Russia, Austria, and at times Holland, Spain, Prussia and Sweden, were all major players in Europe, with waxing and waning influence. France was relatively stable while Russian grew and the others mostly ripped pieces out of each other.
There is no downplaying France in 18th century. It was basically the center of the European world.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-by-country?tim...
Centre not center (-re is French/English, -er is mostly American). There was no such concept of a European as we understand it today, back in C18.
"center of the European world" - no, the Parisian meridian effort was eventually ditched in favour of Greenwich, London. Again you persist with the non French -er.
I do applaud your deft handling of a Germanic language: "English". English is of course the modern lingua franca - French.
Yes, there was. And its mostly unchanged since then after including the changes that the French Revolution brought. And that identity openly and directly took France as its center. The literature, politics, culture, letters and even thoughts of the people who lived in that era, especially the upper classes, demonstrate that unmistakably. Its not something that surfaces by 'interpreting' what they say and reaching a conclusion either - its what they directly say themselves, in writing.
> -er is mostly American
So?
There certainly was a concept of "Christendom", which mostly consisted of Europeans and European colonies in the Americas in the 18th century, as a contrast to the lands of Islam, pagan deep Africa and "the Orient" (China, Japan).
And demographically, American colonies of that time were an insignificant periphery compared to Europe.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust
One in five Europeans was French. This enormous population allowed the country to effectively fight all the rest of the continent at once. But something happened in the latter half of the century that broke French demographics and halted population growth. The article makes a well-founded case as to the reasons.
Keep our borders and centralized power, is all you can remember of the 18th century? I know France is smaller today, but at the time, it was probably on every mouths of Europe.
Granted it was towards the end, but when we think of the 18th century in France, we tend to explain every event and every situation as to leading to the big finale, the final frontier, the first and last regicide. It's the only century that truly matters to us, because that's when we finally woke up.
Do you mean, all who were fatalistic about the divine right of royalty being an inevitability?
The English regicide had already been done in 1649, and some form of large representative republics with or without a monarch were already governing in Venice, Poland-Lithuania, the Netherlands, America, and possibly other populous societies that I don't know about.
I see your point, and I actually agree - massive blow to an entrenched idea about divine monarchy. But I don't think it's quite that extreme, mostly because such republicanism was not unique to France.
The current American government was created the year before the French Revolution. The American colonies had, practically speaking, been self-governing republics for a couple decades, by the time Louis was beheaded. Constitutional republics were going to be a thing in the 19th century in both Europe and America, even if Louis had managed to keep his throne and avert the revolution entirely.
> Napoleon had succeeded in bringing most of Western Europe under one rule. In most European countries, subjugation in the French Empire brought with it many liberal features of the French Revolution including democracy, due process in courts, abolition of serfdom, reduction of the power of the Catholic Church, and demand for constitutional limits on monarchs.
After Napoleon was defeated, the monarchs and aristocrats were never able to fully restore the status quo ante as everybody was used to modern administrative government. That sounds more like the Anglo evolution than the French revolution.