Maybe it was that the French were bringing their platinum-iridium meter bar to the meetings and wouldn't hesitate to rap your knuckles if you got out of line.
Well, French is commonly spoken every day by a lot more 76M people, it's more in the area of 200 to 300M people. If you go in Marocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon and other former colonies in Africa, you can reasonably expect people to be fluent, at least in cities.
English 379.0 million native speakers, 1.132 billion total
French 76.8 million native speakers, 279.8 million total
It seems you might have mixed the French native speakers with a (high estimate of) the English total speakers.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...