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there, together with three members of the associations committee, both to ensure things would go as planned and to show visitors how lively and busy the association was.
While Thomas set up the projector, Colette, in the pedagogical tone of a retired schoolteacher, recalled, in French, the day she became disap- pointed with another committee member, who insisted that open days should revolve around an hour-long crash language course, rather than an introduction to the history of Esperanto: 'history is what matters the most', she stressed. While Thomas, other association members and I listened to her and nodded, two visitors arrived.
On entering the association and crossing the small bookshop on the entrance hall, the first thing to call anyone's attention in the meeting room is a large world map, hung on the wall opposite the entrance. With each country coloured in a rather bright colour, this map was a reason of pride to the association. Whenever a foreign Esperantist visited Esperanto-France, they were asked to place a pin on their home country on the map, which, after about five years of use, resulted in a detailed cartographic account of Esperantists who visited Paris. On the wall to the right, by the side of the whiteboard, an A4 black-and-white drawing showed five children holding hands in a circle, each children displaying a different ethnic background and wearing stereotypical clothes making reference to African, Asian and European traditions. The drawing also depicted a shining star—representing Esperanto—illuminating the chil- dren, sided by the sentence, in French, 'Grace a l'Esperanto nous nous comprenons' (Thanks to Esperanto, we understand each other). Despite the rich imagery of the drawing, it barely competed for attention with the colourful map.
As the visitors opened the door, Denis, a 60-year-old public servant who lived nearby and regularly volunteered at the association, turned to the visitors to greet them—in Esperanto, then in French, to show 'how easy Esperanto was'—and to give them the associations adver- tising leaflet. The front page of the folded leaflet showed a terrestrial globe placed under the logo of the association, followed by the motto 'Esperanto langue equitable' (Esperanto, fair language). Once unfolded, the second page of the leaflet promptly stated that Esperanto is easier to learn than the 'langues dominantes' (dominant languages), that it gives its speakers access to a network of contacts in more than one hundred countries and that, for promoting more egalitarian communication, it counts the support of UNESCO. Speaking fast in French, Denis enthu- siastically presented the leaflet to the visitors and invited them to join the presentation about to begin.
Thomas projected the slides from his laptop to the whiteboard, and confidently spoke, in French, about how Esperanto was created in a city in the Russian Empire 'where there were a lot of people speaking different languages, just like Paris nowadays'. Sitting by my side, Colette turned to me upon hearing this and whispered 'what is he saying? We shouldn't have let him present Esperanto. How could he compare nineteenth- century Bialystok with twenty-first-century Paris like that?' I smiled and turned back to see him moving to the next slide and saying: 'ok, so Esperanto was created and, in 1905, the first international Esperanto meeting took place here in France, in Boulogne-sur-Mer. And... where can we find Esperanto nowadays?' Switching from Microsoft PowerPoint to YouTube, he played a video of an Esperanto version of Queen's We will rock you. While most people laughed, Colette's face blushed.
Next, Thomas skipped to phonetics, emphasising that Esperanto has a phonetic alphabet, and immediately started showing vocabulary about animals in Esperanto, without their translation into French, asking the visitors if they could guess to which animals those Esperanto words referred. Colette turned to me again: 'I can't believe he's giving a crash course! We talked about this so many times, and he seemed to have agreed with me... I need your help once this is over. Come after me as soon as I stand up!' After forty minutes, the presentation came to an end, Colette pulled my arm and we approached the visitors. Back to her pedagogical tone, she told them: 'I'm afraid Thomas forgot to tell some important details about the history of Esperanto. After all, why would you learn a language if you don't know what kind of people speak it or why it exists, right? Being easy to learn is not a good enough reason, I would say. Rumour has it that Indonesian is very easy to learn, but this information alone doesn't make me feel like learning Indonesian'. She asked me to intervene, and we told the visitors about Zamenhof's origin, the first letter exchange in Esperanto, the international congresses, the World Wars and the language's current online presence, being inter- rupted only once, when one of the visitors noticed my 'petit accent'—a gentle way in France of acknowledging one's foreignness—and asked me where I was from. As Thomas joined us, Colette turned to him with a serious look and said, in a husky voice: 'You know, Thomas, history is what matters the most'.
In contrasting ways, both Colette's historical approach and the a-historical perspective put forward by Thomas and Esperanto-France's advertising leaflet are manners of sketching what Esperanto is and how it should be known by Esperantists and non-Esperantists alike. From this ethnographic starting point, this chapter maps out some aspects of the mise en discours (Foucault 1976) of Esperanto over history. By retracing the ways in which scholars and Esperantists—and Esperantist scholars—mobilise history, I explore how knowledge about Esperanto comes to dwell on continuous attempts to keep track of its speakers, their gatherings, and the political opportunities and communication technolo- gies that have brought them together over time. Yet, understanding how Esperanto has been, over history, conveyed as timely requires a detour to the battle ofartificial languages (Garvfa 2015), through which the history of constructed languages such as Esperanto becomes inseparable from the history of the technologies, ideas and political agendas in place since at least late nineteenth-century Europe.
2.1 A Long and Winding Road
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw considerable scientific, technical and technological advancement in the West. The decades preceding the First World War were marked by the invention of the telephone—which gradually replaced the telegraph—the devel- opment of electric and diesel locomotives and the flight of the first powered aeroplane, as well as the popularisation of international ship- ping routes and postal services. Combined, all these advancements recast the relationship the Euro-American world had established with time and space, promoting the circulation of people, things, knowledge and information at a pace never seen before. Parallel to this, imperialism expanded European hegemony to the African and Asian continents, reaching its peak in the period between 1875 and 1914 (Hobsbawm 1989). The increase in international travelling and trade caused by the European expansion provided a powerful incentive for the continuous development of communication and transportation technologies that would enable Europeans to more easily and frequently reach other parts of the world. Unsurprisingly, increasing international communication depended on the mediation not only of communication technologies, but also of languages, which brought the issue of linguistic diversity versus universality to the forefront of discussions.