It wasn't even on the Mediterranean at the time (or rather French was spoken in the North of modern France back then). People on Mediterranean coast of France were speaking Occitan and other dialects which were more closely related to Catalan and Northern Italian (all of those were mostly eradicated during and during the century or so after the French revolution).
The eradication of Occitan and other local languages like Breton was the strongest in mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Students speaking it would be punished.
