Frankly, that is just quite a gratuitous generalisation. Many of us work in fields where the French are just as likely as anyone else to accept English as the standard international language.

On average, older French people speak much worse English than Dutch or Scandinavian people of the same age because foreign language teaching in France was rubbish, but to suggest that the situation is any worse than in Italy, Span or even Germany is simply untrue, and younger generations are typically doing fine (not least because kids learn English from primary school nowadays) and needless to say, vastly better than the average young Brit or American is doing at any foreign language at all.