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concern of the French for accuracy and concision was crystallised at the time. In fact, the article of the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterěts in 1539 which enjoined the use of French had been immediately preceded by one that required clarity of expression in court judgments: they were to be ‘done and written so clearly that there would not be, nor could be, any ambiguity or uncertainty, nor place to ask for interpretation’. Now in 1637 the already famous philosopher René Descartes published his Discours de la méthode. One notable feature of this work was that it was written in French, rather than Latin, acting perhaps in the radical spirit of the academy’s statutes. Descartes was not willingly a revolutionary; indeed, one of his maxims in the Discours was to ‘follow the most moderate opinions and those most remote from excess as were commonly received in practice by the most sensible of those he lived with’, and ‘change his desires rather than the order of the world’.31 But here, at the heart of the European intellectual debate, he proposed that knowledge must be founded exclusively on clear and distinct ideas.32 Abolishing the need for divine revelation, this approach was new and radical, and came to be seen as quintessentially French.* It is often held to mark the beginning of modern philosophy and modern science, even if for Descartes, playing it safe as ever, it left all practical matters of faith and morals unchanged.

And the French belief in their linguistic advantages soon came to be shared by others not so fortunate. Descartes’ great successor Leibniz (1646-1716), though a German from Leipzig, wrote all his major works in French. The intellectual superiority of French culture had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. To be read widely by the elite, one simply had in these days to write in French.

In the late seventeenth century, French culture, especially its classic dramatists Corneille, Racine and Molière, enjoyed a vogue throughout Europe, and Versailles set the standard everywhere for court style and etiquette. Novels in French were everywhere a favourite amusement for rich young ladies. It was especially in the areas of Europe with least cultural self-confidence that the elite set a high value on fluency in French: Sweden, Poland and above all Russia, where starting in the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96) French became established as the language of polite society. Voltaire, the great wit of the age, rejoiced famously that there were French speakers in Astrakhan, and French language teachers in Moscow.33 In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a novel whose action is set in the following generation, substantial parts of the dialogue, including the opening lines,† are written—presumably for realism—not in Russian but in French.

It was in this period that French also replaced Latin as the language of diplomacy, giving it another link with elegance and influence. By 1642 Richelieu’s government had been corresponding in French with most of their northerly neighbours: but Spain, Italy and Switzerland had kept up resistance to it, preferring their own languages. In the second half of that century, in negotiations with the Holy Roman Empire (whose domestic language was German), the French gradually presuaded them to shift the language of communication from Latin to French. In the next century, from the Treaty of Rastatt in 1712, the two sides switched to French exclusively. Treaties came to be written in French, even by powers with no direct French connections. The Danes used it for their traité de commerce de Copenhague in 1691, and the Russians and Ottoman Turks in the terms of their 1774 peace made at Küαük Kainarca (now Kaynarja in Bulgaria).34 The general popularity of France itself evidently took a dive after Napoleon’s attempts in the early nineteenth century to conquer the whole of Europe, but French ceased to play its general intermediary role only in the twentieth century, ironically at Versailles itself, when during the 1919 peace conference held after the First World War the Americans and the British insisted on