Louis Bastien (Esperantist)

Louis Marie Jules Charles Bastien (December 21, 1869 in Obernai, near Strasbourg – April 10, 1961) was a French Esperantist and a quartermaster in the French army. In 1899 he married Marguerite Pfulb (1879–1941); the couple had three daughters and two sons. In school he learned mathematics, classical French literature, Latin and Greek and learned to compose Latin verse. After a year of preparatory studies at in Versailles he entered l'Ecole Polytechnique in 1887 at the age of 17. Not having the maturity of his older classmates, he did not excel in his studies and, on graduation in 1889, had to content himself with a military career.

Commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in the French Army, Bastien studied military engineering at Fontainebleau and was posted with the at Arras (Pas-de-Calais).

In 1895 the government of France sent him on a punitive campaign to Madagascar. Queen Ranavalona III had repudiated the Lambert Charter, an 1855 document which gave a French family the right to exploit Malagasy resources and which, after Britain renounced colonial claims to the island, effectively made the island a French protectorate. Bastien was responsible for telegraphic liaison, using Claude Chappe's optical telegraphic system, in which pairs of trained semaphore operators would relay messages from one tower to the next. The Chappe towers were spaced about 14 km apart between Mahajanga, where the troops had disembarked, and the position of the troops advancing on Antananarivo, the capital. Alone in a horse-drawn two-wheeled light cart, Bastien would survey the line of signal towers in the low and marshy areas between Mahajanga and Maevatanana, then follow the high plateaus along the Betsiboka River to Antananarivo.

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