Pioneers and the First Congress

The Story of Esperanto

Course 1 · Chapter 3 · Volapük, Pioneers and the First Congress (1879-1905)

A book is not a movement. Between the Unua Libro of 1887 and the first world congress of 1905, Esperanto grew from a pamphlet into an organisation with a journal, clubs, a hymn, a flag and a fixed foundation. This chapter begins with the language that came first and failed, Volapük, because its story shaped the way Esperanto's supporters thought about authority, and then follows the early clubs, a ban in Russia, and the congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

The Language That Came First: Volapük

A priest's invention

Volapük (from words meaning roughly "world speech") was published in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest living in Baden (check). It spread through the 1880s, with clubs, journals and congresses in several countries, and its supporters claimed hundreds of thousands of learners (check). Treat those numbers with caution.

Why it declined

Writers give several reasons: a grammar and vocabulary that many learners found hard and that altered familiar words beyond recognition; the founder's refusal to allow changes; quarrels over who controlled the language and its academy; and the rise of a simpler rival (check). By the 1890s the movement had largely collapsed.

The lesson

Many early Esperantists came from Volapük, bringing its journals, its habits of organising and its memories of the collapse (check). They were determined that the new language would not depend on one person's authority.

Why did one survive? The usual answer is "Esperanto was easier and its founder gave up control". It is a plausible explanation, and it is repeated in nearly every history. It is also a claim about causes, and causes are harder to prove than events. Other factors may have mattered too: timing, geography, the decline of a single movement's leaders, and the fact that Volapük had already exhausted the first wave of interest. Chapter 10 returns to this question.

Point (check each)	Volapük	Esperanto
Founder	Johann Martin Schleyer, a German priest	L. L. Zamenhof, a Warsaw eye doctor
Published	1879	1887
Control	The founder kept authority and resisted reform	The founder gave up ownership and later accepted a fixed foundation (see below)
Vocabulary	Roots from several languages but often altered heavily	Roots from Romance, Germanic and some Slavic words, usually closer to the original (check)
Peak	Late 1880s	Growing after the 1890s

The First Clubs and a Journal

The first learners. The earliest Esperantists were in the Russian Empire, soon followed by Germany, Sweden, France and elsewhere (check). Many learned from the book in a few weeks and wrote to Zamenhof in the language.
Nuremberg. A club in Nuremberg, founded in 1888, is often given as the first in Germany (check). In 1889 the city produced the first journal, La Esperantisto, edited by a local supporter, Leopold Einstein (check).
The Russian ban. Most of the journal's subscribers were in Russia. When it published a piece by the novelist Leo Tolstoy, the Russian authorities banned its import around 1895, and the paper lost its readers (check). Tolstoy, who supported the language, is part of the story (check).
Translators and writers. Zamenhof translated works such as Hamleto (Shakespeare's Hamlet, 1894), and the Polish engineer Antoni Grabowski (check) is often called the founder of Esperanto poetry; his translations helped to show that the language could carry literature.
The Fundamento. In the 1890s Zamenhof published a textbook of exercises and a dictionary of roots in several languages. In 1905 these, together with the Fundamental Grammar, were collected as the Fundamento de Esperanto (check). They are the official basis of the language.
Symbols. By the early 1900s the movement had a green flag with a white canton and a green star, and a hymn, La Espero (The Hope), written by Zamenhof (check).

Boulogne, 1905

The first Universal Congress

The first Universal Congress of Esperanto was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the French side of the Channel, in August 1905. Roughly 700 people from some twenty countries attended (check). It was the first time many users of the language spoke it aloud to people from other countries.

The Declaration

The congress adopted the Declaration on the Essence of Esperantism (check). In summary: Esperantism is an effort to spread a neutral human language; it is not tied to any political or religious aim; the language belongs to nobody; and the Fundamento is the unchangeable basis.

Giving up authority

Zamenhof used the occasion to say that he was no longer the owner of the language but one of its users (check). By fixing the Fundamento, the movement tried to avoid the fate of Volapük, while leaving room for vocabulary to grow.

The Boulogne decisions explain two features of Esperanto that last to the present: a fixed core of grammar and roots that cannot be changed by one person, and an open vocabulary that can grow by use. They also explain why the movement later refused the reforms proposed by the supporters of Ido (Chapter 4).

A British comparison The British Esperanto Association was founded in 1904 (check), the year before Boulogne, and British delegates travelled to the congress across the Channel. In 1907 the third Universal Congress took place in Cambridge (check), the first of several held in Britain. Edinburgh's turn came in 1926 (Chapter 5, check). British supporters in this period often presented the language as a tool for trade, travel and peace, not as a cultural project, which is a useful contrast with the Polish and Russian origins of the movement.

Check the details Numbers of Volapük and Esperanto learners are partisan and not reliable. Dates of the first clubs and journals vary between sources. The wording and the number of points in the Boulogne Declaration should be read in the original text rather than from a summary. Names are used from published sources only.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Compare Volapük and Esperanto on five points, and say which difference you think mattered most for survival and what evidence you would want.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

Summarise the Declaration of Boulogne in four points, and say what each promises and what it deliberately avoids.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Test the claim "Esperanto survived because it was easier than Volapük" with the evidence this chapter gives, and say what is missing.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Volapük: 1879, Schleyer; rose in the 1880s, declined by the 1890s (check)
First clubs: Nuremberg 1888; journal La Esperantisto 1889 (check)
The ban: Russian authorities and the Tolstoy article, 1890s (check)
Fundamento: the fixed basis of the language, 1905 (check)
Boulogne: first Universal Congress, August 1905, with the Declaration (check)