts to explain the similarities, differences and specificities in these manuals in order to shed a new light on the standards applicable to the epistolary dimension of the petitioning process. First, it is argued that the “€œPetitioners” appear as a conservatory for relatively fixed rules. Many prescriptions aim at maintaining or restoring a tradition, an “Ancien Regime” of writing, but some changes especially in France give way to modernity in connection with social and political evolutions. It is also suggested that despite these evolutions, French and British petitioners do not equally obey their “€œmasters” rules. Some of the signatories of mass political petitions do not comply with the recommended procedures. Moreover, “€œtraditional”€ petitions sometimes subvert the rules or deviate from them—€”a sign of the difficulty of formal petitionary grammar to make way for new practices.