Why French? The Multiple Roles of French-Language Periodicals in London (UK) and Sydney (Australia) during the Nineteenth Century and Beyond

Abstract

<p>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 <i>lingua franca</i>.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.</p>