During the long nineteenth century, more than a hundred French-language periodicals were produced and circulated in London and throughout the United Kingdom.1 A preliminary analysis of these papers has shown the astonishing breadth of their typology, functions, and multiple possible readerships.2 Especially if surveyed in their rich variety, these publications, albeit often short-lived, were not aimed solely at the closed circle of the French émigré community, but they were intended for – and open to – a much larger local and cosmopolitan readership for whom French had a privileged role as international lingua franca.3 The present chapter builds on this UK-based preliminary research to inaugurate a novel comparison between contemporaneous nineteenth-century French-language periodicals published in London (UK) and in Sydney (Australia). The main aim here is thus to understand whether the French language press performed similar functions in such different English-speaking contexts at the two ends of the globe, during the century of the press.4 It is indeed undeniable that, at that time, the press was the prominent media and source of information for the literate population of these two faraway, yet somewhat co-dependent, geopolitical contexts. In other words, studying the press in the nineteenth century is not dissimilar to studying social media today, or television in the 1980s and 1990s.