When the UK was the world's number one superpower, French was the number one international language. Bizarre. Only when the USA became the biggest superpower, English became the most important language.
It's because England never been a 'superpower', were mainly economical leaders, France was, obviously accurately enough, seen as the 'Cultural Light of the World' during at least all the XIXth century, and maybe you could say as the 'arts and intellectual capital of the world' (waaah) till somewhere in the 1950s, Anglos/Americans defo took the big cultural lead during the 1960s, erasing everything with that 'pop force' (and even then, for example, lots of big popes of pop movies of the Spielberg kind confess that the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1950s had a big influence on them, remember...)
A big cultural influence that began when the Italian Renaissance began to decline, around François 1er, Marignan 1515! (a French ought to add that, nevermind), to more and more develop to totally dominate with Louis XIV.
A big cultural influence that would go along with France development of political power over the European continent, not necessarily a dominating one during the 19th century, but the most inspiring one for political progress (gosh even some Germans came to migrate here then...).
This would be quite illustrated by the fact that French became the most international language through...diplomacy. And this till Versailles 1919, where, ironically enough, the switch with English happened (this castle really only is great to crop tourists currencies...).
Something that would have been helped by the fact it was also seen as the language of arts by European monarchies, till at least the Révolution, and lol, Voltaire was travelling all around Europe amongst those.
So, UK really mainly had the economy, and was quite challenged by both France and 'Germany', depending fields and moments.
It had the advantage to only have to focus on the flexibility of seas, while France and Germany both had to bother both seas and continent (after we French finally managed to make Brits understand that this place wasn't theirs...), and the more the country was continental, the less it had international power through seas.
(I love how very often, always?, the most basic geography explains a lot of things)
So, before 1800 it was...who...exactly?
Oh, and, after Waterloo it was still us??
What a relief!
The configuration of Waterloo itself tells about the XIXth century.
