SYDNEY'S famous harbour crossing could have been a harbour croissant if the French had followed through on an audacious 1802 plan to invade the city.

Oui, oui, it's true. The French actually planned to claim the fledgling city of Sydney for their own strategic purposes.



The audacious plan has been uncovered by historians from the University of Adelaide, who are translating a confidential report from the 1800-1804 expedition of French explorer Nicholas Baudin.



Baudin was charting the southern Australian coastline and hadn't originally planned to pull into Sydney, but he had early the usual 1800s seafarer problems with scurvy and lack of supplies, so he made the unscheduled stop in Sydney in 1802.



And he was impressed with what he saw.



The French had expected the 14-year-old colony to be an unruly outpost. Instead they found a thriving township with good agricultural production and a population of reformed convicts who were establishing themselves as productive citizens.



That made them jealous, in a particularly French kind of way.



Francois Péron, the expedition's chief zoologist and intellectual leader, put together a 160 page document detailing what he had seen and advocating the advantages of an invasion.



As Adelaide Uni's Professor Jean Fornasiero told news.com.au



"It's full of belligerent language about the English, talking about 'outrageous claims to sovereignty over half the Pacific' and so on.



"It's very colourful and an interesting mix of anglophilia and anglophobia. Péron hates the English but is full of admiration for what they've achieved."



Péron saw the colony not just as valuable in its own right for its advanced infrastructure, but as a strategic military site in the Pacific. His report, which the Adelaide Uni staff are translating, was intended for the eyes of none other than Napoleon.



Napoleon was red hot to give it a go. He wanted Sydney. He could just about envisage a city where the Eiffel Tower stood in place of Centrepoint Tower, and iconic pie van Harry's Cafe de Wheels was a boulangerie.



He quite likely had dreams about T20 boules being played at the SBG, as the SCG would have been known.



Alas, Napoleon was too busy waging war with England in his own neck of the woods to devote resources to an invasion of Sydney.



So Sydney stayed as Sydney and Melbourne, you may well argue, got all the culture. But it was a close thing.