Not ridiculous. In the late 70's, everyone's second language in Spain (except OFC the ones speaking Iberian latin dialects or Basque having Spanish itself as a second one) for example wasn't English, but French.
If you wanted a better future (lots of people headed to France to work), you would learn French to make a good chunk of money and cheap goods, period.
> In the late 70's, everyone's second language in Spain (except OFC the ones speaking Iberian latin dialects or Basque having Spanish itself as a second one) for example wasn't English, but French.
1- Spain is a neighbor to France, so it's hardly surprising that French is used a lot in the first place.
2- Spain represents less than 1% of the World population, so it's hardly a proof that French was used all over the world in the 70s.
French is used across the world _today_, so it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that it was also used across the world in the 1970s.
By the Wikipedia numbers [1], French is the fifth most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, yet only fifteenth by native speakers.
If you wanted a better future (lots of people headed to France to work), you would learn French to make a good chunk of money and cheap goods, period.