Abstract This chapter offers a survey of some key moments when external factors such as language contact, civil wars, conquests, political changes, and large-scale colonization played a major role in the evolution of the French language. It focuses on pivotal moments such as the hypothetical birth of an oral koine in Paris during the twelfth century that may, for the first time, be deemed ‘French’, or the gradual increase in the number of French-speaking people in France during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries due to the effects of education and the mass media. The chapter also deals with the growing emergence of a linguistic norm during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which leads to the reallocation of a large set of variants which had been in widespread use until they became stigmatized at this point.