Berthe Mouchette
On Wednesday morning, our students from Grade 3 to 6 participated in Alliance Française’s Berthe Mouchette poetry reciting competition. Thank you to Mr Ramano and the students leaders for ensuring that the day runs smoothly. Good luck to all our participants!
Mercredi matin, nos élèves de CE2 à la 6ème ont participé à la compétition de récitation de poésie Berthe Mouchette orgranisée par l’Alliance Française. Merci à Mr Ramano et aux capitaines de l’école pour l’excellent déroulement de la journée. Bonne chance à tous nos participants !
The Berthe Mouchette Competition : A Memorable Experience
By Alexandra Balafrej (an extract)...
Every year for over a century, millions of young Victorians have been bringing French poetry to life in the antipodes of France. The Berthe Mouchette Competition is a unique and memorable experience for the candidates and it reinforces the vitality of French in Australia.
In Victoria, the Berthe Mouchette Competition plays a key role in the promotion of Francophone language and culture, which is the flagship mission of the Alliance Française. Every year between May and November it is experienced by more than 16,000 candidates; by working alongside primary and secondary schools in Victoria which offer French, it aims to reward the best students of the subject. A French examiner comes to the school and candidates from years 3 to 10, aged from around 8 to 16, recite before them a poem proposed by the Alliance. Students of years 11 and 12, about to sit the VCE, are evaluated in two parts: a general conversation, and then one of two choices, either the recitation of a poem or the discussion of a theme studied in class. The older students are also able to sit a written component, which tests comprehension and expression.
Hundreds of poems, learnt for over one hundred years
In 1894, four years after the creation of the Alliance Française de Melbourne by Berthe Mouchette, there were 35 candidates enrolled. The annual report of the Alliance Française in 1893-1894 emphasises the serious nature of the exams, and their aim to “propagate the practical study of French”.The stage was set, and from then on, the competition continued to develop. The number of candidates only diminished in the years 1972-74 when the nuclear tests in the Pacific temporarily tarnished relations between France and Australia.Enrolments in the Alliance Française exams dropped beneath 8,000 candidates in 1974. During the last French nuclear tests in the south Pacific in 1995-96, the disaffection with the competition was less notable, although the students of years 11 and 12 often chose “the tests” as their discussion topic with the examiners.
In 2019, the competition celebrated it's 125th anniversary with the publishing of a book about the competition titled Berthe Mouchette Celebration and included a selection of the most favourite poets and poems across the decades. All participants are awarded a certificate and there are prizes for the best students in every year level.
But who is Berthe Mouchette?
The Berthe Mouchette Competition takes its name from the first president of the Alliance Française in Melbourne. But who is hiding behind this name from a past era? John Drury, a biographer who has done a great amount of research on Berthe Mouchette, says she was “a unique woman with a discreet but audacious nature for her time, and an artist in love with the French language and culture.”
She was a French artist who arrived in Melbourne in 1882 with her husband and her sister, a French professor named Mademoiselle Lion. Berthe was a successful portrait painter and professor of art, and with her sister she bought a school for young girls in St Kilda in 1886. It was there that the first meetings of the Alliance Française were held in 1890.
The sisters, Lion and Mouchette, formed the “Women’s Committee” of the Alliance Française, which brought together women of Melbourne’s bourgeoisie. Good teachers but poor managers, the two women had to close down their school, but by 1892 when Berthe Mouchette, a widow for eight years, moved with her sister from Melbourne to Adelaide, the Alliance Française of Victoria had become a well-established institution. She stayed In Adelaide for thirty years and enjoyed a prosperous period in which she exhibited her works and held an excellent reputation amongst Adelaide’s high society.
For the first years of the twentieth century, the two sisters were in India, taking an interest in theosophy and walking in the Himalayas! But after the death of her sister in Adelaide in 1922, Berthe Mouchette returned to France, where she died in 1928 in Normandy.
Today, we can see one of Berthe Mouchette’s paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria.