Gambling in Esperanto

Baccarat? But I wanted
to study Esperanto!

Was every Esperanto club in 1907 Paris a front for a gambling den? It might seem that way. When I discovered an June 24, 1907 article about raid on a gambling den in Paris, I assumed it was the one that the WashingtonEvening Star had written about slightly later in 1907. Then I realized the names the proprietors were different. Did Paris really have two cunning ladies who decided that an Esperanto club would be the perfect cover for an illegal gambling den? At least that many. There were two separate raids on Esperanto clubs in 1907.

The article in the Los Angeles Times does not give the location of Madame Schwob’s gambling club. I’m going to make guess that it probably wasn’t too far off from Madame Beaujon’s secret club on the Boulevard Clichy, since another source does say that Madame Schwob also had an apartment on the Boulevard Clichy. I guess in 1907 it wasn’t just the place to go for an illegal baccarat club, but the place to go for an illegal baccarat club that was masquerading as an Esperanto group. But where did you go if you wanted your friends to think you were engaging in gambling, when you really just wanted to get together and talk Esperanto?

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Police Raid Esperanto Lessons! Esperanto a Front for Gambling

The Washington Evening Star reported on July 7, 1907 a June 27 police raid of an organization with the name of “The Republican Association of the Metropolis and the Colonies.” They were gathered on the Boulevard Clichy, in the Pigalle district, for the uplifting purpose of learning Esperanto. The Pigalle had been an artists quarter, but had become even seedier.

I'm not sure when the area became notorious for prostitution, but if that wasn't the case in 1907, it probably wasn't far away. For that matter, I've stayed in a hotel in the (completely upscale and non-seedy) Fourth Arrondissement that, reportedly, was a bordello until the early 1960s (not bad for a building built into a wall of a church).

The police found out that the Esperanto lessons were just a front for an unlicensed gambling parlor. Judging from the Evening Star, the popularity of the place was the giveaway. What? Esperanto lessons can’t be popular?

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