I believe the French Zone refers to the period right after WWII when the country was broken into areas controlled by different countries, although I wasn't sure France was one of them. I knew there was the U.S. Zone, British Zone, and Soviet Zone. Since these zones only existed for about 4 years, these marks are relatively rare, but so far collectors don't care about that.
For information about steins, including translation information, far and away the best source on the internet is
http://steincollectors.org/For questions, you go to steintalk, but also check out the library where much of the information is available to anyone (though some is members only).
Be sure not to confuse this .org site with the .com site, which is a different group and was neither helpful nor polite when I sought help there a few years back.
Forrest
