I have to admit that I did read a couple Bourbaki books. Or should I say “tried to read” because their texts are unreadable to put it mildly. They kill mathematics by removing the beauty of it and instead provide dry and boring texts that could be read by robots. Please don’t try to understand mathematics by reading Bourbaki texts. This is not what mathematics is about.
I used Bourbaki as a second text in an advanced math course I took when I was at UC Berkeley in the early 1960's. I remember with delight the spare clarity of the presentation of the material and organic, intuitive organization of the topic. French has always seemed to me to be the language of mathematics, reason, logic (and love).
For some reason I often find papers and thesis I read in French way more interesting, well thought and presented than most things I read in English. I have a few hypotheses on why I get this impression:
1) the publish or perish culture originated from the Anglo-Saxon world. Until recently the research written in the national language was kinda shielded from it. In Japan for instance, where the higher education is modeled upon the US one, master students are expected to publish at least a conference paper. In France students generally don’t publish anything.
2) the PhD thesis are written differently. Where I’m studying it’s basically slapping three papers together with an introduction and a conclusion. This sometimes leads to awkward thesis and shallow work. Thesis (and HDR) written in Europe are more like a very well structured monograph.
3) the way to use the language is different as well. In French, any intellectual written work will use long and complex sentences (sometimes to a fault) that are cramming few ideas and their relationships. In English the style is to write short sentences, with at most one idea each. I sometimes feel I have to dumb down my writing and splitting sentences while in my native language a Proust-like sentence would be more appropriate.