As a native French speaker, I'm quite amused that several of these words are either French or have a basis in French. Seems that English has appropriated many words from other languages.
Some of them ('Crèches,' for example) are from French, but perhaps you're thinking of others (e.g. 'nascent') that come to both English and French from Latin.
It has. French was the language of the aristocracy in England for several centuries after the 1066 Norman conquest, giving rise to a sort of linguistic duality of French and Anglo-Saxon words in English mirroring the social divide. Thus Saxon-derived words tend to be more down-to-earth than their more elevated French-derived equivalents.
