locale change fails (partially)

[ChameleonScales]

Hi,
I'm on Debian 10.1 (upgraded from stretch) XFCE.
I'm trying to change my locale to US english but only succeded in parts of the system. The rest doesn't change after various attempts. Here's what I tried:

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

There I activated en_US.UTF-8 and deactivated fr_FR.UTF-8, confirmed and selected the en_US as the default.
After that I rebooted the system and ran: $ locale

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locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=fr_FR.utf8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_NUMERIC="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_TIME="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_COLLATE="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_MONETARY="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_MESSAGES="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_PAPER="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_NAME="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_ADDRESS="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fr_FR.utf8"
LC_ALL=

so clearly that didn't work.

Then I ran

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$ export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
$ env | grep LANG
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

but then if I close and reopen the terminal I get this:

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$ env | grep LANG
LANG=fr_FR.utf8

even though /etc/default/locale looks like this:

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#  File generated by update-locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

I also tried running all the above commands as root, still to no avail.

[Bloom]

You probably need to logoff and logon again for this to work.

[ChameleonScales]

I did this countless times.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Is there anything set in /etc/environment?

Try editing /etc/locale.gen directly then run locale-gen afterwards.

Or perhaps

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localectl

[ChameleonScales]

I opened both files and:
- etc/environment was empty
- etc/locale.gen had en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8 commented out

so I ran :

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$ sudo locale-gen
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done

And then :

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$ localectl
   System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: n/a
      X11 Layout: fr
       X11 Model: pc105
     X11 Variant: latin9

Nothing seems to have changed (even after reboot)
I'm not sure what to do next.