This article explores the entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia as settler colonies with convict histories. Existing historiography focuses on the importance of the Australian model in inspiring the French to transport convicts to settler colonies, and has explored the moral panic that erupted over the menace of escaped French convicts invading the Australian colonies after the abolition of British convict transportation. My analysis shifts the focus onto the construction of settler colonial authority, analysing the ways in which comparisons drawn by contemporary observers of New Caledonia and Australia served primarily to solidify the legitimacy of settler rule in Australia and increase its regional hegemony into the first few decades of the twentieth century. Drawing on original French and English‐language sources, including the writing of the obscure French convict poet Julien de Sanary, this article makes the case for understanding New Caledonia and its bagne not as unwanted reminders of Australia’s penal origins, but rather as useful sites of projection for settlers in Australia. Constant arguments about the archaic and authoritarian nature of French penal policy and colonialism helped erase the memory of convictism and strengthen settler authority and legitimacy in Australia and internationally. By considering the trans‐imperial entanglements of Australia and New Caledonia, we can further reveal the dynamics of settler colonialism and the processes of disavowal and disassociation that sustain it.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the two convict-built European settler colonial projects in Oceania, French New Caledonia and British Australia, were geographically close yet ideologically distant. Observers in the Australian colonies regularly characterized French colonization as backward, inhumane, and uncivilized, often pointing to the penal colony in New Caledonia as evidence. Conversely, French commentators, while acknowledging that Britain's transportation of convicts to Australia had inspired their own penal colonial designs in the South Pacific, insisted that theirs was a significantly different venture, built on modern, carefully preconceived methods. Thus, both sides engaged in an active practice of denying comparability; a practice that historians, in neglecting the interconnections that existed between Australia and New Caledonia, have effectively perpetuated. This article draws attention to some of the strategies of spatial and temporal distance deployed by the Australian colonies in relation to the bagne in New Caledonia and examines the nation-building ends that these strategies served. It outlines the basic context and contours of the policy of convict transportation for the British and the French and analyses discursive attempts to emphasize the distinctions between Australia and New Caledonia. Particular focus is placed on the moral panic in Australian newspapers about the alleged dangerous proximity of New Caledonia to the east coast of Australia. I argue that this moral panic arose at a time when Britain's colonies in Australia, in the process of being granted autonomy and not yet unified as a federated nation, sought recognition as reputable settlements of morally virtuous populations. The panic simultaneously emphasized the New Caledonian penal colony's geographical closeness to and ideological distance from Australia, thereby enabling Australia's own penal history to be safely quarantined in the past.

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Cet article analyse la réaction sociale au "Crime de Jully", une affaire d'assassinats multiples commis dans la France rurale en 1909-1910 par deux vachers adolescents d'origine suisse. Alphabétisés et ambitieux, ces garçons prétendirent avoir été conduits au meurtre par leurs lectures. Pour la société française de leur époque, Richard Joseph Jacquiard et Joseph Vienny représentaient des personnalités marginales et dangereuses, en tant que criminels, adolescents (ni enfants, ni adultes), et travailleurs éduqués. Bien qu'ils n'eussent pas été élevés ou éduqués en France, la réaction s'inscrivit dans le cadre d'un débat national concernant les effets de l'instruction laïque et obligatoire qui avait débuté plusieurs décennies auparavant. Comme le montre cet article, en exigeant que tous les enfants allassent à l'école primaire, les autorités républicaines affrontaient un dilemme fondamental : comment éduquer la jeunesse sans déstabiliser l'ordre social. This article analyses the social response to the 'Crime de Jully,' a multiple murder case committed in rural France in 1909-1910 by two Swiss adolescent cowherds. Literate and ambitious, the boys claimed that they had been driven to murder because of their reading habits. Richard Joseph Jacquiard and Joseph Vienny represented dangerous liminal figures for contemporary French society : as criminals, adolescents (neither children nor adults), and as educated workers. Although the boys had not been educated or raised in France, the response was framed within a decades-long national debate over the effects of compulsory, secular education. As this article explores, in requiring all children to attend primary school republican authorities faced a fundamental dilemma : how to educate young people while not destabilizing the existing social order. i n early june 1910, an eager audience packed into the Auxerre assizes court to witness the sensational trial of seventeen-year-old Richard joseph jacquiard 1 Briony Neilson received her Phd in history from the university of Sydney in 2012. her thesis, entitled The Age of Morality : Youth, Criminal Responsibility and Juvenile Justice Reform in Third Republic France, 1877-1912, explored ideas about age, regeneration, and criminality in third Republic france, especially in relation to judicial practice and emerging ideas about childhood and adolescence as distinct stages of moral development. her current research examines social responses to popular literacy in france in the nineteenth century, particularly in the context of a widening of the political franchise.

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