Yes, for a very long time France was the biggest market for Manga outside of Japan. It's partly due to the fact that France has a thriving local comic book industry and partly due to the fact that we were inundated with imported Anime in the 80s and 90s so there's an entire generation who have been raised with Japanese animes.
Spain, too. We followed the French way since the Bruguera school in the 50s/60s copying the Franco-Belgian comic books (ahem, Francisco Ibañez and Spirou) and then Mazinger Z in the 70's and Captain Tsubasa in the 80's, along DB in 1989.
This craps me up in Reddit: While we, Western Europeans (France, Spain, Italy, Germany...) have been watching manganime since forever Americans keep lying about DB and manganime availability in the West in early 90's as if the West was just the US.
For instance, the big lie on DBZ knowledge on SNES/MegaDrive games from the West. Fore sure the US didn't know nothing at all. Meanwhile, we were nearly finishing the Buu saga. So we were pretty aware of DB games in arcades, the SNES, the MD and any platform.
