Patrick Decloitre

The innocent French

By Patrick Decloltre

ANTI-FRENCH feeling is strong

in Australia, since France’s announcement to resume its nuclear tests in French Polynesia. A media campaign launched last June has hit hard at French companies and individuals who have been residing in Australia for years.

But some now realise this may be more detrimental to Australians than the French.

Protests against the French decision have indeed gone through many different channels: it is even possible to send an electronic mail message through Internet to President Chirac. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation also sells pre written postcards to be sent to Chirac as a sign of protest. In the streets, Greenpeace posters remind the public of the strong protest feeling in Australia.

Greenpeace is also posting messages in display windows, a campaign run jointly with the Body Shop natural prod ucts retail chain stores. In Sydney’s Darlinghurst district, not far from King’s Cross, Marc Laucher and Murielie Linares are the owners of Le Petit Creme, a popular French cafe they set up some seven years ago. One morning, not long after France’s national Bastille Day, they found the windows of Le Petit Creme had

been smeared with excrement. The day after the French decision was announced, last June, Julie Smith, who has been living in Australia for the past 15 years and owns the French Riviera cafe, said the French decision was “disgusting” and told the Australian press that she was “not proud to be French”. Anne Fallou has also been living in Australia for 15 tears; since the past June, the turnover of both her Delicieux French patisseries in Sydney

have gone down by 30 per cent. Fallou also wants her customers to know that she does not approve of the French tests in the Pacific; in one of her shops, she displays

a petition against it.

The issue even causes rifts among the French community in Australia; Marc Laucher disapproves of such an attitude from some French people whom he says are collaborators. “Even if we’re not for the tests and even if we live in Australia,

we remain French.

Some of the French here have gone over the top, maybe they want to protect their business,” he says.

An Australian reg ular of Le Petit Creme however says the anti-French feel ing is not as wide

spread as people

think. There are about 200 French

companies in

Australia and they employ some 40,000 Australians.

For French compa nies in Australia, sales have dropped since June. A

Patrick Decloitre

Business goes on: Marc Laucher and Murielle Linares at their cafe in Sydney