ABSTRACT
At the time when French reigned unchallenged as an international language, it was of course international only in the sense that it was spoken and cultivated by a largely aristocratic élite. Since the French Revolution, there have been other revolutions in other countries, and royal and ducal families and courts have largely vanished from the scene. Nationalisms have been asserted, and the equality of all languages as vehicles of a national culture and of national education has been affirmed. In spite of the growing rivalry of English in the nineteenth century, French continued nevertheless to be the normal diplomatic language. In the twentieth, however, it has met with serious setbacks in this function. In 1919, on the insistence of President Wilson of the USA and Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Treaty of Versailles was drawn up in English as well as French-a severe blow to the exclusivity which French had enjoyed since the eighteenth century (see pp. 117-18). A further setback, which might easily have been even more serious, occurred when at the foundation of the United Nations Organisation (San Francisco, April-June 1945), only English, Spanish and Russian were proposed as working languages.
