He then paid homage to Schleyer, the first man to launch an international language, and mentioned Leopold Einstein and other deceased fellow Espe- rantists. At this point, he asked the audience to stand and declared: "To all dead Esperantists, the First Congress of Esperanto expresses its sincere respect and regard." He finished: "I feel that at this moment that I do not belong to any nation or religious creed; I am only human. And at this mo- ment, only that high moral Force, which every human being feels in his heart, stands before my eyes . . . and to this unknown Force I give my prayer."5
When Zamenhof finished his prayer, the audience gave him a long stand- ing ovation. His emotional speech became a memorable event in many par- ticipants' lives—"a stirring time," as one British Esperantist reported.6
Zamenhof's enthusiastic reception clearly showed that side by side with the instrumental view of Esperanto, there was room for a more idealistic con- ception. The French leadership thought it important to downplay the latter. Right after the congress, they launched a public relations campaign to ob- scure Zamenhof's ideological zeal, and, more important, its source; namely, his Jewishness. The campaign succeeded. As Javal reported to Zamenhof after the congress: "I have read more than 700 hundred articles related to Esperanto after Boulogne. Only one commented that Dr. Zamenhof is Jew. We have used remarkable discipline to hide to the public your origins. About this issue, all the friends of Esperanto agree that we have to hide it until we win the final battle [the acceptance of Esperanto as the international lan- guage]."7 Helping this campaign was the "declaration about the essence of Esperanto," passed by the congress. The declaration, tactfully approved by Zamenhof, stated that "Esperantism is an effort to spread throughout the world the use of a neutral language for all; which . . . while not aiming in the least to force out the existing national languages, would give to men of dif- ferent nations the possibility of understanding one another. . . . Any other idea or hope which this or that Esperantist connects with Esperantism is his purely private affair for which Esperantism is not responsible [and, conse- quently,] every person is called an Esperantist who knows and uses the language exactly, whatever the objects for which he uses it."8
Aside from the formal meetings, the Boulogne Congress included many other events. Those who attended had a chance to enjoy a play of Moliere's Le Mariage force (The forced marriage) in Esperanto, performed by actors from nine countries. Balls, banquets, poetry readings, concerts, comic perfor- mances, comedies, and outdoor excursions were also organized for every- body's entertainment. Catholics could attend a morning service in Esperanto at the local church. All told, close to 700 Esperantists from twenty countries attended the congress. The media attention proved its success. The Daily Mail s correspondent, for example, wrote that "in the streets and cafes, in the rail- way stations and shops [of Boulogne], one hears the hum of the language [but] the theater . . . is the great rendezvous of all, and during the whole of yester- day presented a scene of dramatic animation; and here it was that fully came home to me the force, the significance and the potentiality of the new lan- guage. . . . The ease, the fluency, and the facility with which [Russians, Japa- nese, Englishmen, Germans, French, and Norwegians] spoke to each other struck me forcibly." Like the British journalist, the correspondent of La Van- guardia, a Barcelona daily, was also most astonished by the representation of Molieres play. But after conceding that Esperanto had made great strides, he ended his report with some skepticism, the memory of Volapuk still fresh: "Who can tell that Esperanto is the longed-for language which will facilitate international relations, and not one more project?"9
For the Esperantists, the Boulogne Congress proved something more im- portant. During the months before the congress, Esperanto leaders had aired their disagreements about the organization and strategy of the movement. This had weakened the society of Esperantists, but face-to-face interaction among people from different nationalities, their common participation in the entertaining events and working sessions in a language that they had chosen to learn, strengthened the community of Esperantists.
Theirs was a multifaceted movement, and members had different ideas about the ultimate purpose of the language. But they also understood that they depended on each other to learn and practice the language, to let it grow. Beyond their local organizations, their professional, national, or religious af- filiations, the congress's atmosphere helped forge a network of personal ties and shared emotions, a distinctive identity minted by a common language and a new community or country, as Zamenhof named it: Esperantujo, or the country of the Esperantists.
We find an example of the community-building properties of the language and the annual congresses in the recollections of the German philosopher and physicist Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970). He learned Esperanto when he was fourteen. Three years later, in 1908, he attended the international Esperanto Congress in Dresden: "It seemed like a miracle to see how easy it was for me to follow the talks and the discussions in the large public meetings, and then to talk in private conversations with people from many other countries while I was unable to hold conversations in those languages which I had studied for many years in school."10
A member of the Vienna Circle connected with Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap worked in the new field of symbolic logic. He explored the possibil- ity of an ideal, scientific language, a research program that resembled those of Dalgarno, Wilkins, and Leibniz. In Carnap's view, such a language would let us translate common expressions into their logical relations. Although not useful for common interaction, a language of this sort would help us distin- guish between real, empirical problems and pseudo-problems (namely, state- ments not logically translatable and, as such, dispensable as metaphysical or illogical). This language would advance scientific knowledge, and, conse- quently, social welfare. Carnap was not a detached philosopher. He was a so- cialist and a pacifist, very involved in political debates. For him, Esperanto was a natural way of extending his political ideas. He fled to the United States in 1935, having previously helped his friend Karl Popper escape from Vienna. But before moving to the United Stated he had the chance to attend another Esperanto congress, this time in Helsinki. There he met