Somewhere on this site there's a great set of World War I photos from the French Army in the trenches on the Western Front. One of the more surprising thing in the pictures is the number of black soldiers from French Africa. Something like 10-15% of French forces during the war were blacks, either from the overseas departments or the African colonies. The Empire made a substantial contribution to the war effort.
This is the thing about France that makes it so very different from the rest of Continental Europe. The rest of the countries in Europe very nearly correspond to racial (in the European sense), ethnic and linguistic lines. France of course corresponds to linguistic lines, but that is only because of 200 years of public education. There is a French culture, but it is like American culture - learned, adopted from the state that cobbled the country together. France doesn't descend from one tribe, but is at the crossroads of Europe and incorporates all of the tribes of Europe. And then France and England raced to conquer and colonize the whole world, so you end up having French Asians and French Africans, French Polynesians and French Amerindians.
There is an old saying in France about the difference between France and England in this idea of who is French, or can be French. It is "Est anglais qui peut; est francais qui veut" - literally "Is English who can be; is French who wishes to be". Or in other words, one can choose to be French, because to be French is to adopt a language and a culture, but one cannot choose to be English, because it's an innate ethnic quality, like being Dutch or Swedish or Polish or Czech or Serb.
This is all because France was for centuries not just the biggest state in Western Europe, but the most populous state in Europe (it was not until after 1800 that the population of Russia exceeded that of France, and then only slightly for a long time). France was big in terms of territory, but vast in terms of the polyglot of tribes and peoples and cultures. What made France was the monarchy welding it together with one faith, one law, one God, one King. Before there was anything like the sense of ethnic nationalism, which the Napoleonic Wars and the French Revolution ended up awakening in Europe, there were the various kingdoms of Europe. But all of them except for Muscovy in the far East, were little bits of Kingdoms, confined to one ethnic group or another. Yes, there was The Empire (Germany), but it was an utter sprawling mess composed of over a thousand petty kingdoms, and an Empire in nothing but name. The Emperor had title, but no command.
England was the only other Kingdom in Europe whose basic bone structure came down from the Dark Ages, like France's did, but England was a little bitty thing compared to France. In 1800, there were maybe 8 million English. There were about 38 million French. France simply dwarfed everyone, because it was truly a Kingdom that expanded into the void and ended up holding so many peoples within its bounds for so long that they BECAME something new: French.
This is most similar to China, in the East, and in a real sense the overwhelming influence France had for a thousand years on the whole of Europe was due to the same thing that gave China such influence over the rest of East Asia: sheer volume of people and relative size and wealth have a powerful centripetal draw. France was about the limit for a medieval kingdom. The Empire was well past it, and flew to pieces.
Insightful post. Comparing the results of English Colonialism (a great number of people descended from other people from the British Isles most comfortable with those most like themselves) with French, Portugese, and Spanish Colonialism (a great number of people descended in part from the people colonizing but primarily from the original inhabitants who have adopted certain key aspects of the colonial power's culture--e.g. Catholicism, an official language, and some of the bureaucratic structure), I've often thought of some of these differences as the result of differences resulting from a world view that begins with a Catholic starting point versus one that starts from a Protestant starting point. Two of your four welding points (one faith and one God) bring this aspect out, but you have much to add that I had not thought about. Among other things, by identifying four welding points (the other two being the King and the law), you make it evident that the revolution, by dumping three of the four ends up relying exclusively on the law, which will change much.
Nice post. It gives me more to think about. Do you read Belloc?