Certainly, but I did not propose "give up", but reduce. France in fact collected very little of the gross reparations schedule. The totals in the treaty were established without any real refrence to economic damage & were intended to be both punative and to cripple Germany economicaly. While they threatened to cripple Germany they failed in the end to do so. The collapse of the post war Entente & French policy towards reparations as represented by the Ruhr Occupation 1923-24 illustrates the overall failure of the Reparations gambit. A smaller more viable reparations schedule coupled with seperation of at least Prussia from the other German states may have come closer to French goals.
In terms of hard currency they got little because there was little to be had; instead they took a lot of goods and raw materials like coal as payment instead and undervalued it as payment, something Germany and France repeatedly disagreed on. I would like to question too the value of the coal taken from the Saar for the 15 years it was occupied IOTL.
The treaty totals IIRC were actually calculated exactly on the cost of what was damaged/destroyed, though perhaps overvalued.
In terms of French politics I don't think they could have accepted any amount less that what was levied and didn't have the power to occupy all of Germany long enough to ensure that it was broken up, nor deal with the international fallout from the US and Britain for trying to do so; you'd need an early victory with a lot of Russian participation, as they wanted the Polish bits of Prussia and Slavic parts of A-H. France could probably grab the Saar if they were strong enough and use Russia to dismember Eastern Germany. The question is whether Russia would economically/politically stable enough to pull that off, same with France.
Reparations were far cheaper to extract and more certain/less politically costly than breaking up Germany. If the goal were the rebuild France and economically prosper in the peace deal, going with a costly major occupation is not going to be viable politically or economically.