Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France

Introduction

1 5 Introduction The deaf community is not merely a symbolic community of hearing-impaired people who share similar experiences. It is also created through marriages, friendships, acquaintances, parties, clubs, religious organizations, and published materials. The activities provide the body of the community, whereas the identification and shared experiences provide the soul.1 In 2005, the French government officially recognized French Sign Language as “an entirely separate language” in the context of a larger law that gives equal rights to all disabled people in the nation.2 When I began my historical study of the French deaf community in the 1980s, it was difficult to know whether a law of this type could ever become part of French society. Though it is generally a welcomed turn of events, much in the way that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was for the United States, this new law categorizes deaf people as part of a disabled population and does not address fundamental questions about the preservation of deaf culture and history in France today. On a practical level, the law of 2005 poses a challenge to French deaf people who do not regard themselves as a disabled population and yet want their language to be officially recognized on its own merits, without any connection to spoken and written French. For the French deaf community , language is inextricably tied to deaf culture and group identity.3 Through the efforts of the National Federation of the Deaf of France, deaf community activists have recently developed a social program that includes defense of deaf cultural heritage, the struggle for civil rights, and access to communication in society and the arts through sign language .4 Only by taking a longer view of deaf history can we appreciate that French deaf society has been dealing with these same key issues since the Revolution of 1789. Often when I attend historical meetings or deaf conferences, participants —especially deaf people—ask me why I chose this area of research because I am a hearing person. So let me briefly explain my own “roots” with this project. My interest in the field of deaf history began in the 1980s, when I was working on a study of teacher–training schools for women in France and accidentally discovered documents that described the condition of education for deaf children in the mid-nineteenth century . At that time, I imagined that I would study a few educational questions surrounding deaf schooling, but I soon found that education was only one part of a much larger story about French deaf society. As it happens with so many historians, I was led down a path of historical inquiry that opened more doors than I had first anticipated. The more I began to study the documents, the more I discovered that I was really interested in the history of the French deaf community, its identity, and the way that it had developed sociability among its members.5 I wanted to understand how deaf people in France began to see themselves as their own community. As I wrote this history of the French deaf community, I was also mindful that, as a hearing person, I am an outsider to the contemporary deaf world, whether here in the United States or in France. However, we historians are used to being outsiders. More often than not, the people we study already belong to ages past. We consciously pick up their trail and try to place these individuals in their historical setting so that we may understand their lives, their concerns, and their achievements. As a historian, I have written about the French deaf community with an eye toward discovery, an attention to detail, and, hopefully , a dispassionate view of the larger events that affected deaf society during the nineteenth century. The Disability Model and the Deaf Community One contemporary way to study marginalized groups, such as those who are part of deaf society, is through the perspective of disability history. For many hearing people, it seems commonplace that the deaf are “disabled ,” for they lack the ability to hear and communicate like the hearing majority in any given society. The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) treats deaf Americans as a disabled group, as does the law of 11 2 Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France February 2005 on equal opportunity for the disabled citizens of France...