In 1779, in Paris, the deaf were the subject of much curiosity. Every month, a large crowd gathered on Rue des Moulins to see and hear what had long been considered impossible: deaf people reading, understanding, speaking and writing French. This was the work of Abbé Charles-Michel de L’Épée, a reader of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and inventor not of sign language, as is often read, but of “methodical signs”, a gestural language modelled on the grammar of the French language which made it possible to teach French to the deaf by starting with their natural language, sign language: in two words, to make them bilingual.
The hypothesis that a sign language could exist is strong and original in this second half of the 18th century.e century. It breaks with the practices of a long line of pedagogues who, since the 16the century, were content to teach the deaf to mechanically articulate sentences in French without being able to ensure that they were understood. It also places L’Épée in contradiction with the pedagogues most attached to Genesis and Revelation: to write that there can be a sign language, is it not to deny that man has received from God the articulated word – the Word – to distinguish him from the animal kingdom?
In the 18th centurye century, L’Épée and his bilingual ambitions therefore gave rise to numerous philosophical and theological controversies. Today, the figure of L’Épée is caught up in other controversies, tinged with contemporary debates on identities. By making the deaf literate, did L’Épée contribute to making their natural language invisible? By grafting their language onto that of French grammar, can he be held guilty of having subjected it to it?
A recently rediscovered text, the Observations of a Deaf and Mute Man (1779) published by a deaf author contemporary of the Abbé de L’Épée, Pierre Desloges, perhaps allows us to get the debate out of contradiction. Its author is a 32-year-old book craftsman who became deaf at the age of 7 following measles. Although he learned French without having followed the teaching of L’Épée, Desloges took up the pen to defend his method against the attacks of a rival teacher, the Abbé Deschamps. The first book published by a deaf author in France that is known to us, this text is also the first point of view of a deaf person that we have on the method of L’Épée.
Why does Desloges publicly take sides with a method that he himself did not follow? Because it is “entirely based on the use of signs.” Now, the use of signs—this is the second subject of his work—is what best characterizes people “of his condition”: the deaf people of Paris use among themselves a lingua franca gestures. Desloges draws up a draft dictionary of it — one of the rare descriptions of French sign language from the 18th centurye century that has come down to us – and explains that it allows deaf people to approach everyday things, but also abstract subjects.
The “sign language” that the deaf use among themselves, explains Desloges, is sufficient in itself and does not need to be equipped with the grammar of an audio-oral language: “My comrades who can neither read nor write, and who do not attend the school of this skilled teacher, make very extensive use of this language; […] They have the art, by its means, of painting to the eyes all their thoughts, and their ideas even the most independent of the senses.
If the teacher in question here is indeed the Abbé de L’Épée, we should not read here a criticism of his method, but a defense of the hypothesis on which it is based, set out in his 1776 treatise,Institution of the deaf and dumb through methodical signs : any deaf and mute person referred to him already has a language. If the defense of L’Épée’s method can be transformed into a defense of French sign language, it is because Desloges’ experience as a speaker corroborates the hypotheses of the Abbé de L’Épée.
Writing that the deaf do not need French to discourse and reason does not prevent Desloges from staging the paradox at the heart of his enterprise: that of defending in writing a language without writing. The text allows exchange without presence, and Desloges’ goal is precisely to “give a more accurate idea than is commonly held of the language of [s]”his deaf and mute companions from birth.” If the French language does not seem to him to have any advantage over sign language as an instrument of thought, it allows Desloges to appropriate a means of communication allowing him to share his experience and knowledge of sign language beyond his community, in a century where video does not exist.
Desloges’ text undoubtedly invites us to qualify L’Épée’s legacy. The abbot is neither the savior who invented sign language nor the executioner who sacrificed it on the altar of literacy and standardization. L’Épée was a man of the 18th century.e century, just like the Enlightenment: he had a social vision of language, which led him to recognize firstly the existence of a sign language within deaf communities where most of his contemporaries saw only empty grammatical gestures and, secondly, the importance of teaching French to deaf people to “return them to society”. We can judge his method, but the fact remains that it is based on an early recognition of the existence of a sign language.
Desloges and L’Épée both believed in deaf bilingualism, one from the point of view of the deaf minority, the other from the point of view of the hearing majority. Rereading their dialogue with 250 years of distance is fascinating. Pierre Desloges’ text has also been digitized by the National Library of France.