The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille (review)

In spite of its rather flat title, scholars of the French nineteenth century should approach this book expecting neither a survey beginning in the high middle ages nor complete coverage stretching from the Consulate to the Third Republic. The reader reaches the eighteenth century on p. 55, the Revolution on p. 119, and the mid-nineteenth century. . . barely at all, except insofar as these are the last years of the remarkable Louis Braille (1809–1952), whose contribution to the life of the blind remains unrivaled two centuries after his birth. The work’s chronological center of gravity lies in the years from 1784 to 1830. The author, Zina Weygand, has pulled together considerable evidence of how the blind were treated in social institutions, imagination and thought during the medieval and early modern periods (and also in the popular literature of the early nineteenth century), but her book is above all a social history of an episode of Enlightenment and nineteenth-century modernization, at least partially successful: a story that justifies more than it refutes the claims of modernity to have accomplished something both new and beneficent.

Weygand does a good enough job with both the Enlightenment philosophic problem of the blind person restored to sight and with Diderot’s remarkable Lettre sur les aveugles, but her study really comes alive with the figure of Valentin Haüy, the first systematic teacher of the blind and the founder, in 1784, of the Paris Institution des enfans aveugles. Haüy’s project and his establishment, begun under the auspices of the Société philanthropique, soon came under the control of the successive Revolutionary governments, having been effectively nationalized. The intertwined fates of Haüy’s school and of the (formerly Royal) Hospice of the Quinze-Vingts make for a fascinating (though often sinister) institutional history that forms the rewarding heart of Weygand’s book.

Although the successive regimes that followed the Revolution often tended toward austere and quasi-exploitative policies toward the state’s blind wards, the institutions charged with their care and instruction did not fare as badly as might be imagined. Much of the credit for this belonged to two unlikely and unsung administrators. In 1801, Paul Seignette, a civil servant with no particularly relevant prior experience, took up the work of educating the jeunes aveugles in the darkest days of their institution, when it had been forcibly joined to the Quinze-Vingts, its founder purged, its goal of empowerment through instruction replaced by a mandate to make the blind productive through mindless labor. Over the next five years, this agent général of the Quinze- Vingts managed to revive Haüy’s institution, cannily taking advantage of the economic failure of its textile and spinning manufactures to restore the centrality of its educational mission. Alexandre-René Pignier, a member of the Congrégation, curbed the authoritarian excesses of the early Restoration and expanded educational programs following his appointment as director of the Institution Royale des jeunes aveugles in 1821, a post he would hold until 1840.

Despite the sinister side to many aspects of the modern institutionalization of the blind, despite the frequent betrayals of the respective ideals inherent in Christian charity, Enlightened rationalism, and Revolutionary fraternity, Weygand’s book ends with the story of a genuine modern triumph, one in which Pignier played a key part. It was early in the Restoration that a retired artillery officer, Charles Barbier, proposed that a system of encoding speech via raised dots could be useful to the blind. Pignier’s sinister predecessor as director of the Royal Institution wanted nothing to do with Barbier’s method, but the new man welcomed the officer in early 1821, within months of taking over. One of the pupils, Louis Braille, then twelve years old, immediately began to work on improvements and refinements that would make Barbier’s “night...