Alexis Bergantz PhD Thesis 2016

221 Pages·2016·46.22 MB·English

by  Alexis Bergantz

French Connection
French Connection
The culture and politics of Frenchness in Australia, 1890-1914.

Alexis Bergantz

December 2015
A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The
Australian National University

© Copyright by Alexis Alphonse Bergantz 2015
All Rights Reserved

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This thesis contains no material which has previously been accepted for the award of
any other degree or diploma in any university or institution and, to the best of my
knowledge, contains no material previously published or written by another person,
except where due reference has been made.

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Abstract

This thesis is a cultural history of ideas about France and the French in Australia during
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It explores the links between
representations of France, and of the French, and the ways in which different groups of
individuals, whether they were French migrants or Australian colonists, mobilised these
representations in social life.
Until recently, studies of the French presence in Australia have tended to encase French
lives in an ethnic framework, linked primarily to a social history of migrants. Although
this has rescued some of their stories for posterity, it has also tended to marginalise
them from a broader national story.
This project, in contrast, combines French and Australian private and public sources
(memoirs, letters, newspapers and works of fiction, as well as official government
archives) to examine the shifting relational significance of France, both for the
Australian nation and for individuals who lived during a formative period in its history.
Pitched in the liminal space between two countries’ records, the thesis demonstrates that
the tensions that arose in the articulation of cultural difference between Australian
colonists and French and francophone migrants are revealing of the complex and
sometimes paradoxical expressions of Frenchness in the antipodes in the decades before
the Great War. They show some of the processes at play in the on-going definition of
Australian culture and character in the early Federation era and bring to light a range of
political and personal meanings that France had in people’s lives.
In underscoring the connections that the Australian colonies, and later the Australian
nation, entertained with France, this work helps bring to light the global and
transnational connections constitutive of Australian history and identity.

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Acknowledgments

This work would not have been completed without the help of many people to whom I
owe a large debt of gratitude. The unwavering support, sound advice and sharp eye of
my supervisor, Dr Alexander Cook, has helped me see this project through. Dr Carolyn
Strange’s academic rigour and intellectual precision as well as her moral support have
been crucial to me. This work would also not have been possible without the unfailing
support of Dr Peter Brown since the inception of the project. Associate Professor Frank
Bongiorno has generously provided exhaustive feedback on a whole draft at a later
stage. The intellectual and collegial stimulation from everyone else in the School of
History, from staff to fellow postgraduate students cannot be stressed enough.
Emeritus Professor Ivan Barko once described himself to me as a ‘facilitator’, which he
has been, providing me with difficult to find documents. But the word does not do
justice to the important role he has played as a cornerstone of the French-Australian
research network for many decades; the work done through the aegis of the Institute for
the Study of French Australian Relations has, in turn, been crucial to this project.
Librarians and archivists in France and Australia armed themselves with patience to
deal with my sometimes very obscure requests, and I owe them a lot. Margot Riley at
the State Library of New South Wales, Anne Sophie Cras at the Archives du Ministère
des Affaires Etrangères in Nantes and Jacques Pétillat at the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris deserve particular mention. Meredith Murray’s keen eye has helped me find many
Proustian sentences and Frenchisms: what is left is entirely my fault.
To the Australian descendants of French migrants who have shown such strong
enthusiasm and contributed all they could to this project, Jacqueline Dwyer, Michel
Reymond, Gaston Liévain, Liz de Chastel, the Droulers family: this work is yours as
much as it is mine.
I also thank the Herbreteau family in Nantes for taking me in. For their unfailing
support and generosity, I also thank my parents and Elizabeth Kinne. Finally, Paul, who
has read far more of this work than he ever should have, my deepest thanks.

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Pour ma grand-mère

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Table of Contents

Abbreviations viii
A note on translation ix

Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Frenchness in the antipodes 16
Chapter 2. An invasion of rascaldom 55
Chapter 3. The crème de la crème 90
Chapter 4. Frenchmen on the boil 112
Chapter 5. Family ties 137
Chapter 6. Alliance and misalliance 158
Epilogue 185

Appendix: translations 189
Bibliography 193

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Abbreviations

Australian Dictionary of Biography ADB
Correspondance Politique et Commerciale 2CPC
(Political and Commercial Correspondence)
Correspondance Politique et Commerciale, Nouvelle Série 139CPCOM
(Political and Commercial Correspondence, New Series)
Archives of the French Consulate in Melbourne 428PO
Archives of the French Consulate in Sydney 662PO
Archives of the French Embassy in London (Fonds CH) 378PO/CH
Archives of the French Embassy in London (Fonds K) 378PO/K
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (or archives of the Ministry) MAE
Mitchell Library ML
National Archives of Australia NAA
National Library of Australia NLA
State Library of New South Wales SLNSW
State Records of New South Wales SRNSW

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A note on translation

For ease of reading I have translated all French quotes into English; all translations are
my own unless otherwise stated. To indicate that a quotation was originally in French,
the author’s name is followed by an asterisk (*) in the footnotes. The originals can be
found in the Appendix under the heading of each respective chapter.

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Introduction

In September 1906, ‘disillusioned’ and out of sorts, the French acting vice-consul in Australia
took to writing to his superiors in Paris. In the letter, Eugène Lucciardi recounted the insults he
had just witnessed against the grandeur of his nation. He had attended a Victorian exhibition
showcasing the work of state schools and was still reeling at the heresies he had seen: how
could they draw the Union Jack above Madagascar, when it was a French colony? Worse: one
student wrote a report confusing Marat, the revolutionary martyr, so famously assassinated in
his bath in 1793, with Joachim Murat, the ‘Dandy king’, brother-in-law to Napoleon I, who died
a whole twenty-two years later. The acting vice-consul was adamant: the report and the
exhibition were ‘an automobile accident translated into text’ – it was a car-crash.1 To add
further offense, just a year later, the Premier of Victoria, Sir Thomas Bent, absentmindedly
castigated one of his political opponents for ‘shooting in the back’ like a Frenchman.2
Had France not been, since the time of Louis XIV, the quintessence of civilisation and a mighty
military power commanding all nations? Had not all artists and aristocrats, dandies and
diplomats, connoisseurs and courtesans turned their eyes towards France, its literature, its
language and its fashions?3 Certainly some of these ideas still found an echo when the
Australian writer Christina Stead enthusiastically wrote in 1929 that Paris, where she had just
moved, was ‘not so much … the French capital, as the capital of the modern world’. She was
not prepared to leave this vibrant and intellectually saturated haven any time soon.4
Ideas about France and French culture in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were multifarious and sometimes contradictory. They oscillated between expressions
of Francophilia and Francophobia, and one did not preclude the other.5 They were as much an
inheritance from Australia’s British origins as they were a result of the French geopolitical

1 Lucciardi* to MAE, 11 September 1906, MAE, 428PO/1/69; Argus, 4 September 1906, 6; Raleigh Sun,
14 September 1906, 7
2 Age, 29 August 1907, 6; Weston Bate, ‘Bent, Sir Thomas (1838–1909)’, in Australian Dictionary of
Biography (Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University), accessed 10 August
2015, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bent-sir-thomas-2978.
3 Marc Fumaroli, Quand l’Europe parlait Français (Paris: de Fallois, 2001).
4 Christina Stead, Letter to Nellie Molyneux, 1 March 1929, in R. G. Geering, ed., A Web of Friendship.
Selected Letters (1928-1973) (Angus & Robertson, 1992), 12; on Christina Stead’s Paris see Rosemary
Lancaster, Je Suis Australienne: Remarkable Women in France, 1880-1945 (Crawley, W.A: UWA Press,
2008), 124–150.
5 Kim Davidson, ‘The Idea of France in Victoria’, Explorations 2 (December 1985): 3–9; Wallace
Kirsop, ‘Classrooms, Connoisseurs and Canons: Nineteenth-Century French Literature in Australia’,
Australian Journal of French Studies 30, no. 2 (1993): 145–53; Wallace Kirsop, ‘Baudelaire’s Readers,
Commentators and Translators in Australia around 1900’, in Richard Bales, ed., Challenges of
Translation in French Literature. Studies and Poems in Honour of Peter Broome (Bern: Peter Lang,
2005), 149–59.
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