Anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French

But ever since the decline of Latin, French had been the language of cultivated cosmopolitan elites – and thus the European language par excellence. When, in the early years of the twentieth century, it was first proposed to introduce the teaching of French as part of the modern languages syllabus at Oxford University, more than one don opposed the idea on the plausible grounds that anyone worthy of admission to the university would already be fluent in French.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 760