Antoine Dupont says France wanted to produce a big performance at Twickenham to keep the pressure on Grand Slam chasing Ireland.
Les Bleus put together a record-breaking victory over England on Saturday with Steve Borthwick's men conceding seven tries in what was the Red Rose's worst-ever Six Nations defeat.
Having lost to Ireland in Dublin in round two, France were determined to put on a show in London to remind table-toppers Ireland that they have to keep delivering with a tricky tie at Murrayfield to be negotiated today before next Saturday's final game at home to England.
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"It took time for it to sink in when we looked up and saw the score - 53-10 at Twickenham in the amphitheatre of rugby, of course it is historic," said scrum-half Dupont.
"I think we are having trouble realising what we have achieved. We are delighted with our match, the result, the performance, and now we want to savour it with all the French supporters.
"We will pay close attention to the result (of Scotland v Ireland). We know that if Ireland win all the matches remaining they take the title and bravo to them.
"But we wanted to play our card that we had remaining in the toughest possible fashion, we did not want to hand over the trophy that easily.
"We knew we had to produce a huge result here to stay in the race for the Six Nations, that is what we have done. We will wait for what follows now."
France full-back Thomas Ramos explained that his team wanted to put things right in their first away game after their 32-19 loss at the Aviva Stadium.
"We had it in our hearts to pull off a huge performance, as we rather let the match pass us by against Ireland," said Ramos. "We needed to respond with a huge match away from home, and that we did.
"I think we produced our best performance for quite a while so that will do the team an enormous amount of good.
"It is only every two years one comes to England to win so we must savour this moment. This is great as it puts us back on the right path in this competition, even if we must wait for Ireland's match.
"In any case next weekend we will have the cards in our hands for us to finish the tournament strongly. The conditions were not easy to play in, notably when the rain began to fall.
"But nevertheless we succeeded in making some passes, to counter attack, there was space and they made defensive errors, and we knew how to profit from that. Everything was positive."
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