Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France

C H A P T E R 1

9 C H A P T E R 1 5 Social Images of Deaf People, 1780 to 1880 On divergent paths, the more [hearing and deaf people] advance, the less they understand each other; they will never meet each other and will be more and more estranged the one from the other.1 During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the hearing community formed complex social and cultural images of deaf French people that often tell us more about the concerns of the hearing community rather than what was historically accurate about deaf people. These social images in French society were dynamic, took on a life of their own, and ultimately had a harmful impact on deaf people. During the late eighteenth century, curiosity about difference and charitable care for impoverished deaf people most clearly defined the hearing perspective. Later in the nineteenth century, more disapproving ideas about poverty, anxiety over physical difference, and the preference for spoken language began to influence how hearing people created social images of deaf individuals . Though negative images became more pronounced by the midnineteenth century, it is also evident that the social and cultural images of deaf French people were already harsh before the outbreak of the French Revolution. During the middle to late eighteenth century, hearing society routinely made many pejorative references to deaf people: “il n’est pire sourd [nothing worse than deaf],” “sourd comme une pierre [deaf like a rock],” “une douleur muette [a silent pain],” but despite these mean allusions, deaf people were not viewed in a completely negative way. Though still regarded as savages among normal people, their physical condition coupled with their poverty opened the doors of hospitals to this “unfortunate ” population, where they invariably commingled with the mentally infirm.2 The conventional wisdom was that deaf people were better off in a hospital than on the streets, where poor people would be exposed to all sorts of nefarious activity.3 But hospitals in Paris in the decades before the Revolution were horrendous depots for the sick, mentally ill, and the dispossessed. After the catastrophic fire at the Hôtel-Dieu in December 1772 when several hundred patients died, the elites of Enlightenment society began to ponder the future of the hospital as an institution . The troubles of public health and its social impact were no longer an abstraction for those well-connected Parisians who frequented the salons of the mid- to late-eighteenth century.4 Though the intellectual and social world of these elites and the world of the average deaf Frenchman were distant and largely unconnected in the eighteenth century, there would eventually be some points of intersection. On an abstract level, some Enlightenment elites suggested that deaf people—and their sign language—could lead hearing people to a “universal philosophical language.”5 Philosophes like the Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and Denis Diderot used the study of language to connect the reality of gestures to the eventual development of modern (eighteenth-century) language.6 The observations of these two influential thinkers helped to shape certain images of deaf people that later informed the literate, hearing public. Condillac was interested in the transformation from langage d’action (language of action) to modern, more abstract language. For Condillac, language was a concrete entity born of direct experience in the material world. Human society had developed language in stages, from the gestural to the verbal, all based on concrete, tangible conditions.7 But Condillac’s views about langage d’action changed over a period of some thirty years. At first conceived as a primitive expression of human language, Condillac later concluded that langage d’action was more intricate than he had previously thought. Perhaps Condillac’s association with Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée in the 1770s was in part responsible for this revised theory. By that time, Condillac had attended a number of the abbé’s public demonstrations of his deaf pupils and saw first-hand how gestural language functioned in relationship to written language.8 Diderot argued that the first signs were complex, not merely a simple reflection of human needs. These human gestures had intrinsic 10 Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France power, but eventually a vocal (speech-driven) language replaced these complex gestures with a “rational” language system composed of more “abstract terms.”9 For both Condillac and Diderot, deaf people were surely objects of...