Esperanto in 1908 Paris

"The two-thousand-and-first language"
in their view, one too many.

A cautionary tale published in the New York Sun on September 5, 1908 shows the problem of network effects. There might have been a lot of Esperanto speakers in France at that time, but the point of the Sun piece (translated from Le Matin) was that your Esperanto wasn’t going to do you any help in Paris.

Other reading I’ve done has shown that Le Matin was fairly hostile to the Esperanto movement, in part perhaps to the appeal Esperanto had for the labor movement in Europe. The conservative newspaper does not seem to have been a fan of organized labor in any language, although the motive behind the Le Matin piece was the fear that Esperanto would reduce the prestige of French. If you want to be a truly sophisticated world traveller, you should speak French. Ask any Frenchman.

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