Both French (35 mm) and Italian (36 mm) have drive-side (actually, both sides) right-hand thread. English (1.370 inch or 34.78 mm) and Swiss (35 mm) have drive-side left-hand threaded. It wasn't a matter of smoking anything. The French and Italians each had a substantial bicycle industry, and had developed their own standards to support it, evidently deciding that the complexity of having cup and BB threading different on each side wasn't worth it, when the precessional loosening problem could be solved by tightening the fixed cup really tight.