It isn't French cuisine as a whole that developed differently, and is regarded as sophisticated, but a subset of it: haute cuisine and its modern descendants. If we look past haute cuisine, at traditional French country cooking, the food and cooking styles look quite different, and much more like German/English/Nordic cooking. There are differences in the foods and dishes, many of which result from differences in climate (and thus also differences over France, especially from north to south), but many dishes such as asinat (a cabbage soup with pork, sausages, potatoes and other vegetables) and cassoulet (a stew of beans, sausages, and other meats), and many other stews, soups, and pies are very much a part of a broader European style of cooking.

Haute cuisine, on the other hand, is very deliberately a sophisticated elite cuisine (as the name implies, "high cuisine"). Haute cuisine was developed by professional chefs cooking for the elite. The key early pioneer was François Pierre La Varenne, who pulled early haute cuisine away from its Medieval roots. La Varenne's 1651 cookbook, Le Cuisinier françois, meant that the printed word could help spread his version of French cuisine.

The next giant of haute cuisine was Marie-Antoine Carême, in revolutionary France, who laid the foundation of the modern sauce-centred haute cuisine, with the four "mother sauces" (espagnole, velouté, allemande, and béchamel) used as bases for a great variety of child-sauces.

The torch then passed to Auguste Escoffier, who brought haute cuisine into the modern world.

The de-Medievalisation of haute cuisine had been started by the Italians, as a very Renaissance activity. However, they were left behind as revolutionary France revolutionised elite cuisines across Europe as well as revolutionising European politics (but there are still sometimes heated words over who invented various sauces!). In modern times, they have caught up, and others have entered a very French haute cuisine game (with their own touches added); this was assisted by the 1960s French nouvelle cuisine, a reaction and revolution against Escoffierian orthodoxy, quickly developing into a sythesis with haute cuisine rather than overturning it. Nouvelle cuisine brought elements of regional and country cooking back into haute cuisine, and chefs in other nations which had never strayed very far from their own regional and country roots could develop their own national versions of haute cuisine rather than aping the great French chefs.

Before this modern diversification of haute cuisine into something less purely French, with distinct versions in other nations, haute cuisine was very French. Elites across Europe were often happy to eat French food (the haute cuisine version, that is), read French literature, speak French, and so on. This is the foundation of French elite culinary fame. However, haute cuisine has never been the food of the masses - it worked very hard to not be so. It doesn't represent, and never represented, the everyday food of the common people. Many French everyday dishes are justly famed, but so too are many German, Spanish, and Italian dishes (British cuisine, largely but not entirely unfairly, is often regarded as inferior, despite the presence of many excellent dishes (e.g., elvers lightly fried with bacon, Welsh cawl, and many more) that can surprise French eaters with their quality (and even their existence)).

For a history of the birth and development of haute cuisine, see Susan Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste: The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2009.