Yes, few facts to support this claim: the french are big consumers of SciHub content (biggest in the EU [1]) and the CNRS (one of the main french national scientific organization) has boycotted traditional publishers on several occasions (e.g. Springer [2]). The CNRS also supports Hal which is the french equivalent of arXiv.

I think this has more to do with the copyright lobby than anything else.

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/visuel/2016/05/10/edition-sc... (in french)

[2] https://www.the-scientist.com/daily-news/french-universities...

[3] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/