Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France between the Wars

5. The International Language of the Future

In A Short History of the International Language Movement, published in 1922, Professor Albert Léon Guérard, a French expatriate living in the United States, traced the development and use of a variety of national and so-called artificial languages, languages invented to facilitate human communication and to encourage peaceful cooperation between different nations and cultures.1 Guérard’s history proceeded from an analysis of linguistic traditions and movements in the past to the projection of a world to come. Entitled, “Anticipations,” the final chapter of A Short History began: “Let us imagine, then, that the...League of Nations, acting upon the report of a competent committee, has formally adopted a scheme which, for the sake of neutrality, we shall call Cosmoglotta. What will happen?”2 Guérard imagined a not-so-distant future in which ‘“Cosmoglotta” would gain equal footing with the two, three, or four languages officially used by the League of Nations.3 According to Guérard, Cosmoglotta would not be employed at either the local or the national level. Reserved for international relations and exchanges, it would become a kind of “Latin of democracy,” facilitating European unity in particular.4 While battles still in recent memory in 1922 had divided Europe in a number of ways, Cosmoglotta could help to relieve international tensions by facilitating clearer communication in all domains. Like the territorial boundaries that could seem less and less relevant in an age of advanced military technology, so too would political, cultural, and linguistic borders gradually give way to more openness and exchange between different nations. In terms of language, C H A P T E R 5 The International Language of the Future 136 F u t u r e t e n s e Guérard saw this community extending outside the European continent, predicting, “After a few years, it is probable that all business would be conducted exclusively in Cosmoglotta” eventually bringing about an “emancipation from Babelism.”5 At the same time, Guérard wondered about the impact of Cosmoglotta’s reach on national languages, literatures, and cultures: Will the day ever come when Cosmoglotta is no longer an auxiliary, but a truly universal language? Will our existing tongues gradually be reduced to the position of home dialects...still the vehicles of local literature, but hopelessly outdistanced in the race by the one great instrument of government, science, commerce? Will the leveling influences of modern civilization gradually conquer [the] last strongholds until the languages of Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Victor Hugo, fade into classic unreality and popular oblivion, like the speech of Homer and Virgil?6 While Guérard predicted “even a Cosmoglottic literature will be developed ,” his answer to this series of questions was a resounding “no.” As far as he was concerned, “the idea of a Universal Empire, and even of a Universal Republic” had long since been abandoned. In Guérard’s imagined future, each inhabitant of the world would have “two fatherlands, the country of his allegiance and the common home of the race.” Each world citizen would be fluent in both “his mother tongue and the common, neutral medium of all.” Cosmoglotta would help to create, “a universal federation wherein no originality would be stifled, but all would be freely and peaceably harmonized through justice and love.”7 Guérard insisted that A Short History’s concluding thoughts on the future “need[ed] no apology,” given that they were based on reasonable extrapolation from experience. “Prophecy is the sober trade of the promoter,” he claimed, calling on his reader to join him in the kind of anticipation he perceived as vital to human progress. In his words, “Lesseps would not have dug the Suez Canal if he had not expected that boats would use it, nor Zamenhof devised Esperanto if his eyes had been obstinately turned backwards.”8 Here, Guérard referred to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who played a key role in the building of the Suez Canal, and Ludovic Zamenhof, the Polish physician who had, in the nineteenth century, developed Esperanto, the most widely known of the invented languages Guérard discussed in the pages of A Short History.9 t h e I n t e r n at I o n a l l a n g u a g e o F t h e F u t u r e 137 Despite the fact that...