Catholics and freethinkers, military officers and pacifists, Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards: There was room for all of them in the eclectic ranks of the French Esperanto leadership. More Eurocentric and cosmopolitan than in- ternationalist, and characterized by practical and well-connected people, the French Esperantists could safely work for the cause so long as they were not stigmatized as hopeless dreamers, which occasionally required exiling the po- tentially embarrassing Zamenhof to the backstage.
They were very effective at their task. Originally promoted in scientific circles and through the local press, Esperanto rapidly obtained some popu- larity among the educated elite. By the turn of the century, more French than Russians sent their names and addresses to Zamenhof to be included in the Adresaro, or address book (see Figure 2), and by 1902 there were more Espe-
Russian French
Figure 2. Percentage of Russian and French people in the Esperanto movement, 1889-1901. Source: Adresaroj, 1889-1902, reprinted in Ludovikito, Ludovikologia dokumentaro, IX. Adresaroj I, 1889-1902 (Tokio: Eldonejo Ludovikito, 1992).
ranto clubs in France than in any other country. In a short time, Esperanto had shifted its center of gravity from Russia to France.
A milestone in this process was the 1900 Universal Exposition, held in Paris. The Exposition was a bold celebration of the advancement of science and technology, and a privileged site to promote the idea of a standard, arti- ficial language. Among the many scientific meetings that the Exposition had planned, there was the general conference of the French Association for the Advancement of Science, where de Beaufront made a presentation on "The Essence and Future of the Idea of an International Language," based on an unpublished article of Zamenhofs.7 With the help of the Russian Esperan- tists, the Paris Esperanto group set up a permanent stand on the premises of the Exposition.
A more important but less visible milestone in the French popularization of Esperanto was the contract the following year that the French Esperan- tists managed to sign with the Hachette publishing group. Founded in 1826, Hachette's niche was affordable textbooks for the middle and working classes. Since 1860 it had also been the publisher of Le Tour du monde, a periodical that focused on travel and international issues. This was also a good platform to promote Esperanto. The deal with Hachette allowed Zamenhof to publish his manuscripts and also edit and approve the publication of dictionaries, handbooks, translations, and literary pieces written by other Esperantists.
Since Hachette had a scholarly department, the Esperantists aspired to give their language some academic stature. Hachette also had commercial ties in the most important European cities, which helped improve the visibility of the language across the continent. More important, the Esperanto book series published by Hachette became the main literary corpus of the lan- guage, facilitating the standardization of the language consistent with the 1894 referendum. All in all, the collaboration with Hachette helped protect the language against potential reformists and other contenders.8
The main contender by this time was not Volapuk. In 1896, too busy re- writing his dictionary, Schleyer transferred the day-to-day business of the movement to his most loyal disciple, the Catholic teacher Carl Zetter (1842- 1912) of Graz (Austria), who took over the editorial office of Volap ukabled zenodik and published a third edition of Schleyer's handbook. Zetter was able to breathe some life into the movement, but Esperanto had effectively ruined it.9
This was, at least, Schleyer's interpretation. In 1910, when Volapuk was an extinct linguistic species, he anonymously published a brochure against Esperanto: Uber die Pfuscher-Sprache des Pseudo-Esperanto (On the botched, pseudo-Esperanto language). In this, his last word in the international lan- guage movement, Schleyer exuded bitterness. He drastically misrepresented the characteristics of Esperanto, conveying the idea that Zamenhofs language was a poor imitation of Volapuk—an imitation that, according to Schleyer, was doomed to disappear, as had other imitations. "On Volapuk a greater Genius, impelled by a long and deep study of languages, has revealed and manifested itself," he wrote. But "on the language systems proposed by its imitators, only simple capriciousness, vagaries and the sheer desire to get money or a name."10
The main challenger to Esperanto at the time was not Schleyer, however, but the Volapuk Academy that his rivals still controlled. Led since 1893 by Waldemar Rosenberger, a German-speaking engineer who lived in Moscow, and after some years of inactivity, the Academy got down to work. Rosen- berger's initial idea was to reform Schleyer's vocabulary, and to this end he began sending lists of new words to other Academy members, to vote on them. He soon realized that it would take years to complete a dictionary, so Rosenberger decided to put aside Volapuks word construction rules and create a brand new lexicon based on the same principles that Zamenhof and Liptay had proposed: namely, to use the most common roots of the more important natural languages.11 This idea, however, also implied the construction of a new grammar. Since Volapuk words began and ended with a consonant, and grammatical prefixes and suffixes were marked with vowels, the introduc- tion of a common word such as "animal" demanded a new grammar. For Rosenberger, this realization meant that the whole Volapuk edifice had to be dismantled and that, consequently, a new language had to be created.
In 1902, Idiom Neutral came into the world.12 Almost immediately, the ex-Volapukists-turned-Esperantists of Nuremberg, disgruntled by their de- feat in the 1894 referendum, changed their allegiance to Idiom Neutral.13 But Idiom Neutral was not much different from Esperanto, and it had arrived too late. Esperanto kept growing, and dictionaries, handbooks, and literature could be ordered from any European bookstore. As Guerard put it, as if he were reminding us of the importance of timing in path-dependent processes: "Idiom Neutral never achieved a corresponding degree of popular success: it remains the 'Illustrious Unknown' among artificial languages. Had the Acad- emy been a little more active, a little less conscientious, perhaps, the language could have been made public much earlier, about 1898, before Esperanto had taken a tremendous lead. In 1903 Esperanto was no longer a project but a
fact."14
The 1905 First Esperanto Congress, held in France's Boulogne-sur-Mer, was critical to Esperanto becoming "a fact" more than a project. The congress was organized by the local Esperanto group, led by the Jewish lawyer Alfred Michaux. Interestingly, the First Esperanto Congress was not the byprod- uct of a scientific or political initiative, but of an earlier sporting event: a motorboat race that had brought together Esperantists from both sides of the Channel. The fact that participants were able to communicate in Espe- ranto encouraged Michaux to organize an international Esperanto congress to show the world that the language was also suitable for face-to-face com- munication. He obtained the support of the Touring Club de France, a mix- ture of a sport, tourist, and conservationist society, founded in 1890, which only five years later had 22,000 members, mostly urban professionals and qualified workers. The Touring Club had been promoting Esperanto since 1901. It let Esperantists use its premises, inserted articles about Zamenhofs language in its monthly Revue du TCF, and published Esperanto tourist guides, dictionaries, phrase books, and abridged manuals.15 But as Michaux was soon to learn, the support of the main Esperanto leaders was not as easy to obtain as the Touring Club's.