Antoine Fauchery

Antoine Fauchery was born in Paris, France, the son of Julien Fauchery, a merchant, and his wife Sophie Gilberte Soré. His parents, who married in 1818, are recorded as having a baby girl, Barbe Julie Sophie, in 1820, three years before Antoine's birth on 15 November 1823.[1] Fauchery's initial interests were in architecture, painting and engraving.[2]

Due to a fortunate meeting in café in 1844 with the poet Théodore de Banville, Fauchery began to develop as a writer. He became part of the Bohemian circle that included writers Henri Murger, Champfleury, Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval and Théodore Barrière and contributed articles to the journal, Le Corsaire-Satan, along with the rest of that circle.[2] Through his friend, photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon), in 1848 he journeyed with a group of idealistic French and Polish émigrés who were intent on liberating Poland from Russia. However, Fauchery and Nadar didn't have enough money to support them and were sent back to France a couple of months after they set out.[2]

Fauchery, according to De Banville, was immortalised in Henri Murger’s novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème in the character of the painter Marcel.[2][3] Between 1848 and 1852, Fauchery produced a number of pamphlets, serials and short plays, which were published in journals such as Le Corsaire, Journal pour Rire, Dix Décembre and L’Evénement.[2]

In July 1852 Fauchery set out from London by ship for Australia with Louise, probably Louise Joséphine Gatineau (whom he later married in 1857), and he spent the better part of the next four years in Australia.[4] Once in Melbourne, he was apparently inspired to go to the goldfields by a Catholic Priest, a fellow Frenchman.[2] Fauchery went to the Ballarat Goldfields, a major destination during the Victorian Gold Rush, where he spent two years digging for gold but had little success himself, although witnessing some successful gold discoveries by others.[5] On his return to Melbourne, he established Café Estaminet Français at 76 Little Bourke Street in Melbourne to serve Europeans in the colony, who could meet and play billiards there. Later, he kept a provisions store at the Jim Crow gold diggings (Daylesford).[1]

Fauchery returned to UK/Europe in 1856, but missed the staging of a play he wrote with Théodore Barrière, Calino, charge d’atelier,[6] which was produced at the Vaudeville Theatre in Paris.[1] His letters, written while a gold miner, were serialised in Le Moniteur Universel, then later published in book form in 1857 as Lettres d’un minuer en Australie[7][8][9] and provided an account of day-to-day life and the society of the goldfields.

Fauchery returned from London to Port Phillip, Australia, by the ship Sydenham with companion Julie in late 1857.[2] It was reported in January 1858 that he had brought various examples of photographic portraits of famous people with him on his return to Melbourne[10] and he set up a commercial photography studio at 132 Collins Street, Melbourne. In February of the same year, he won a gold medal for ‘various portraits on paper, from collodion negatives’ at an exhibition held by the Victorian Industrial Society.[11] As a working photographer, in November 1858 he photographed the Melbourne division of the Volunteer Artillery Regiment and the A and B troops of the mounted force as they went about their artillery practice and manoeuvres in the parkland adjoining the Princes Bridge barracks.[12] Photographs of Melbourne, the Victorian goldfields and Aboriginal Australians that he took with photographer Richard Daintree and sold in 1858 in monthly instalments, which became known as ‘Sun pictures of Victoria',[13] are some of the only existing images of the goldfields and Australian Aboriginal Peoples from this time.[5]

In February of 1859, disillusioned with that city,[5] he left Melbourne and went to Manila. It is believed that the French government then paid him to go to China as a photographer and journalist or war correspondent. From July to November 1860 he was in China and sent regular reports back to France. His Lettres de Chine were serialised in Le Moniteur Universel (October 1860-February 1861).[14] Fauchery became ill while in China and died in Yokohama, Japan, probably of gastritis and dysentery, on 27 April 1861. He was buried in the Yokohama Foreign General Cemetery.[1]

Fiction

• Amours d’un Petit Bossu et d’une Magdeleine en Bois

• Une Histoire de l’ami Jacques

• Conte de Jour de l’an

Plays

• Fauchery, A. and Barrière, T. Caline, charge d’atelier [play staged 12 March 1856]

• Fauchery, A. and Murger, H. La Résurrection de Lazare (Paris: Michael Lévy, 1856)

Published letters

• Fauchery, A. Lettres d’un miner en Australie [serialised in Le moniteur universel 9 January-8 February 1857) and published Poulet Malassis et de Broise, Paris, 1857.

• Fauchery, A. Lettres d’Chine [serialised in Le moniteur universel 12 October 1860-3 February 1861)

Photographs

• Fauchery, A. and Daintree, R. Australia (1858) (known as ‘the Sun Pictures of Victoria’) [photographic views and studies]

• Anglo-American Name Authority File, s.v. "Fauchery, Antoine", LC Control Number n 84178594. Accessed 5 October 2006.
• O'Neill, K. M. "Fauchery, Antoine Julien (1827? - 1861)", Australian Dictionary of Biography, online edition; print edition: volume 4 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), pp 158–159. Accessed 5 October 2006.
• Thiriez, Régine. Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1998).
• Charles Monselet, La lorgnette littéraire: dictionnaire des grands et des petits auteurs de mon temps, p 90 (Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1857)] (in French).

• Sun Pictures of Victoria at State Library Victoria.