With his magisterial study, “When the World Spoke French,” Marc Fumaroli harks back to a time when the situation was exactly the reverse. In the 18th century, he shows, “the international community of the learned” tended “to speak, write and publish mostly in French.” Whether they hailed from Russia or Prussia, Sweden or Spain, Austria or America, the Enlightenment’s best minds gravitated to French out of their shared reverence for both the matchless sophistication of the French art de vivre and the spirited intellectual exchanges of the Parisian salon.

Like most of the tableaux in his gallery, Fumaroli’s portrayal of Aldenburg supports his claim about the “unique alliance of intelligent power and insolent joie de vivre” that earned the French language so many devotees. For this very reason, though, reading his subjects’ “French” texts, appended to each chapter, proves a somewhat unsatisfying exercise, despite Richard Howard’s characteristically able translation.

Two events in history saved the English language from being replaced completely by Norman-French. One was political, and the other a natural disaster. Politically, the Norman-French lost their lands in northern France to the French king – thus cutting ties to the mainland. Also, the plague which swept across Europe is said to have killed at least one third of the population of the British Isles – labouring and merchant classes thus found themselves in demand and with greater social status. By the end of the 13th century, even the ruling classes and court had reverted to English – by this time transformed into what we now refer to as Middle-English. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales belongs to this period.