If you can step back cognitively and see it's your own pre-existing expectations, then yeah, I can absolutely see this. As an American, when I visited Paris, my preconceived notion of dogs in Paris sort of unavoidably meant, "my dogs, or dogs I know, in Paris." My dogs are reasonably well socialized for a suburban American introvert's dogs, but they would be an absolute menace in Paris.
They pull on the leash because they spend most of their outside time in the backyard or with their heads out the car window, so walkies is a special occasion, for good or for ill. They are obsessed with every new person until that person has moved on. Sitting calmly at a cafe has happened once or twice, but it takes a bit to get them used to it. One of them is a bit weird about new foot textures he hasn't dealt with. Everything about Paris is different from their everyday life, and much of it is different from my everyday life. To a certain extent, it would be the same in any pedestrianized urban area, but Paris is also so aesthetically distinct.
So, to see dogs just doing their thing, confident and happy, barking at neighbors from a 130-year old wrought iron balcony railing instead of through a cedar fenceboard, accompanying their owner for daily outdoor market shopping instead of being told they can't come this time because I'll be getting out of the car, or walking through that crushed-limestone surface Paris seems to like for their parks (unlike any city I've been to in the US), all of that endows the dogs with a certain "Frenchness" that will seem weird until you parse it. It's amplified if the owner's sense of style or affect strikes an American's eye, or even their subconscious, as distinctively French.