Hodler was not destined to live to see the realization of any of these ideas: he died, short of his 33rd birthday, in March 1920. But, thanks to him, UEA had established itself, in the eyes of the Esperantists, as the representative of the Esperanto movement—a role all the more important because, with the founding of the League of Nations, the movement for the first time had a respected partner on the international scene. Hodler provided the theoretical guidelines for the Esperantist position in the post- war period, when hope for an era of more secure peace grew on every side.
Hodler analyzed the importance of the founding of the League of Nations, particularly from the point of view of the Esperanto movement, in the following terms:
We all know that the League will prove viable only if it brings together not only governments, through legal means, but principally peoples, in a spirit of reciprocal understanding. Lacking an international neutral language, the peoples remain completely alienated from one another, even if they are theoretically linked by interstate conventions. So from the League of Nations the Esperantists hope for early recognition of the necessity of a common means of understanding.[166]
We should look, then, at how the Esperanto movement sought to pres- ent its wishes to the League of Nations and examine whether the League fulfilled the expectations that Hodler, and not only Hodler, defined as the precondition for its successful operation. The horrendous butchery of the war put an end to the belief, on the part of worldwide public opinion, in warfare as a means of solving international conflicts. As a result, much faith was placed in the League of Nations. UEA took this as a good opportunity to demand an intergovernmental agreement on the introduction of Esperanto in schools. The Association had an enthusias- tic advocate in the person of the publicist Edmond Privat, who worked for the League in the years 1920 and 1921 as an interpreter and from 1922 to 1927 served, first, as counselor to the Persian delegate, and later as his deputy.74 Privat went to the same school as Hodler; after Hodler's death he took over as editor of the journal Esperanto.
In December 1920, on Privat's initiative, 11 delegates (from Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Czechoslovakia, Haiti, India, Italy, Persia and South Africa)^[167] presented a draft resolution to the First Assembly. Drawing attention to the language difficulties 'that hinder direct relations among the peoples' and expressing the hope that 'the children of all coun- tries should, henceforth, know two languages: their mother language and an easy means of international communication', the draft included a request to the League's secretary-general that he prepare a report on the results of the teaching of Esperanto in the public schools of member states.[168]
This proposal exemplifies the idealistic hopes placed on the League principally by the less powerful and non-European states. But at the same time it attests to the insufficient wariness of the proposers, who completely underestimated the degree of opposition that this near- revolutionary proposal would encounter—particularly from one of the great powers. Privat himself later confessed that it was a tactical error to present so early in the game the most controversial of possible proposals, namely the introduction of Esperanto into schools.[169]
The Second Commission, which took up the proposal on16 December, removed part of it, namely the expressions of hope already mentioned, and accepted the rest of the text by ten votes to one (France). Two days later, when the Belgian Senator Henri La Fontaine[170] reported the reso- lution to the Assembly, he was greeted by strong protests from Gabriel Hanotaux, the French delegate. Hanotaux, historian, member of the French Academy, former minister of foreign affairs, angrily denounced the recommendation. Encountering no objections from his intimidated fellow delegates, Hanotaux launched himself into an eloquent defense of the honor of the French language, 'which has a history behind it [...] and which has the right to defend its position against new creations'.[171] He succeeded in forcing a decision to table the matter without discussion.
To understand the context of Hanotaux's outburst, we should note that after the war, in which France was among the victors, there ensued what was called 'the battle of the languages'.[172] When, early in 1919, a decision was taken to introduce English as a second official language in the Paris Peace Conference, the language problem rapidly became an issue. In the League of Nations French continued to be used in the first instance, but France recognized such bilingualism as a break with tradition. Already on the defensive because of the growing prestige of English, France saw in the proposal to examine the current global condition of Esperanto a further threat to the position of the French language as the classic language of diplomacy, even though the draft resolution on Esperanto was not aimed at changing the arrangement of working languages in the League.[173] Before this reversal, Privat was apparently barely aware of France's position. Now, the Esperantists and the delegates sympathetic to their cause were obliged to recognize how the poorly prepared proposal had immediately fallen vic- tim to such vigorous opposition—because, as Maurice Rollet de l'Isle, pres- ident of the French Society for the Dissemination of Esperanto, explained in a December 1920 letter to Privat, 'I am astonished that you are surprised by this hostility, since here [in France] we have long encountered the most violent hostility from the Quai d'Orsay'.[174]
Indeed, Hanotaux's initiative should have come as no surprise; even before the war Esperanto was playing a role in discussion of Anglo-French bilingualism. In 1905 the French government began to increase its fund- ing for the dissemination of the French language in the world, driven to such action by the growing importance of English.[175] At the same time, the French intelligentsia were campaigning for recognition of the French language as a more suitable auxiliary language for Europe.[176] On the one hand, Esperanto was considered insufficiently strong to halt the progress of English; on the other, it was seen as a competing hindrance to French. The writer Marcel Boulenger in 1910 blamed the Esperantists for seek- ing, in agreement with Germans and internationalists, 'to deprive French of its role as a language perpetually universal'. He pronounced the pio- neer of automobiles and aviation, Ernest Archdeacon, who was an enthu- siastic publicist for Esperanto, disqualified to discuss linguistic issues and, in the same breath, 'a traitor to the fatherland'.[177] In the same year the anti-Semitic writer Emile Gautier specifically reproached Zamenhof for creating not only a language but also a 'super-nation' intent on dominat- ing the world.[178] It was therefore consistent with past practice that prime minister Rene Viviani refused in 1914 to provide government support for the planned (but ultimately abortive) World Congress in Paris.[179]
Both before and after the war the French found themselves facing a dilemma. When they argued for French as the official auxiliary language in international relations, they naturally incited the opposition of other nations.[180] At the same time, such pushback upset those French who claimed the natural worldwide superiority of their language and had no wish to see it reduced to the level of competing with other national lan- guages. This dilemma offered an opportunity for the Esperantists, who, often with protestations of strong emotional links to the French language, argued that the international auxiliary language should be artificially cre- ated and 'not be a language of national identity'.[181] While they were able to convince a few people, frequently they met with a wholly negative reaction; Esperanto presented a clear threat to the view that universal- ity could originate in a national language, namely French—and hence a threat to what constituted the very foundation of French identity. Thus, Esperanto risked trivializing the international vision of the French.[182]