I am not surprised that the Loi Toubon is being applied to ops manuals. But I am surprised that it has taken 16 years for someone to notice that it applies to AF.
I was working in France, at a research institute in computer science, when the law was passed. Believe me, everyone I knew thought it was *obviously* stupid. There are thousands of international scientific conferences taking place in France each year (for good reason; France is a great scientific nation) and according to the Loi Toubon all of the proceedings of each one shall appear in French. Considering that practically all the papers were submitted in English (since Latin has gone out of fashion in recent years), including those from the most prominent French researchers, the question arose as to who was going to translate them and how they were to be paid.
Everyone thought about it for two seconds, laughed, and quickly forgot the issue. As one must do with an obviously impractical decret. But a quasi-state airline can apparently be bullied, even though it's 16 years after the fact.
PBL