delegation committee’s members as “a few persons who perhaps
have a very imposing exterior and very glorious names, but who
have no right or competence to give orders in matters of
international language.” 94 Since the committee’s charge was to
select one or another auxiliary language, a “Permanent
Commission” (including Beaufront) was set up to decide on specific
features of the chosen auxiliary language. At one point, Zamenhof
invited this commission to work under the aegis of the Esperanto
Language Committee; when it refused, he demanded that
Esperantists disavow the entire delegation, or else become “traitors”
to the cause. His letters became increasingly shrill and erratic; then,
just as he was in danger of losing his own “beloved child,” he lost his
father, Markus Zamenhof, who died in Warsaw on November 29.
In January 1908, when Ido was put forward as a “Simplified
Esperanto,” the Esperanto Language Committee would have none of
it. Zamenhof tendered a weak counterproposal, ignoring the pivotal
issue of reversibility. He was not simply being stubborn; by refusing
to regularize derivation, he was honoring the quirks and
irregularities of what was clearly, by contrast to Ido, a living
language. And in snubbing the scienculoj—the academic experts
whose influence he had long feared—he insisted that Esperanto was
not, and would never be, the prerogative of an elite. When his
counterproposal was dismissed, Zamenhof issued a scathing circular
about the delegation’s endorsement of Ido as a “Simplified
Esperanto.”
As far as we’re concerned, the Delegation committee no
longer exists.… [T]here remain only some private
individuals who—according to their own words—have now
become Esperantists. But when these new Esperantists who
joined Esperanto just a few weeks back begin to dictate
rules to the Esperantist people, who have already worked
more than twenty years … then we simply cast them
aside. 95
At moments of schism (as at all other moments), Esperantists are
hard to count, but it is estimated that one quarter of the movement’s
leaders defected to the cause of Ido. 96 Still, the Ido schism was more
palace coup than proletarian revolution; only 3 to 4 percent of
rank-and-file Esperantists transferred their allegiance to Ido. 97
It was only a matter of time before the identity of Ido’s
anonymous creator was revealed. In June 1908, L’Esperantiste
featured a “Declaration by Ido,” signed by one Louis de Beaufront.
But all along, it appears, Beaufront had merely been a surrogate for
Couturat, who, as a member of the delegation committee, had been
disallowed from presenting his own proposal. Why Beaufront
performed this role, we can only speculate. Perhaps it was a way of
augmenting his own importance in a movement that was to be the
linchpin of intellectual exchange—or so the early Idists thought. On
the other hand, so many suspected Beaufront of inventing Ido that
his “Declaration of Ido” was a relatively painless way of heroically
protecting Couturat, with whom he had cast his fate.
As the Esperantists have told it ever since, the secession of the
Idists purged the movement of its logicians and tinkerers, of the
language-fetishists who would have no truck with the interna ideo.
Esperantists like to cite Bertrand Russell, who wrote of Couturat:
“According to his conversation, no human beings in the whole
previous history of the human race had ever been quite so depraved
as the Esperantists. He lamented that the word Ido did not lend itself
to the formation of a word similar to Esperantist. I suggested ‘idiot’
but he was not quite pleased.” 98
The Idists began to refer to Zamenhof’s language as “primitive
Esperanto,” as though it were a “primitive church” that had been
decisively superseded. As historian of science Michael Gordin has
shown, Wilhelm Ostwald, the committee chair, played an important
role in advocating for Ido among scientists in Europe and Russia.
Expressing contempt for the Esperantists’ reverence for their book of
language rules, the Fundamento—“Ido ‘does not have a holy book’”99
—Ostwald characterized Ido as a triumph of scientific progress. But
movements born in schism are usually destined for schisms of their
own, and such was the case with Ido. Its most illustrious followers—
including Ostwald—forsook it to invent Weltdeutsch (Ostwald),
Novial (Jespersen), Occidental (educator Edgar de Wahl), and
Romand (Michaux); Peano started his own Interlingua academy to
promote his neo-Latin language. None of these inventions has
become what Esperanto is: a living language with a worldwide
community.
But for those most affected by the schism, including Zamenhof, it
destroyed the ideal of Esperantujo as a unified, harmonious
community. As Zamenhof defensively noted in 1908, the ax had not
damaged the tree, which, in spite of “a great cracking noise,” had
“kept all its strength and lost only a few leaves. ”100 Once the great
cracking noise died down, Beaufront was forced out of his post as
president of the Société Française pour la Propagation de
l’Espéranto. Whatever illnesses, heroic achievements, or scandals
Beaufront could boast in his remaining years (apart from a grammar
of Ido, which he published in 1925), they are lost to us. He died,
fittingly, in a village called La Folie in 1935, according to Boulton,
“so much alone that the first news of his death came from the post-
office stamp on a returned letter.” 101 For the Judas of Esperanto, not
even a potter’s field.
7. The Sword of Damocles
In 1908, an important institution emerged to bridge the fault lines
left by the Ido schism: the Universala Esperanto Asocio (Universal
Esperanto Association), founded by a young Genevan named Hector
Hodler. Son of the painter Ferdinand Hodler, Hector appears in his
father’s dreamlike paintings as an infant, a toddler with a Dutch-boy
haircut, a boy in white linen, and a slim, nude diver; in all, like a
ghostly visitant from a world of eternal youth.
Born in 1887, the same year Esperanto entered the world, Hodler
learned the language at sixteen along with his charismatic
schoolmate Edmond Privat, who became Zamenhof’s first
biographer. Together, Hodler and Privat founded a club as well as a
journal, Juna Esperantisto (Young Esperantist); in 1907, Hodler
acquired Esperanto, a magazine founded by the French anarchist
Paul Berthelot. (Now called Esperanto Revuo, it remains the organ of
the UEA.) Hodler’s vision of a worldwide network of Esperantists
dovetailed with two ideas floated at the 1906 Universal Congress:
first, a network of Esperantist “consuls,” who would provide services
to traveling samideanoj; and second, a network of local offices
devoted to running year-long programs and courses. 102
Within two years after Hodler assumed the post of director, the
UEA acquired over eight thousand members and a network of 850
consuls, later called delegates. 103 When in 1909 Zamenhof publicly
endorsed the UEA as a realization of the interna ideo—“UEA