"There is nothing like a couple of batsh*t crazy nationalists stirring up some ol' reliable xenophobia for the entire population of the country they come from to get tagged with the same label."
Or people discussing verifiable historical facts about the post-revolutionary French government's stated policy of using the standardization of their language as a tool of domination to produce a unified French identity, to the point that they turned it into the first state-controlled language in the world. This is pretty well-recorded in the early 19th century, and the motives are explicitly laid out in this manner.
You can discuss the crimes of various states throughout history without being a nationalist or a xenophobe, and despite being a Brit (as embarrassing as that admission is at the moment) I'm entirely happy to discuss the British Empire's record of genocide, wrongful imprisonment, economic destruction and downright idiocy too. But the British didn't care as much about language as the French did, and they still don't (aside, obviously from the furious anger we all feel during Microsoft installs when it offers US English first).
In fact, the British were quite happy for local groups to be unable to communicate with each other, in keeping with the 'divide and rule' philosophy of the Empire. The French were hell-bent on attempting to assimilate their colonial possessions (hence why Algeria ended up in a department in it's own right, where there was never any talk of turning Mysore into a British county), which ironically generally mean they were a lot nicer in their colonialism.
Where the British built plantations, the French built schools. But their price for that was the wholesale assimilation of local cultures. Where the British tended to just subjugate local world-views, or pervert them to their advantage (like they did with the hardening-up of the Indian caste system, which was largely in decline prior to colonization), the French tried to replace them outright.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
