Those numbers have to be off: According to wikipedia [0]:

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...

Maybe we were just trolling english speakers and their curious way to format dates ;)

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.

According to your logic it should be in Chinese.

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.

I find comfort in the fact you're not a diplomat... I hope