There was a time when French was the lingua franca (literally). Academics are exposed to more of its vestiges than lay people. I didn't mind it.

In a way I feel like this is indicative of one of the points of the essay: the expectation that authors today need to dumb down and distill their work into cereal for the lowest common denominators in order to sell more copies.

Granted, there's a fine line between gesturing to your intellectual forebears and just being an obnoxious prat, but I don't think the author crossed that line for the worse. Time to brush up on your french?