The perils of assimilation in modern France: the deaf community, social status, and educational opportunity, 1815-1870.

"The deaf and others who are disabled serve as a foil for the nondisabled in society. By portraying the disabled as different, odd, or not quite normal and by routinely putting them in an inferior position, the nondisabled assert their moral superiority. The nondisabled also expect the disabled to agree. They expect the disabled to mourn their losses ... If the disabled do not mourn their losses, then they threaten the security and superiority of the nondisabled ..."

Paul Higgins, Outsiders in a Hearing World.(1)

In 1990, the United States Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act which, for the first time, affirmed the right of all Americans, regardless of their physical status, to equal access in employment, education, and leisure activities. Ideally, this legislation strives for an integrated national community with the benevolent purpose to end discrimination against "disabled" people. From the perspective of the nondisabled community, this new legal framework is the outcome of a progressive and decent society which wants to assimilate its former "outsider groups." For the American deaf community, however, this milestone legislation poses some special problems as the deaf seek to define their minority culture in the midst of the majority, hearing community. The history of the deaf community both in the United States and Europe has revolved around "the preservation of [sign] language, policies for educating deaf children, and maintenance of their social and political organizations."(2) Today just as over a century ago, these goals have been difficult to explain to a hearing community which is predominantly focused on national integration. The history of the deaf community often shows us that there are genuine perils for "outsiders" like the deaf who have little control over their own place in society.(3)

With the advent of modern-day society in the early nineteenth century, many outsider groups like the deaf, the aged, and the indigent found that their social status and economic condition depended on the attitudes and policies of those "knowledgeable leaders" in their society who defined the terms of social integration. In modern French history, the sometimes violent conflict between "outsiders" and "insiders" has long fascinated historians. One classic study which inspired this avenue of research was Louis Chevalier's Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes. Chevalier argued that the society and culture of the lower classes threatened the "civilized" middle class in France during the 1830s.(4) These threats engendered more social control from the center to "contain" those people who were different. Recently, John Merriman and Rachel Fuchs have more closely examined the lives of people who functioned at the margins of society.(5) These studies provide us with some useful information about outsider groups and allow us to interpret, in a broader historical context, those events that affected the French deaf community in the early nineteenth century.(6) Only a few researchers, particularly Harlan Lane and Christian Cuxac, have focused on the deaf and the circumstances that surround their interaction with the dominant, hearing population.(7) While Lane's study captures the frustrations and challenges of the deaf community in France and America during the first half of the nineteenth century, his "story" permits fictional description if the historical evidence is wanting. Cuxac is more conventional in his study of deaf education, but he treats many of the language issues in the first half of the nineteenth century in a social and political vacuum.

In the following discussion, I will build upon the most instructive elements of Lane and Cuxac's work in order to evaluate some of the social, economic, and educational issues facing the deaf in France between 1815 and 1870. First, I will briefly consider the role of the Deaf Institute in Paris as a state-sponsored institution serving both social welfare and educational purposes. Second, I will introduce two important contributors to deaf education, Louis-Pierre Paulmier and Roch-Ambroise Bebian, who as professors at the Deaf Institute in the early 1820s advocated the use of sign language even as hearing people remained skeptical about its application. Third, I will evaluate some educational reforms proposed during the Second Empire that would have integrated deaf children into the public primary schools. By connecting these events in mid-nineteenth century France, we will discover how the majority, hearing community perceived the deaf, and what measures they were willing to adopt to assimilate deaf people into French society. We will also discover what role, if any, deaf people themselves played in determining their place in the national community. Although I have focused in this particular study on several notable leaders for the deaf community, it is my larger purpose to encourage more historical debate about the emergence of the deaf as their own cultural group during the course of the nineteenth century.(8)

To a great extent, the social image of the deaf in nineteenth-century France was essentially negative and reflected the stereotype that the hearing community had developed over generations. Perceived as naive, childlike, and not competent enough to make economic choices, hearing people maintained that the deaf required special protection and continual guidance if they were ever to become productive members of society.(9) Hubert-Valleroux, a medical doctor, writing on social assistance to the poor and disadvantaged at mid-nineteenth century, illustrated this typical attitude. He classified the deaf population with what contemporaries called "idiots," and seemed determined that they lead pastoral lives away from the confusion of urban areas. While Hubert-Valleroux's goal was the assimilation of the deaf population into the majority, hearing population, he was also concerned that the corruptions of modern-day society would only further debilitate the deaf.(10) Thus, for Hubert-Valleroux and other professionals of the mid-nineteenth century, deaf people were not truly capable of managing their own affairs because they were already "damaged."

We can trace middle-class concern about the social and economic condition of deaf people and their social assimilation with the hearing community to at least the Revolution of 1789. From the beginning of the revolutionary period, legislators realized that more education, especially in vocational skills, might be one concrete way to alleviate the cycle of poverty that seemed to strangle so many deaf Frenchmen. Revolutionaries seemed to be consciously carrying out the work of Abbe de l'Epee who had tutored deaf children in the years before the Revolution and had lobbied the royal government for a stipend to create a special school for the deaf.(11) Thus, the concept of a National Institute for the Deaf, rather than representing a break with the pre-revolutionary period, actually built on the work of de l'Epee whom the deaf, even today, consider to be their educational mentor.

In July 1791, the National Assembly formally ordered the creation of an institution for the deaf in Paris that would be funded by the national government and supervised by the city of Paris.(12) By the late 1790s, France had two national schools for the deaf, one in Paris and another in Bordeaux. The government also created state-sponsored scholarships, sixty at each school, so that indigent deaf children from throughout the country might have the opportunity for some schooling.(13) While this effort to provide the deaf with rudimentary social benefits only touched the lives of a few hundred deaf children, the principles of social welfare and public education were well-ingrained in French public policy toward the deaf by the end of the Napoleonic period.(14)

Certainly in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Deaf Institute in Paris became the symbol of the social welfare policy and educational goals that concerned both the deaf and hearing communities. Supervised through the Ministry of Interior under the division of social welfare, this institution accepted only ninety non-paying students each year (out of one hundred sixty students) during the monarchy of Charles X.(15) Because students remained inside the institute for about five years, there were usually no more than eighteen available scholarships for new students during each academic year. This small allotment meant that there would be stiff competition among the lower class for what amounted to a handful of openings for the entire nation.

Through a complicated process, parents had to prove their financial need and attest that their child was in good health and actually deaf. For example, Josephine Collot, the wife of a day-laborer living in Versailles, contacted the Minister of Interior in 1820 requesting that her two oldest children, Fanie and Edme, be allowed to enter the Deaf Institute. The Collots had four children and the financial burden of two deaf girls was clearly weighing upon them.(16) There was, however, a small window of opportunity for admission. Children could not be less than twelve years of age or older than sixteen.(17) Fanie Collot was twelve years old in 1820, but her sister, Edme was only nine.

While Madame Collot was initially unsuccessful in her request, by 1823, her chances seemed better. By this time, Josephine Collot was a widow and had five dependent children, three of whom were deaf. Her own health was apparently poor and authorities recognized that she might soon leave five orphaned children in the charge of the town of Versailles. The prefect of the department of the Seine-et-Oise seemed determined to place at least a few of her children in institutions where the national government would absorb the costs of public assistance.(18) In September 1823, Fanie Collot finally made the approved list to enter the Deaf Institute in Paris; she was fifteen years old.

The case of the Collot family represented a larger social reality than the problems of just one laboring family trying to cope with financial hardship. The family economy of the early nineteenth century was not prepared to deal with children who could not contribute wages to the subsistence of the family unit. Parents needed to have their children gainfully employed before the age of twelve, even if only in menial chores.(19) The example of the Collot family demonstrates that the Deaf Institute was one of the few avenues of social assistance available to lower class families with deaf children. From the perspective of local politicians, the Deaf Institute represented one concrete way to decrease their welfare liability. They seemed anxious to send deaf children to Paris in order to transfer that burden to the national government.

Once enrolled at the Deaf Institute, deaf children followed an academic program that was very similar to the requirements set for the average French primary school in the first half of the nineteenth century.(20) The first priority was to give children sufficient religious training and then teachers focused on reading, writing, counting, design, and vocational training. In the 1820s and 1830s, sign language was the key vernacular that could deliver most instruction to deaf students. In this period, there were three regular instructors, at the institution; the school also had three repetiteurs or special tutors who were deaf.(21) One instructor at the Paris Deaf Institute during the early Restoration was Louis-Pierre Paulmier who published a book entitled Le Sourd-muet (The Deaf Man).(22) Paulmier's study was rich in commentary about deaf language and cultural identity at a time when few educated people understood that the deaf had a veritable language of their own. Another teacher at the Deaf Institute and a contemporary of Paulmier's was Roch-Ambroise Bebian. Even as he was part of the hearing community, Bebian fought tirelessly for deaf education and recognition of sign language for its own pedagogical and cultural merits. A young tutor at the Deaf Institute and student of Bebian's, Ferdinand Berthier, would later become a full-fledged professor at the Deaf Institute. Berthier's life's work during the middle of the nineteenth century would entail the organization of the French deaf as their own cultural group. Each of these men in his own way provided leadership to the deaf community in the early and mid-nineteenth century. We shall now look more closely at the ideas of Paulmier and Bebian, men who both anticipated the opportunities and perils awaiting the French deaf at mid-nineteenth century.

Paulmier's views in Le Sourd-muet give us the opportunity to look at the world from the perspective of a man who had built a teaching career for himself in the early nineteenth century when only a few people understood that the deaf could improve their station in life. It is clear that Paulmier wanted professionals involved with educating the deaf to settle on one effective method that would most help deaf children acquire knowledge. For Paulmier, sign language provided the best method when compared to only written language or relying on the spoken word. He traced the origin of sign language to childhood when sign was a totally natural development in the communication patterns between all people, both hearing and deaf. After one entered adulthood, Paulmier argued that sign language was still the universal language among all people.(23) Paulmier's claim may not seem so outlandish when we recall an awkward moment trying to make ourselves understood in a foreign country, our hands animated and our body language the best means of conveying our basic needs. Even more important for Paulmier, sign language acted as the natural bridge between the hearing and deaf communities because each group had a common tendency to use sign intuitively and spontaneously.

Because Paulmier knew that his ideas about the validity of sign language were highly controversial, he provided an intellectual argument about the merits of sign which he hoped would satisfy the skeptical hearing community. In his study, Paulmier continually reminded his readers that sign language was far more complex than appeared at first glance. "With these signs," wrote Paulmier, "the deaf have the advantage of speaking with objects and especially to recollect at the same time the concepts that develop their intelligence."(24) While sign expressed concrete objects, it also had an abstract dimension which Paulmier called "recollection of ideas" (rappel d'idees). This part of sign language would be developed between teacher and student to explore and analyze concepts.(25) Without schooling, this aspect of sign would remain implicit rather than explicit. Paulmier believed that education in abstract ideas brought the student into "civilized" discourse because it provided him with linguistic tools to analyze the larger world in a more intricate way.

Paulmier's call for "civilized" discourse was remarkably similar to the views of other educators of the early nineteenth century. The prevailing opinion that children would behave like savages until they learned how to use words and apply the concepts implicit in the words to their behavior in the modern world was not very different from Paulmier's argument.(26) In the hearing community, children were socialized through the written and spoken word; in the deaf community, according to Paulmier, children should be socialized predominantly through the signed word and concept. While sign language was the basis of all learning for deaf people, Paulmier also concluded that there must be a hierarchy of methodology for any schooling to succeed. The teacher of deaf children should begin all instruction with sign followed by writing exercises and the manual alphabet. Instruction in spoken language - articulated speech - should only follow if there was sufficient time.(27)

Clearly, Paulmier felt that sign language coupled with writing exercises would be more useful to deaf students than another approach. As an experienced professor, Paulmier would surely have been more comfortable with these teaching methods, but he also was well-placed to evaluate the usefulness of the spoken word for deaf children. To make his point more forcefully, Paulmier told the story of a distinguished musician in Paris who decided to try an experiment with a deaf woman. For six months he gave her music lessons and then presented her in a recital before a large audience. The deaf woman did not learn to play music with any feeling and the musician did not measurably improve his reputation. Paulmier concluded that to teach a deaf person how to play music was analogous to teaching spoken language.(28) "The use that the deaf person makes of articulated speech," according to Paulmier, "is to make himself heard in a very imperfect way and to make himself understood by others even more imperfectly."(29) In sum, Paulmier was not convinced that trying to educate deaf people on the hearing model would work to the benefit of the deaf or the hearing community.

Paulmier's colleague at the Deaf Institute in Paris, Roch-Ambroise Bebian, would also be a proponent, if not an inventor, of French sign language. Although technically part of the hearing world, Bebian strongly identified with the deaf minority culture in France. He spent a good deal of his life writing books about sign language, teaching deaf children sign, and explaining the merits of deaf language to the hearing community. After his exclusion from the Deaf Institute in Paris (following pedagogical conflicts with his godfather, Abbe Sicard), Bebian created his own schools for the deaf in Paris and finally in his native Guadaloupe.(30) In 1817, Bebian published a study entitled Essai sur les sourds-muets et sur le langage naturel, ou introduction a une classification naturelle des idles avecs leurs signes propres (Essay on the deaf and on natural language, or introduction to a natural classification of ideas with their proper signs). Two decades later, his former student, Ferdinand Berthier, would credit Bebian with "having revealed so perfect[ly] ... the nature of the spirit and heart of the deaf [person]."(31)

What had Bebian done pedagogically and socially for the deaf community that won him such high praise? Bebian argued that sign was a complete language which would give deaf people full command of ideas and could be readily transmitted by the "educated" deaf to other deaf people.(32) From the deaf perspective, Bebian's viewpoint was a call for deaf autonomy in a hearing world that scarcely recognized the validity of sign language. While Bebian's and Paulmier's ideas were complementary, it was clear that Bebian developed a systematic method by which one could study sign language. Unlike Abbe Sicard, his superior at the Deaf Institute, Bebian believed that sign language was not a derivative of spoken or written language, but rather that sign had its own valid structure which conveyed both practical and abstract ideas to deaf people.(33) Bebian's version of a sign language dictionary presented the many different signs available in the deaf language along with the parts the human body that were involved in the gestures. "Every sign," wrote Bebian, "is made up of one or more gestures; the gesture is a movement of a part or whole of the body. So to write the sign, all we need to do is to indicate the gesticulating organ and its movement."(34) Although this process involved many, many signs, Bebian remained undaunted. When he thought of all the combined vocabularies of all the spoken languages in the world, he concluded that "the multiplicity of signs is less intimidating."(35)

Bebian's view of spoken language was quite similar to that of his deaf colleague, Paulmier. He pointed out that "interjections," the earliest form of spoken language, originally conveyed no conceptual meaning if not accompanied by hand or facial movements.(36) Thus, Bebian philosophically dissociated spoken language from the production of ideas. As human society evolved, Bebian noted that speech actually separated different hearing communities because humans no longer shared that common natural language based on sign. If we follow Bebian's argument to its logical conclusion, he discovered that verbal language could actually be inimical to its true objective, communication.(37)

For the deaf community even in the Restoration period, the inclusion or exclusion of spoken language in schools for the deaf was a crucial issue and one that did not escape the attention of Bebian. By the end of his teaching career in the 1830s, Bebian would strongly argue that the use of verbal language in deaf education was only a pretext for the exclusion of deaf professors from teaching deaf students.(38) Although Bebian had a vested interest in promoting sign, the crop of successful, deaf professors that he produced under his system was undeniably impressive. Bebian's students proved that one could simultaneously have excellent command of sign and written French.(39) In fact, it was through the written word that Bebian envisioned cooperation between the deaf and hearing communities. Bebian believed that "it is necessary to place [the deaf] in contact with the people among whom they are destined to spend their lives.... [Deaf people] must learn the language of their country. Here is the goal toward which the teacher [of the deaf] must direct all his thoughts, all of his effort."(40) In Bebian's lifetime, he anticipated the perils of assimilation for the deaf into the majority, hearing community, but if the "national language of France" remained written French, Bebian suggested that both communities would be better served.

When Bebian left Paris in 1834 for his native Guadaloupe, Louis-Philippe's regime was only beginning its great experiment in the dissemination of the "national language" through greater state involvement in public primary schooling. The government in Paris was taking a more assertive role in educating the lower classes and as a result, demanded better accountability at the local level for public primary instruction. How would this more activist role for the state affect education and social opportunity for the deaf? From all accounts, the Orleanist monarchy would have only a marginal impact on deaf education and the socio-economic status of the deaf. Ever since the revolutionary period, the national government had housed deaf education under the Ministry of the Interior, combining the two functions of social welfare and education. Government leaders had routinely viewed the deaf as wards of the state who were in need of protection and control. Therefore, the minimal oversight of deaf education during the Orleanist monarchy came from the Interior Ministry that monitored all so-called "deviant groups," which included the deaf. In the 1840s, France had about twenty schools for the deaf or about one school for every four or five departments. Perhaps six hundred deaf students out of a potential forty-eight hundred attended these different schools throughout the country.(41) Except for the institutions in Paris and Bordeaux, the other schools were all started at the local level and were often dependent on private donations for their basic needs. Because no national regulations unified these schools for the deaf, curriculum and teaching methodology could vary dramatically from school to school. There was, however, increasing pressure to dismiss sign language at the Deaf Institute in Paris in favor of greater emphasis on written and spoken French. Deaf professors at the Paris Institute, in particular Berthier and Lenoir, held their own against an administration bent on imitating the "German method" of articulated speech.(42)

Meanwhile in 1841, Louis-Philippe's government initiated the first ever national inquiry into deaf education which dovetailed with national interests evident only a decade earlier. The government was on record through the Guizot Law of 1833 and the creation of a corps of inspectors for the public primary schools that it wanted a larger role in the schooling of French children. The primary school inspectors, sent on mission to all comers of France, became the eyes and ears of the national government.(43) Yet in the case of deaf education, the government could not rely on its established corps of inspectors. Because the Ministry of Public Instruction had no jurisdiction over schools for the deaf, the government relied on information from prefects of departments or rectors of the different regional academies. Education officials had numerous questions that they wanted answered: how many students attended these schools for the deaf; who paid students' expenses; how long did students stay at school; what kind of methodology did teachers use in the classroom; and in the opinion of the prefect, what was the conduct, morality, and aptitude of those men and women who directed these schools for the deaf?(44)

While it is difficult to generalize about the condition of deaf education at mid-nineteenth century, the example of the region around Clermont-Ferrand, in central France, illustrates the type of schooling available to deaf children in a rural area.(45) With six schools among four departments, we know that private initiative created whatever schools for deaf children that we find in this period. To a great extent, members of religious orders were the ones who volunteered their time, energy, and whatever teaching skills they had to care for deaf children. Their mission was both educational and charitable, much as the century before when priests and nuns, through the support of their religious orders, had created their own schools. In the 1840s and 1850s, nuns and priests also relied on the generosity of local and departmental governments to make up any shortfall in their funding. For local authorities, these small stipends to schools for the deaf were a good investment. These children were not charges of the state and even had the prospect of earning their own living after some vocational training at school.

In the department of the Haute-Loire, the Brothers of Christian Instruction taught thirty-three deaf students in a boarding school environment. Except for two full-paying students, the rest received some amount of financial aid. Both local and departmental governments contributed a total sum of 2,800 francs each year to support the school. According to visitors to the school, children spent most of the day in vocational training in preparation to become farmers and workers. This kind of practical and social instruction was intended to help deaf children fit into the larger, hearing community and hopefully would make them responsible wage earners. The second school for the deaf in the Haute-Loire, directed by the Sisters of the Presentation, was composed of twenty-seven deaf girls. Except for one child whose family paid room and board, the nuns kept the rest of the girls free of charge as boarders. The town of Le Puy gave the nuns 400 francs a year for their school and 1,600 francs came from the department. In order to supplement these funds, the nuns sold the needlework of the students to the Le Puy community. Needlework was a typical "female" handicraft at mid-nineteenth century and supposedly allowed deaf women, like other lower class women, to support themselves later in life regardless of their marital status.(46)

In the department of the Puy-de-Dome, we learn more about local government support for deaf education and the expectations that this funding created among officials.(47) In the 1840s, the sisters of the Good Shepherd maintained a boarding school which also accepted a certain number of deaf girls. The department of the Puy-de-Dome provided seven scholarships amounting to 2,100 francs and the town of Nievre contributed 800 francs for two scholarships. The nuns kept three of the fourteen deaf girls at their school free of charge because their families were too poor to pay even a small sum. The school's curriculum does not seem measurably different from other primary schools of the period or for that matter, from the curriculum at the Paris Deaf Institute. Young girls learned their catechism, reading, writing, and a little arithmetic. Since reports do not indicate whether or not the nuns used sign language in their instructional method, we can suppose that teachers habitually relied on repetition, memory, and the written word as the preferred instructional method much as they would at any other primary school. Officials who visited the institution in 1847 criticized the nuns for their deficiency in vocational training. Without practical skills, the officials pointed out, these young deaf girls would remain financially dependent on their families, who could little afford to support them, or even worse, require public assistance. The nuns contended that workshops were a fine idea if only the department would subsidize the expense by doubling its stipend per student from 300 to 600 francs a year! In fact, the department or local authorities had little clout in any negotiation with a religious order in the 1840s. They understood that the nuns who cared for deaf girls in a provincial town like Nievre were providing a worthwhile community service at a reasonable cost.

In addition to its support for the sisters of the Good Shepherd, the department of the Puy-de-Dome also gave 3,000 francs a year to the Abbe Dessaigne who ran a co-educational boarding school for deaf children at Chaument. In the 1830s, Dessaigne had studied at the Deaf Institute in Paris, obtaining a special diploma in 1837, and presumably was better prepared than most instructors of the day to teach deaf children. It is likely that he knew some sign language, but visitors to his school in the 1840s did not particularly take note of his level of proficiency in sign nor his teaching methodology. Dessaigne's school housed eighteen boys and twelve girls, only three of whom paid room and board. Even with support from the department, this priest must have maintained his school on a "shoestring." Officials who visited Abbe Dessaigne's school were impressed with the balance between academic subjects and vocational training. In fact, they paid him the highest compliment that could be bestowed on a teacher of the deaf at mid-century: his students could "immediately earn their bread" when they left the Chaument school.(48) Certainly, trade skills for adulthood were uppermost on the minds of the abbe and officials alike.

What larger conclusions can we draw about these few schools for the deaf in the Clermont region? At mid-century, the lack of a systematic organization of schools for deaf children did not particularly trouble local officials. There was little distinction to be gained in these modest boarding schools, and there was no reason to doubt the faithful duty of the priests and nuns toward their deaf pupils. Local authorities were content to give the responsibility of educating deaf children to different religious orders because their goals and values were quite similar to the Church's view of the poor and disabled. Deaf children would be cared for in a disciplined environment that taught the values of decent labor and self-maintenance. The Church had lifted a genuine burden from the shoulders of poor parents and local officials alike.

These modest standards for deaf education, which we noted for the Clermont region, gradually came under review during the 1850s and 1860s even while government leaders did not measurably alter their perception of social status and economic opportunity for the deaf. With more than twenty thousand deaf people in the country and almost fifty institutions for schooling deaf children in cities like Paris, Bordeaux, Chambery, Nancy, Lyon, Toulouse, and Poitiers, a debate ensued over whether or not deaf children should be integrated with hearing children in primary schooling.(49) Today we would call this concept "mainstreaming" children with disabilities and it is still as controversial at the end of the twentieth century as it was for the policy-makers of the nineteenth century. On one level, this discussion dealt with the quality of education for the deaf, and seemed sincere enough. Yet on another level, the ongoing issue of social welfare and the financial burden that hearing people often associated with the deaf community was never far from the surface. Probably some hearing people subscribed to the view that "by improving the lot in life of the poor, [we] give more security to the rich, more value to their property; [we] increase the strength of the social structure."(50) Others probably identified with the philanthropic goals of the nuns and priests in the Church orders. While their goals were more altruistic, they could scarcely jettison the stereotype of the naive and vulnerable deaf child who required constant protection. Both groups, however, did share one common opinion: neither was particularly interested in communicating with the deaf community about their educational goals and plans for economic improvement.

And yet the deaf community was reaching out to the hearing community in more and more direct ways ever since the monarchy of Louis-Philippe. One of Bebian's students, Ferdinand Berthier, became a noted spokesman for the deaf community in the 1830s when he initiated annual banquets to celebrate the birthday of Abbe de l'Epee.(51) Even more important for the recognition of the deaf community was Berthier's continual production of literary and scholarly publications. These works preserved deaf history for posterity and informed the hearing community about what values deaf people held dear in their lives.(52) In the 1840s, Berthier was a strong advocate for sign language and he would remain so until his death in 1886. It appears that Berthier defended sign language, not because it was most congenial to his own deafness, but because he had "reasoned" its value through years of studying its conceptual foundation. Berthier knew that there would be a fight over sign language which would pit academicians from different countries against the deaf. Deaf people would have to fight to prove that their language embraced abstract concepts as well as concrete objects.(53) Frustrated by stereotypes of the deaf in the majority, hearing community, Berthier pinpointed discrimination against the deaf as a function of the spoken word. Hearing people fundamentally did not believe that deaf people could develop their intellectual ability without verbal language.(54) For one who made a professional life for himself at the Paris Deaf Institute working with "abstract ideas," this cloud of discrimination no doubt was the ultimate challenge for Berthier. It was only logical for him to defend deaf rights and promote their dignity by creating the Societe Centrale des sourds-muets in 1838.(55) With the advent of Napoleon III's regime in the 1850s, Berthier would have to deal with new strategies from the hearing community which would assimilate deaf children into public primary schools. Some of these "new ideas" came from Berthier's colleague at the Deaf Institute, Alexandre Blanchet.

It is apparent that the debate about mainstreaming deaf children into public primary schools grew more intense during the 1850s when the state-appointed medical doctor for the Paris Deaf Institute, Alexandre Blanchet, published a book on this very topic. By 1858, Blanchet's Moyens de generaliser l'education des sourds-muets dans les ecoles primaires (Ways of spreading the education of the deaf and dumb in primary schools) was already in its fifth edition. From the start, Dr. Blanchet reminded his readers that the deaf become "beggars from their childhood" and were largely under the care of their families or of the state. In these observations, we find no new thinking about the socio-economic plight of the deaf. Indeed, Blanchet was consistent with other writers earlier in the century and the public's perception of the deaf as basically unable to care for themselves. Blanchet was also comfortable with the bleak psychological-social portrait of the deaf as "less than children" who resembled hearing people only as "the inferior sides of our nature." Despite these kinds of stereotypical remarks about the innate nature of deaf people, Blanchet remained the optimist, believing that deaf people were "capable of learning, of loving, of becoming useful." In what might be perceived as a bold assertion for the time period, he blamed the hearing community for the exact opposite result, that deaf people were more likely "ignorant, useless, and sometimes dangerous" in mid-nineteenth century France.(56)

As chief doctor at the Deaf Institute in Paris, Blanchet had no doubt some opportunity to reflect on the social problems that he personally witnessed. First, Blanchet argued that there was a need to reach out to more deaf children in France and give them an opportunity for some schooling. By his estimate, there were approximately six thousand deaf children of primary school age in the entire country. Of this population, only two thousand five hundred were receiving any education. If Blanchet's statistics are correct, then there was about a fourfold increase in the number of deaf children receiving some education in the 1850s compared to twenty years earlier. Second, Blanchet did not believe that the government had an accurate idea about the costs involved in the schooling of deaf children. While the average "recorded" cost to the public treasury through scholarships was about two hundred francs per child, Blanchet presumed that the real cost was about four hundred to five hundred francs for each scholarship holder.(57) Because religious orders ran so many of the schools for the deaf in this period, Blanchet may be correct that Church orders routinely absorbed expenses which the government did not calculate as part of the true cost of education for the deaf.

Doctor Blanchet's solution to the dual problem of accessible schooling and reasonably priced education for deaf children was through more effective mainstreaming of deaf children in public primary schools. Children who came from rural France would not have to be displaced to attend school in larger towns, but rather would be able to have easy access to the public school in their own locale. Blanchet concluded that there would be two immediate benefits from this strategy. First, hearing and deaf children would enjoy better communication because they would be routinely integrated at school. No doubt this arrangement for "mainstreaming" conformed to Blanchet's larger goal of social assimilation for the deaf. Second, educators would direct deaf children toward agricultural labor. By transferring deaf children to urban areas for special schooling, policy-makers were exposing them to needless temptations and even encouraging ambitions that might never be fulfilled.(58)

Although Blanchet praised teachers of deaf children for devoting their entire careers to special education, he refused to admit that "the teaching of deaf [children] is less accessible or much more difficult than teaching hearing [children]."(59) Blanchet used his own experience over the years with deaf children to support this viewpoint. In the 1840s, he opened his first school for the deaf in Paris and through the 1850s, was committed to curing, if possible, these deaf children.(60) If the cure proved impossible, Blanchet then turned to articulated speech as the best way to guarantee social assimilation to these children.(61) The goal of teaching deaf children to speak, according to Blanchet, was totally feasible within the system of public primary schools, but he did not give any idea about how primary school teachers would structure their time and balance the needs of hearing and deaf students. Doctor Blancher did favor more government intervention in the schooling of deaf children with regular visits from government officials who would monitor this "mainstreaming system." Apparently to motivate teachers and ensure that deaf children were not left behind in the classroom, Blanchet recommended an incentive system whereby departments would reward their teachers with a yearly bonus depending on the degree of progress among their deaf students.(62)

Doctor Blanchet's proposals for deaf education coincided with a period of change in the ministry of public instruction during the second decade of Napoleon III's Empire. In 1863, the emperor appointed Victor Duruy to become his new education minister. Duruy's tenure in this office would mark a new era in public school policy.(63) Although France already had a functional system of public primary schools, Duruy wanted to expand the system, reaching out to every village in the country, and offer young girls the same opportunity for schooling as boys. In order to achieve this goal, Duruy knew that state-sponsored schools would have to provide as much economic assistance as did the Church-sponsored primary schools. Frenchmen had long associated the Catholic Church with free schooling in many villages where the Church-sponsored school was the only hope of poor children to glean the basics of reading and writing.(64) The appeal of the Church-sponsored primary school was also evident when we consider the socio-economic condition of the deaf. We have already seen that different religious orders voluntarily committed themselves to educating deaf children and received only modest financial support from department or national officials. Since the Ministry of Interior was responsible for loosely supervising schools for the deaf in the 1860s, Duruy could not yet make a case for their inclusion in his proposed education reform.

Although technically outside his purview, Victor Duruy formed a special commission in 1863 to study the question of deaf education. Blanchet's proposal to consider the "mainstreaming" of deaf children into the public primary schools of the country was now formally on the table. Of the eight members assigned to the commission, four were from the Ministry of Public Instruction and thus, directly accountable to Victor Duruy. Two members were affiliated with deaf institutions, Doctor Blanchet from the Deaf Institute in Paris and Jean-Jacques Valade-Gabel, formally director of the Deaf Institute in Bordeaux and professor at the Deaf Institute in Paris.(65) These two hearing men were considered the "specialists" on the commission, and no doubt, their ideas carried weight with their other colleagues.

Both Blanchet and Valade-Gabel shared one common viewpoint: they were both openly critical of sign language. By the 1860s, these men were part of a larger European-wide movement that questioned the efficacy of sign language as a medium of instruction and as a serviceable language later in life for deaf people.(66) Blanchet had long been on record favoring instruction through articulated speech, whereas Valade-Gabel had strongly argued for the predominant use of written language in his own book on deaf education.(67) While both men had spent many years working professionally at national deaf institutes, they did not understand the importance of sign language to educated members of the deaf community. Instead, they believed that they were inventing a new approach to deaf education that would ultimately benefit deaf Frenchmen. Ironically, it would fall to these two gentlemen to represent the "deaf viewpoint" to the other members of the commission. Apparently, the idea of appointing a deaf professor to the special commission on deaf education never occurred to Victor Duruy or seemed too awkward to contemplate. In any case, the deaf community had no true representative on Duruy's commission.

Within a year, the commission reported its findings to Victor Duruy. It is apparent that Blanchet's case for mainstreaming deaf children had won favor with members of the commission. The standard objection to the placement of deaf children in public primary schools had revolved around three basic problems: discipline in the classroom, the general academic progress of hearing students, and the time constraints of the schoolteacher. Noticeably absent in this consideration of mainstreaming deaf children was any particular concern for the deaf themselves as a group intrinsically worthy of good schooling. After investigating these areas of concern, the commission found the mainstreaming concept to be a sound one. They had sampled schools from the Parisian area where some teachers had volunteered to test the integration of deaf and hearing students. In these particular schools, which Dr. Blanchet had founded some years before, the commission members concluded that deaf children could learn side by side with hearing children with no ill effects. Sometimes hearing children even fought among themselves for the "honor" of helping their deaf classmates. Instead of finding intolerance toward the deaf in these classes, commission members concluded that deaf children might use their "weakness" to play the role of "tyrant" in school. In this scenario, the hearing child played the role of benevolent interlocuter much as these commission members envisioned their role in redefining the parameters of deaf education. In the view of the commission, mainstreaming deaf children in public primary schools would be morally beneficial because these children would learn the value of order and respect for authority that was key to all social education in the country. As they concluded to the minister of public instruction, "the [deaf child] will cease to be what he was for so long, a savage in the middle of society."(68) With this paternalistic assessment, Duruy's commission, no matter its reformist goals, reaffirmed society's most basic stereotype of the deaf person.

Other educators of the deaf were less sanguine about the commission's judgment and less inclined to label these students as uncivilized. They did not agree with Doctor Blanchet that schooling deaf children was comparable to that for hearing children. There were special psychological-social problems that confronted teachers as they tried to establish their rapport with deaf children. Two letters to Duruy, written before the official commission report, argued that deaf children attending hearing schools were always troubled and were unhappy in class. The letters also pointed out that when given the chance, the deaf would always speak in sign even if they were taught articulated speech.(69) In one response to the commission's investigation, a priest from western France who had twenty years of experience in deaf education offered a sobering evaluation: "the education of the deaf [child] is impossible at the [local] primary school.... To give the tinge of instruction to these unfortunate [children], if this is to pay a debt to humanity, is to do so in counterfeit money."(70)

Although Victor Duruy may have shown some interest in the education of the deaf, he did not make headway on the issue of mainstreaming the deaf into the public primary school system. The continued obstacle was the Interior Ministry's bureaucratic jurisdiction over schools for the deaf throughout this period.(71) Duruy's commission members must surely have known that their findings would not apply to the functions of another department. Strangely, the government's status quo viewpoint would help deaf leaders temporarily fight off the rush to make articulated speech the preferred method of instruction for the deaf. But looming on the horizon were new inquiries and trips abroad to other European countries by officials of the Interior Ministry during the 1870s.(72) These meetings were perilous for the deaf community as ministry officials set the stage for a purely hearing model of deaf education. While mainstreaming deaf children was not their ultimate concern, the teaching of articulated speech in schools for the deaf, to the exclusion of French sign language, became more and more probable. Bebian was truly prescient when he warned in the 1820s that deaf teachers would be systematically excluded from schools for the deaf once articulated speech (in addition to written French) became the unique method of instruction. After the Congress of Milan in 1880, a policy which outlawed sign language in all schools for the deaf and mandated articulated speech became the official plan in France and other Western European countries.(73) Only in the United States did sign language remain a vital language, especially through the efforts of Edward Gallaudet.(74)

From the perspective of the deaf community, the perils of assimilation were very real by the end of the Second Empire. The more the hearing community showed interest in the deaf, the more articulated speech seemed to become a condition of social acceptance. We have seen that the professors Paulmier and Bebian argued for the supremacy of sign language in deaf education from the 1820s onward and that their viewpoints, while resolute, encouraged cooperation between the hearing and deaf communities. Between 1830 and 1870, Ferdinand Berthier and other members of his deaf organization were determined to stem the tide of "articulated speech" and work for more social and economic opportunities for the deaf.(75) But their efforts would not measurably strengthen the deaf cause. Because government leaders did not value the deaf viewpoint, people like Berthier found themselves ignored and even worse, trapped in a bureaucratic system that was forcibly transforming their lives. More than ever, the deaf were the "outsiders" in French society and would have to regroup as a community after the Congress of Milan to protect their language and their cultural identity.

Department of History Annapolis, MD 21402-5000

ENDNOTES

1. Paul C. Higgins, Outsiders in a Hearing World: A Society of Deafness (Beverley Hills, CA, 1980), 178.

2. Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 44.

3. For a discussion illustrating the dilemma facing the American deaf community in the education of deaf children see, Harlan Lane, The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (New York, 1992), 165-200.

4. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes, trans. Frank Jellinck (New York, 1973).

5. John M. Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (New York, 1991) and Rachel G. Fuchs, Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, NJ. 1992).

6. For a useful study that discusses the problem of outsider groups for the mentally ill see Denise Jodelet, Madness and Social Representations: Living with the Mad in One French Community, ed. Gerard Duveen, trans. Tim Pownall (Berkeley, 1991).

7. Two notable exceptions are the works by Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York, 1984) and The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA, 1984) as well as the study of the French deaf by Christian Cuxac, Le Langage des sourds (Paris, 1983).

8. For the latest debates on deaf history see, John V. Van Cleve, ed, Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship (Washington, D.C., 1993).

9. See for example Victor Hugo's treatment of deafness in Notre-Dame de Paris where he states that "it is better for a judge to be thought profound or an imbecile than deaf." Brian Grant, ed., The Quiet Ear: Deafness in Literature (London, 1987), 92.

10. E. Hubert-Valleroux, De l'assistance sociale, ce qu'elle a ete, ce qu'elle est, ce qu'elle devrait etre (Paris, 1855), 323, 328-29.

11. Archives Nationales, [F.sup.15] 2584, Decree by the Conseil d'Etat of the King, which orders that an institution be formed for the instruction of the deaf, by the Abbe de l'Epee dated 25 March 1785.

12. "Loi relative a M. l'Abbe de l'Epee, & a son etablissement en faveur des Sourds & Muets, Paris, le 29 juillet 1791," and "Decret de l'Assemblee Nationale, du 21 juillet 1791" (Paris, 1791), 1-4.

13. Le Baron de Watteville, ed., Legislation charitable, vol. 1 (Paris, 1863), 36.

14. Cuxac, Langage, 21-31; Watteville, Legislation, 2, 9-10, 16-17, 36, 40. Also consult the Archives Nationales, [F.sup.15] 1944 on the students who left the Paris Institute for the Deaf in 1813.

15. According to Ferdinand Berthier, professor at the Paris Institute and a deaf leader of the period, there were 160 students in total at the Deaf Institute in 1830. See Ferdinand Berthier, Adresse des sourds-muets au roi (n.p.: 1830), 3. For the reference to the reign of Charles X, consult Almanach Royal, 1824, 921. Naturally, some parents could afford the 800 to 900 francs a year for their child's room and board at the Deaf Institute, but this was a substantial sum by contemporary standards.

16. Archives Nationales, [F.sup.15] 1945, Letter from Josephine Collot to the Ministry of Interior, requesting admission of two children to the Deaf Institute in Paris, 1820. The Ministry of Interior received its first letter from the Collot family in 1818.

17. The age requirements for the Deaf Institute in Paris did not at all correspond to those for hearing children in public school. Even before the promulgation of the Guizot Law of 1833, hearing children began their education at age six and by twelve or thirteen had completed the elementary school program.

18. Archives Nationales, [F.sup.15] 1945, Letter from the Prefect of the Seine-et-Oise, M. le baron Destouches to Monsieur le Conseiller d'Etat, 17 March 1823.

19. Roger Price, A Social History of Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 1987), 212 and Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), 104-16.

20. See the provisions of the Guizot Law on primary instruction for a comparison of curriculum. "Loi Guizot du 18 juin 1833 sur l'instruction primaire des garcons," in L'Enseignement francais de la Revolution a nos jours, vol. 2, ed. P. Chevallier and B. Grosperrin (Paris, 1971), 121.

21. Almanach Royal, 1824, 922.

22. Louis-Pierre Paulmier, Le Sourd-muet, 3d ed. (Paris, 1834).

23. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 85.

24. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 76.

25. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 95.

26. For information on the transformation of teaching techniques for hearing children in this period, see Antoine Prost, Histoire de l'enseignement en France 1800-1967 (Paris, 1968), 119-124. In the 1830s and 1840s, pedagogues were beginning to emphasize the use of phonetics in the reading curriculum, connecting the spoken "parts" of the word even more closely to the concepts implicit in new vocabulary.

27. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 243-44.

28. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 109-110.

29. Paulmier, Sourd-muet, 132.

30. Ferdinand Berthier considered Bebian to be one of the best friends of the deaf community. See, Ferdinand Berthier, Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages d'Auguste Bebian, ancien censeur des etudes de l'Institut royal des sourds-muets de Paris (Paris, 1839). For a recent study that generally refers to the conflict between Sicard and Bebian, see Dora B. Weiner, The Citizen-Patient in Revolutionary and Imperial Paris (Baltimore, 1993), 242.

31. Berthier, Notice sur la vie ... de Bebian, 12-13.

32. Cuxac, Langage, 78-79.

33. Roch-Ambroise Bebian, "Essay on the deaf and natural language, or introduction to a natural classification of ideas with their proper signs," in The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education, ed. Harlan Lane, trans. Franklin Philip (Cambridge, MA, 1984), 148 and Cuxac, Langage, 80-81.

34. Bebian, "Essay on the deaf and natural language," 142.

35. Bebian, "Essay on the deaf and natural language," 142.

36. Bebian, "Essay on the deaf and natural language," 156.

37. Bebian, "Essay on the deaf and natural language," 157.

38. A. Bebian, Examen critique de la nouvelle organisation de l'enseignment dans l'Institution royale des sourds-muets de Paris (Paris, 1834), 52.

39. Cuxac, Langage, 88-89.

40. Roch-Ambroise Bebian, Journal de l'instruction des sourds-muets et des aveugles (Paris, 1826 - 27), 33.

41. Precise numbers are difficult to verify since the national census did not contain any specific reference to deaf Frenchmen until 1851. See M. le Baron de Watteville, Rappport a S. Exc. le minisetre de l'Interieur sur les sourds-muets, les aveugles, et les etablissements consacres a leur education (Paris, 1861), 7. De Watteville states that 4,803 deaf boys and girls were between the ages of five and fifteen. For reference to the total number of deaf children receiving some schooling in the 1830s see, Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Resume d'un cours d'enseignement primaire des sourds-muets, fair a l'ecole primaire de Sevasbourg, September 1830, by Mr. Piroux.

42. Cuxac, Langage, 96-101 and Lane, When the Mind Hears, 144-151. An eighteenth-century teacher, Samuel Heinicke, set the pattern for articulated speech in the German schools of the period. Hence, Berthier's reference to the "German method" as the one which followed the model of spoken language.

43. Prost, Histoire de l'enseignment, 92-93 and Linda Clark, Schooling the Daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the Socialization of Girls in Modern French Primary Schools (Albany, 1984), 60.

44. "Circulaire contenant demandes de renseignements sur les sourds-muets et les aveugles, 14 aout 1841," in Legislation charitable, vol. 1, ed. Baron de Watteville (Paris, 1863), 647-48.

45. The material for this discussion comes from the Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Report from the rector of the Clermont academy, Monsieur Bedel, to the minister of public instruction, Comte de Salvandy, 27 December 1847.

46. Bonnie Smith has argued that needlework was one important way that the middle class transmitted their values to the lower class. There is no reason to believe that deaf girls, as part of that lower class, were not also part of this "cultural transmission." See, Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), 6, 68-69.

47. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17 ] 9677, Report from the rector of the Clermont academy, Monsieur Bedel, to the minister of public instruction, Comte de Salvandy, 27 December 1847.

48. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Report from the rector of the Clermont academy, Monsieur Bedel, to the minister of public instruction, Comte de Salvandy, 27 December 1847.

49. Leon Vaisse, Histoire et principes de l'art d'instruire les sourds-muets (Paris, 1865), 11-12.

50. F. Marbeau, De l'indigence et des secours (Paris, 1850), 6.

51. Bernard Mottez, "The Deaf-Mute Banquets and the Birth of the Deaf Movement," in Deaf History Unveiled: Interpretations from the New Scholarship, ed. John V. Van Cleve (Washington, D.C., 1993), 27-39.

52. See for example, Ferdinand Berthier, Histoire et statistique de l'education des sourds-muets (Paris, 1836); Les sourds-muets avant and depuis de l'Epee (Paris, 1840); Le Code Napoleon ... mis a la portee des sourds-muets (Paris, 1868).

53. Berthier, Sourds-muets avant et depuis de l'Epee, 43.

54. Berthier, Sourds-muets avant et depuis de l'Epee, 63.

55. Berthier, Code Napoleon, 134.

56. Alexandre Blanchet, Moyens de generaliser l'education des sourd-muets dans les ecoles primaires, 5th ed. (Paris, 1858), 16.

57. Blanchet, Moyens de generaliser l'education, 11-12.

58. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, A. Blanchet, Documents relatifs aux moyens de generaliser l'education et l'assistance des sourds-muets (1865), 3-4.

59. Blanchet, Moyens des generaliser l'education, 18-19.

60. Constantin James, Blanchet: notice biographique (Caen, 1867), 10.

61. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 12529-12530, Societe generale d'education de patronage et d'assistance en faveur des sourds-muets et des jeunes aveugles, 12 August 1867.

62. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Blanchet, Documents, 3-4.

63. Consult Sandra Horvath-Peterson, Victor Duruy and French Education: Liberal Reform in the Second Empire (Baton Rouge, 1984).

64. Archives Nationales AD XIX H41, Statistics on primary instruction for 1863, Report made to the emperor on the condition of primary schooling for 1863 by Victor Duruy, minister of public instruction.

65. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, List of members of the commission to study the teaching of deaf children in primary schools, 13 November 1863. These members included: A. Franck, president, member of the Conseil imperial; Victor Foucher, advisor to the Cour de Cassation; Mr. Pillet, head of the 3rd division at the Ministry of Public Instruction; Mr. Rapet and Mr. Ritt, general inspectors of primary instruction; Doctor Blanchet, physician at the Deaf Institute in Paris; Mr. Valade-Gabel, honorary director of the Deaf Institute in Bordeaux; and Mr. Beuvain d'Altenheym, inspector of primary instruction in Paris and secretary for the commission.

66. Lane, When the Mind Hears, 376-88.

67. Jean-Jacques Valade-Gabel, Methode a la portee des instituteurs primaires pour enseigner aux sourds-muets la langue francaise sans l'intermediaire du langage des signes (Paris, 1857).

68. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Report to the minister of public instruction (V. Duruy) concerning the instruction of the deaf by A. Franck, president of the commission, 11 August 1864.

69. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Mr. O. Caresme, rector of the Besangcon academy to Victor Duruy, minister of public instruction, 8 December 1863 and Mr. A. Magin, rector of the Rennes academy to Victor Duruy, 28 December 1863.

70. Archives Nationales [F.sup.17] 9677, Observations on teaching deaf-children with hearing children by Frere Louis, 18 November 1863 (Loire-Inferieure).

71. Even today the Deaf Institute in Paris is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health rather than the Education Ministry.

72. Theophile Denis, Les Institutions nationales de sourds-muets et le ministere de l'Interieur (Paris, 1882), 15.

73. Cuxac, Langage, 138-39.

74. John V. Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, D.C., 1989), 108-111, 141.

75. Berthier, Code Napoleon, 20, 134.