They (French banks) certainly do have some strange rules.
My parents transfer money once in a while from France to Canada. They just make a deposit to my bank account from their bank. It's taken anywhere from a day to two weeks to receive the money, usually around 2,3 business days. Fee has always been the same, around 40-50 EUR, IIRC. I never had to pay anything on my end.
Since you are getting a fairly large amount of money transfered I'd ask the bank about the rules for reporting it (anything over 10,000CAD banks have to report to .gov, large money transfers between accounts get flaged as potential money laundering, there's more stuff than that).
http://www.optruth.org/