Depending where you live in France.

You got some places that uses numbers like "nonante", which is basically the same system as English.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonante

Is this question a furry thing?

There were bears all over Europe. They were a huge part of Greek and Roman mythology. They didn’t know anything about polar bears at the time.

Bears have been important in many cultures, and Ursa Major is depicted as a bear in many non-Greek cultures as well, going back to prehistory.

Many North American indigenous tribes depict it as a bear, long before European contact. Same with pre-Islamic Arabian cultures.

It was named because the constellation looks like a bear, not because it pointed to where bears were. Even Native Americans called that constellation a bear, and they had bears south of them.