Historical situation

FROM the sixteenth century, after the disappearance of Latin and despite the competition from Italian and Spanish, French was widely used throughout Europe among the aristocracy and for diplomatic contact. Over the next two centuries it strengthened this role as a ‘universal’ language, and the central importance of France and the French language in disseminating ideas reached its climax in the eighteenth century and with the Revolution. In the nineteenth century the European powers including France were hungry for colonial expansion, for the movement of people and goods, for raw materials for their industries and for markets for their products; France participated eagerly in the rush to extend influence world-wide. The present-day situation, in which French is one of the few languages used in all continents, is a direct consequence of military, economic, cultural and political expansion; significantly, it is not a consequence of mass emigration such as that of Spanish-speaking peoples to South America or English-speaking peoples to North America or Australia.

After the establishment and consolidation of France's European territory, a slow process mainly of military and diplomatic conquest from Paris, and which was not completed until 1860 with the attachment of Nice and Savoy, France's first overseas empire began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with settlements in Canada and Louisiana, in the West Indies and across the Pacific, including continental India.