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At the end of the nineteenth century, and in a context of multiform competition between great nations, culture became one of the stakes of power and a good measure of it too. L’Alliance française, founded in 1883 as a "national association for propagating the French language in colonies and abroad," incarnated the will of some French elites, especially intellectual and administrative, to ensure France the renewed conditions of its traditional cultural "reach." A decentralized worldwide network emerged within twenty years thanks to local committees almost independent of the headquarters in Paris. By sustaining French schools and French books, the organization of conference trips, and above all the creation of a highly intellectual language and civilization course in Paris, l’Alliance française of Paris and her local committees abroad invented the apparatus of modern cultural diplomacy, even before the appearance of the first French Institutes in about 1910. Ideal representations of a French language and universal culture were inscribed amid this game of multiple practices created by some French and foreign actors. This flexibility was one of the principal trumps of this association, often envied, at times imitated, but always difficult to duplicate.