The Alliance Française de Melbourne was founded in 1890. It has been promoting French language and culture in Victoria for a hundred and thirty-six years, which is roughly a hundred and thirty-six years longer than this day has existed.
It has joined Édition n°01 as a cultural partner, alongside the Alliance Française de Sydney.
Melbourne is the largest French language centre in Victoria, with around four thousand enrolments and more than seventy thousand people taking part in its cultural programme last year. It is the only accredited centre in the state for the diplomas issued by the French Ministry of Education, and it runs the French Film Festival each March under the patronage of the French Embassy.
It also runs the Berthe Mouchette competition, created in 1894 and named for the Alliance’s founder, in which thousands of school students each year recite French poetry from memory.
That last detail is worth sitting with. A competition that has run for a hundred and thirty-two years, in which children learn poems by heart in a language most of them will not grow up speaking, because somebody decided it was worth doing and then kept doing it.
This is a day about a stew. But it is the same idea: that things worth keeping are kept by people who go on keeping them after the novelty has gone.
Both Alliances will tell their members about the day, and both are entered in the register as cultural partners of the founding edition.