Deaf People, Language, and Emancipation in Modern France, 1789–1914

Following the death in 1789 of Abbé de l'Epée, the first teacher of deaf pupils renowned in France and beyond, revolutionaries committed to founding national institutes for the education of deaf pupils. There was little doubt about their ability to integrate as full citizens and communicate fully in sign language and written French. One hundred years later, deaf writers and journalists were editing journals and penning articles about the impact of politics on the education and social opportunities of deaf people. But in broader contexts, deaf people's capacities were increasingly reframed within newly established, exclusionary, and othering scientific and medical categories. What made such a reversal possible? Deaf People, Language, and Emancipation in Modern France, 1789-1914 investigates how defining deafness was rarely about an auditory variation; teachers, physicians, legal advisors, and governmental representatives understood instead a human variation in the light of a range of norms, expectations, and misconceptions. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary debates about Deaf identity, the book considers how such understandings of deafness developed, and how deaf people variously challenged these fields of knowledge and their purported expertise to redefine and claim equal rights. As a history that makes space for the diversity of deaf and hearing people's aspirations, Sabine Arnaud aims to give space to figures who defy linear visions of history. Much beyond the debates about the teaching of speech or the use of sign language, this book analyzes the broad creation of sign language and fingerspelling systems, deaf people's command of rhetoric and poetics, their mobilization of literary tools, and broad exercise of citizenship. These distinctive developments in the history of deaf people's empowerment challenge and broaden current conceptions of identity politics. Such an historical approach is crucial in order to understand the emergence of a deaf community and to rethink the different and often contradictory readings of deafness in medical or cultural terms that we are faced with to this day.