Frenchposting (or refusing to do so)

One time when my mom visited France, she asked a shop's clerk for directions. She tried French but kind of gave up and used some English words scattered throughout her sentence for words she didn't know. The clerk acted annoyed and pretended not to understand, so my mom tried to use only her broken French. The clerk responded very quickly in French.

My mom then said, in English, "I'm sorry, I didn't get that, French is such a beautiful language but I'm having a hard time learning it". The clerk then completely 180'ed her attitude, acted all happy and switched to perfect, fluent English, with almost no French accent.

That situation taught me that some French people apparently just want you to suck the metaphorical dick of their culture before they choose to be nice to you lol.

Nobody likes the fact that English tourists think they just can skip trying to learn a language when they visit another country. That being said, your mom was clearly trying so yeah I would have cut her some slack right away.
- If I had to learn the language of every country I ever visited I would have never had time to visit those countries.
  
  It's not hard to learn to say please, thank you, good day, two beers please, etc just for some basic conversation. I do so for every country I visit and almost never have encountered rude people.
  
  This isn't trying to learn a language. This is memorizing a few key words to convey the most basic of necessities. I have lived in english speaking tourist places, and anytime it got popular, with a more culturally insular ethnicity (ie like people from the booming Chinese middle class who aren't working in a place that places value on knowing english), it's not that big of a deal. This happened A LOT with the economic miracle period, new middle class, of germany, and japan. Their inability to speak english isn't what bothered me, or anyone else where we were, it was their crass disrespect of property, propensity to wander off, alone, into the wilderness, etc. that made them bad tourists. Their home media trying to blame us for some idiot, that wandered off into death valley, with only a small bottle of water, didn't help. I can't expect someone raised in those conditions to know my language at all, and I wouldn't want them excluded, nor feel they should receive rude treatment, for not know how to say bathroom, or whatever.
  However, if I spoke, say, simplified chinese, I would not continue speaking english to a chinese person I know I can't speak english, to have a clear communication venue, in their language. As long as they are not acting in a manner detrimental to where I live, they are fine. Who am I to expect everyone to know my language? Why would I exclude those people to greater exposure to my culture if that bothered me? That would be oppositional to my desire for them to better understand my language. Just sounds like misplaced frustrations that come with living in any tourist spot. Depending on exactly what you feel/do, maybe xenophobia.
  I have been working on learning spanish for a couple years, in my free time. That is a language that is rapidly rising in importance in my country. That is why people actually try to learn languages.
  
  Nobody's asking you to be fluent but yeah every country I've been too I took crash course in the language they speak and used tools to try and speak the language. Expecting other people to learn English doesn't help with how obnoxious english-speaking tourists have a reputation to be.
  
  This isn't trying to learn a language. This is memorizing a few key words to convey the most basic of necessities. I have lived in english speaking tourist places, and anytime it got popular, with a more culturally insular ethnicity (ie like people from the booming Chinese middle class who aren't working in a place that places value on knowing english), it's not that big of a deal. This happened A LOT with the economic miracle period, new middle class, of germany, and japan. Their inability to speak english isn't what bothered me, or anyone else where we were, it was their crass disrespect of property, propensity to wander off, alone, into the wilderness, etc. that made them bad tourists. Their home media trying to blame us for some idiot, that wandered off into death valley, with only a small bottle of water, didn't help. I can't expect someone raised in those conditions to know my language at all, and I wouldn't want them excluded, nor feel they should receive rude treatment, for not know how to say bathroom, or whatever.
  However, if I spoke, say, simplified chinese, I would not continue speaking english to a chinese person I know I can't speak english, to have a clear communication venue, in their language. As long as they are not acting in a manner detrimental to where I live, they are fine. Who am I to expect everyone to know my language? Why would I exclude those people to greater exposure to my culture if that bothered me? That would be oppositional to my desire for them to better understand my language. Just sounds like misplaced frustrations that come with living in any tourist spot. Depending on exactly what you feel/do, maybe xenophobia.
  I have been working on learning spanish for a couple years, in my free time. That is a language that is rapidly rising in importance in my country. That is why people actually try to learn languages.
- You can definitely skip learning the local language these days if you're just a short-term tourist. Translate anything written with OCR, and for most other things just smile, point, fingers for numbers, and again machine translation is totally fine for simple things.
  If you actually assume people can speak English though, that's not cool.
  
  Yup, if someone comes to me in the street asking if I know English, I'll do my best effort to help them, no problem. If they come speaking in English asking the question? Fuck off, you are not entitled to get help.

All those people online with their anecdotes agreeing with what you wrote, yet my experience has been the complete opposite. I think the problem is Americans being insufferable assholes, and the French not letting that fly as much as other countries.

Yup, much more likely

Depends. They also like to watch you to awkwardly stammer through your hardly recognizable French sentence just to reply in perfect English (or even your mother tongue in border regions).

My favourite is when they ignore you when you speak English (which isn't even your native language either, just the most likely language to be understood by both parties), then when you speak bad French, they reply on even worse English. Bonus points for those that do it to tourists in France and as tourists in other counties (both have happened to me but ofc I can't know if the same person would do both).

I'm French and foreign languages are one of my hobbies. I'm proficient in English and Spanish. I can at a lower level speak some Russian, German, Czech, and Italian.

Imho the fault lies in our education system which puts a heavy accent on STEM studies and tends to treat anything outside of that as lesser subjects.

Also from anecdotal evidence the younger generations are quite better than the older ones.

Exactly how heavy is the accent? And are we talking parisian or quebecois?
I stayed at an AirBnb let by a lovely couple a few years back. It's mostly a meme with just a kernel of anecdotal truth.

Germany's 2nd most spoken language is English, by 32% of the population.

Germany's 3rd most spoken language is French, by 9% of the population.

France's 2nd most spoken language is English, by 24% of the population.

France's 3rd most spoken language is Spanish, by 9% of the population.

UK's 2nd most spoken language is French, by 16% of the population.

UK's 3rd most spoken language is German, by 5% of the population.

Source: https://languageknowledge.eu/

While you could say that France is a bit behind the curve in comparison with most other Northern European countries, native English speakers are far worse at learning any other language. I'm not even French, but the circle-jerk English speaking communities have about French people sometimes gets pretty embarrassing.

As someone from the UK, I absolutely do not think that 13% of the population can speak French to an acceptable level. I'd go as far as to say that 13% of the population can barely speak English to an understandable level...
The point is precisely that they are very capable and do speak the language, but they sometimes refuse to.
And yes, it's also a meme.
- A racist one, if it isn't based on data as seen above.