Your suspicions are correct, SRB. The Air Transat A330 was not the first commercial example of RAT deployment. When the second (No2/Right) engine quit on the Air Canada Gimli Glider (23 Jul 83) the RAT was deployed automatically as per the owners handbook - not manually as per some accounts.
The 75/767 RAT provides limited hydraulic power to the basic flight controls down to 130 KIAS. Without it the aircraft would have been unsteerable. The VC10 ELRAT incident posted by Notso predates Gimli by several years, although the function of that equipment differs from that of the Boeing RAT.
I bet someone knows of other incidents of (design) RAT deployment, but it surely wasn't an aviation first for Toulouse/BWoS.