The Deaf Awakening in France: For a bilingual perspective

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author’s note

Foreword by Christian Cuxac

Introduction

FIRST PART:

My background

SECOND PART:

The beginnings of the deaf awakening in France

DOCUMENTS and PICTURES

THIRD PART:

The emergence of bilingualism in France

FOURTH PART:

Developments since 1971…

Acknowledgements

Author’s note

This book was translated from French into English by students of the Master’s degree in Translation and Interpreting at Rennes 2 University (France) under the direction of Prof. Daniel Toudic, within the framework of a partnership project with the author.

Foreword by Christian Cuxac

Professor of Language Sciences

University of Paris VIII

Children born deaf have always tried to communicate with hearing family and friends using gestures of their own. However, for centuries, apart from sporadic attempts to teach speech or lip reading to children from wealthy families, no real attempt was made to educate deaf children in any part of the world. It was only in 1760, in France, after seeing two young deaf twin sisters communicate with gestures, that a priest with private means, Abbé de l’Epée, had the brilliant idea of educating deaf children together in a single institution.

From this institution eventually emerged a visual language based on gestures, which was initially a mixture of specific signs invented by each child. Institutionalization accelerated the process, and a few years later, the young boarders were using a real language. This language of socialization was then transmitted from generation to generation and gradually grew more comprehensive and complex through being promoted as a gateway to school-related knowledge and as a language that could be used to translate French written texts. Abbé de l’Epée’s idea was so attractive and easy to implement that very quickly, all the major French towns followed suit and it was not long before the idea was being exported to major European cities and to other big cities throughout the world. Deaf adults, who had previously been rejected by society, became a genuine speech community with their own culture, numbering tens of thousands, and all thanks to the education they received in these institutions.

Moreover, they were able to take an active part in educating young deaf children and take up positions as supervisors, tutors, teachers or even headmasters, giving them access to intellectual careers.

However, in 1880, following an international congress in the city of Milan advocating the banning of the sign language in all educational institutions, under the pretence of turning deaf people into normal citizens, the bodies in charge of educating deaf children in France (at the time, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Public Education) brought to a sudden end what was in effect a tremendous social and educational advance with its roots in the Age of Enlightenment.

Not only was this decision particularly cruel, depriving a speech community of the practice of their own language, but it also turned out to be extremely stupid. Indeed, an educational policy for deaf children mainly aimed at the use of speech and lip reading seems somewhat incompatible with the gathering of all those children in the same educational establishment. What could be more absurd than forcing deaf children or teenagers to talk to each other without using their natural means of communication, when they could not hear what the others were saying? This educational principle, called oralism, reigned supreme for over a hundred years in France, and was applied more or less strictly. While some schools single-mindedly forbade students to sign in all living areas, others banned sign language within the classroom only.

Some figures collected at the end of the seventies demonstrate the tragic effects of the banning of sign language in schools:

Less than ten deaf teenagers passed the Baccalaureate (The Baccalaureate is a French high school graduation exam. It is required to gain access to higher education) each year where there should have been some 200 according to the ratio applicable to the hearing population,

All over France, young deaf people could only choose from about fifteen manual trades and higher education was denied even to the lucky few who did pass the Baccalaureate,

Illiteracy affected 80% of the deaf population (a figure taken from the Gillot report commissioned by the Prime Minister in 1998),

Deaf adults did not have access to careers in education or other professions.

In 1975, the World Deaf Congress in Washington DC gave the French deaf community the opportunity to meet their American counterparts and realize that the United States was the only country where sign language was allowed in schools, and that American deaf adults were not experiencing the same social and cultural deprivation as they did. From then on, it became obvious to many that there was a direct link between the practice of sign language in schools and students’ later involvement in society.

From that moment on, a lot of French deaf people began to stand up both for their rights as citizens and for the promotion of sign language. However, few of them thought it necessary to completely rethink the educational system, by returning sign language to the classroom and offering deaf children a bilingual education. André Minguy, the author of this book, is one of those few. He believed that a lone struggle would get nowhere so he decided to bring people of goodwill together to restore French sign language to its former place within the educational system as part of a bilingual education. This led to the creation of the Two Languages for One Education association. Fortunately, the movement towards a bilingual education was by then gaining support from the scientific community: sociology and anthropology described the deaf population as a linguistic and cultural community while linguistics had recently proved that all sign languages formed a genuine cluster of languages. Parallel to that, historical research was starting to do justice to bilingual educational experiments which had been deliberately ignored and hidden away after the Milan Congress. This patient historical reconstruction slowly but surely recovered the memory of a wealth of censored teaching practices. For the Two Languages for One Education association, the scientific basis provided by research in the human sciences was a tremendous help, as the authorities, i.e. the ministries in charge of the education of deaf people, were by no means eager to bring about change. For the Ministry of Health, then ministry of Social Welfare in charge of most of the specialized institutions, accepting the return of sign language in classrooms boiled down to admitting a crushing responsibility for what can be called an institutionalization of failure. The Ministry of National Education, which was willing to listen to the parent associations fighting to enable deaf children to learn alongside their hearing peers, was very guarded about the idea of a bilingual education.

Moreover, given that those in charge of the National French Deaf Federation, which was involved back then, believed that only hearing teachers could handle the education of deaf children, it is easy to understand that returning sign language to schools was and still is no easy task.

Le réveil sourd en France recounts the story of an unwavering single-minded fight to re-conquer a dignity denied, in spite of the frustrations and in some cases, the humiliation inflicted by institutions bent on maintaining the status quo whatever the cost. This is the story of an unrelenting day to day struggle, spanning thirty years, to open up educational opportunity, to ensure official recognition of the importance of sign language in deaf children’s cognitive and linguistic development as well as its socializing role and its value as a crucial pedagogical asset for deaf adults.

Finally, in 2002, Jack Lang, the then French Minister of Education, used the well chosen word atonement to describe the debt society owes to the deaf population. However, not many realize that even today in France, a law still forbids deaf people to train in teacher training colleges (IUFM) to become school teachers: this is a clear sign that there is still a long way to go.

In a human life span, thirty years is a long time, especially when compared to the handful of months it took the authorities to destroy the bilingual education for deaf children introduced by Abbé de l’Epée.

André Minguy’s book also offers us a glimpse of the history of the passionate relationship between deaf people and their language, the language of their identity, the language that helps them restore their dignity and their freedom. André Minguy also highlights the fact that a lot of social roles that were once out of bounds for deaf people are now open to them thanks to sign language. Those roles include deaf educators, teachers, actors, stage directors, national museum guides.

Finally, this book is the inspiring story of one of those tiny revolutions ¹ which help to open eyes; the story of everyday lives and experiences, which added together, make the world a better place, without any of the dire consequences that usually go with totalitarian revolutions.

Paul Jouison, Gallaudet College Summer School, 1978.

¹ The French magazine Autrement has devoted one of their issue to this question. The article dealing with deaf people and sign language is by Bernard Mottez.

Introduction

Back in March 2005, I was first encouraged to write this book during a training session in linguistics for the teaching staff of the Centre de la Ressource in Sainte-Marie de la Réunion (on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion). When Marie-Anne Sallandre and Ivani Fusellier, lecturers in language sciences at the University of Paris VIII talked about the French deaf awakening in the seventies, they referred to Poitiers and Toulouse as starting points of the 2LPE ² association and of bilingualism. As I was behind the foundation of this movement along with two friends of mine and my wife Cécile, I told them, without wishing to boast, that the idea of a bilingual movement was born in my house, in Saint-Laurent-en-Royans, one October night in 1979. Marie-Anne then suggested I should write a book about it.

In January 2006, after giving it a lot of thought and a lot of hesitation, I started writing. I love writing, especially letters or reports dealing with my professional activities. It is a fine mental and intellectual exercise. However, writing a whole book was a different story, and it took time to grow accustomed to it. Eventually, I decided to take up the challenge. I did not know how it would turn out but I was determined to write the best I could with my own words and thoughts and to pour my heart into it.

Dear reader, as you can see, I have my own way of writing, which is and will remain my strength. You will perhaps come across some typical turns of phrase used by a deaf person in it.

At the request of some of my friends from the Island of Reunion and from mainland France, I added my own background as a deaf person in the family, school, social and professional environments I have lived in, in the first part of the book. The hardships and obstacles related to oral communication have enabled me to understand that there is an alternative, i.e. gestural visual communication.

This is why I included the section on my background until the birth of the movement and why it drove me to campaign for bilingualism through the association of French Sign Language and French. It represented a new philosophy of life and communication which is and will remain anchored in my soul.

Before putting pen to paper, and to be honest with myself, I chose to describe my project to three pioneers of the bilingual movement: Christian Deck, Geneviève Decondé and Cécile Minguy. All three encouraged me to go on with it. Christian supplied me with a pile of documents related to the actions of the 2LPE Association, which enabled me to write about the birth and development of this association.

In order to prove and authenticate my writings related to the action of the association, I felt it was essential to include testimonies from those who contributed so much of their time and energy to the development of this bilingual adventure. Most of all, I needed testimonies of the first regional and local players: deaf people, parents of deaf children, professionals working with deaf children and teenagers from the bilingual circuit. I contacted them by email and received many positive answers.

This book is an historical overview, a succession of memorable facts which happened between 1970 and today, in the course of my own life. In my opinion, it is the men, women and families of deaf children as well as hearing people that make history. I can only give my living testimony to what happened before and after 1975. The creation of the bilingual movement results from a raised awareness of French sign language since 1970 and more precisely since 1975, just after the much vaunted World Deaf Congress in Washington DC. In the second part of the book (beginnings of the French deaf awakening), you will read about the historical moments of the deaf movement in France. You will also witness the turmoil generated by those moments, through my adventures as well as through changing mentalities, trends affecting deaf people’s socio-professional and cultural environments, the rebirth of bilingualism, interpretation and much more. Finally, I will present a comparative study of deaf people’s living conditions before and after 1975.

In summary, my book falls into four parts, organized as follows:

My life as a deaf person: communication within the family, my discovery of gestural and visual alternatives and bilingualism.

The beginnings of the French Deaf Awakening.

The Two Languages for One Education (2LPE) Association, its goals, actions and the testimonies of the protagonists.

A comparative study of the trends related to deaf people’s living conditions before and after 1975.

In this book, you will find cartoon drawings by Paul Jouison ³, created during his stay at Gallaudet College in Washington DC, USA, in July 1978.

In his position as head special needs teacher at the Specialized Education Center for the Hearing Impaired ⁴, in the rue de Marseille in Bordeaux, Paul Jouison had already shown his interest in sign language practiced by deaf people in the seventies.

From 1978 onwards, drawing his inspiration from the discoveries of American linguist William Stokoë on the parameters of the American Sign Language (ASL), that he soon questioned, he conducted linguistic research from a video corpus comprising spontaneous discussions in LSF (French Sign Language) and he was able to show that meaning in French Sign Language is not exclusively expressed by the hands, but by the signer’s whole body and particularly, by his/her eyes, the movements of his/her body and facial expressions.

Brigitte Garcia, a lecturer at the University of Paris VIII, has devoted a book, Ecrits sur la Langue des Signes Française ⁵ to Jouison’s research findings, highlighting his contribution to the field of French sign language studies. She also referred to this work in the doctoral thesis she defended at the University of Paris V in 2000 ⁶.

The content of my book is written in two different fonts: Arial for my comments and Times New Roman for the testimonies.

The manuscripts and typescripts I carefully kept and chose are included in this book.

² Two Languages for One Education.

³ A hearing person, 1948 – 1991.

⁴ In French: Centre d’Education Spécialisé pour Déficients Auditifs.

⁵ Collection Sémantiques, éditions l’Harmattan, 1995.

⁶ Contribution to an historical and epistemological study of research into French Sign Language (LSF). Paul Jouison, 2000, Doctoral thesis, University of Paris 5 - Sorbonne.

FIRST PART:

My background

Paul Jouison, Gallaudet College Summer School, 1978.

Paul Jouison, Gallaudet College Summer School, 1978.

Brittany… 1949…

Deep in the heart of Brittany, where I spent the first years of my life on the family farm, I do not recall having ever heard a single noise or sound. According to my mother, I did not talk.

My parents were baffled by my strange behaviour that set me apart from other children.

Like all children, I used to walk to the village school with my brother and sister. I hated every moment of it. I could not read or write, nor could I communicate with my schoolmates or with my brother and sister. I could not hear nor understand what the teacher said. He in turn would mete out harsh punishments whenever I did not answer his questions.

Because of that, I used to slip out and find a hiding place, somewhere outside the school. I would also sometimes run away from the projection room where everyone was watching Charlie Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy comedies. Eventually, given the hardships I suffered and the problems I caused, I was removed from the school and had to stay on my parents’ farm.

One day, my mother took me for a very long ride by carriage, then by coach to meet a man in a white coat. He must have been an ear and nose consultant and he wore a headlamp. The practitioner examined my ears and pronounced me completely deaf. On hearing the diagnosis, my mother and family finally understood why I had been behaving the way I had. Even I was completely unaware that I had been deaf since birth.

Discovering the gestural visual world

In 1957, I was 7 years old and had just been found deaf. My mother took me for the first time to the institution for young deaf people in Saint-Brieuc. I have a lasting memory of boys clad in grey smocks. They were playing and having fun in the playground while making signs to each other. They seemed happy to be together. While I stood and watched in amazement, my mother slipped out for a moment and I was left alone with the boys in the grey smocks. I cannot really say how I managed to communicate with my new schoolmates, nor how I learned their gestural language, which was the word used at that time.

I naturally started with the special signs used by my schoolmates in the classroom, then gradually learned the gestural codes describing people and things. I grasped them as they came my way and learned avidly like every other child of that age.

Communicating with the family

I was the only deaf child and the last-born of a family of six children where no one could use sign language. My mother tongue was therefore oral French. I do not remember when I started to talk. I do recall oralising everything belatedly, often in a way that was incomprehensible for my family. I was constantly told to repeat a mispronounced word or sentence. I therefore never really enjoyed a true conversation with my family. Usually, long discussions between the grown-ups were summarized in one or two sentences for my benefit. It was both frustrating and increasingly boring, especially during my teenage years when I naively believed I could lip-read what hearing people said to each other if I set my mind to it. In fact, it was well nigh impossible to follow they were saying or to understand conversations.

Those awkward situations bothered me no end. The hearing aid did not help at all in those cases, except in the rare situations when I could communicate face to face with someone who knew how to talk to a deaf person. However, in that kind of situation, my mother talked to me a lot. I hung onto her every word without really understanding the meaning, which often, very often led to misunderstandings. My sister often acted as an interpreter between my mother and me and translated what was said in a kind of basic language: such as Mom not understand why you cry…. While she was talking, my sister often pointed at people or things that were mentioned in the conversation.

Robert, my nephew, the son of my elder sister, was the one I communicated with best. I think he knew instinctively that I needed other means to understand his words. He had come up with signs that helped me see and understand what he wanted to tell me. He talked orally but added visual or gestural elements that made sense to me. Maybe he had observed my communicational behaviour and adapted to it.

Nevertheless, the absence of a genuine and harmonious communication within my family and the setting of a remote little town deep in the heart of Brittany drove me to explore every nook and cranny of the countryside around the family home. I drew happiness from it, and loved to wander across the typical Breton landscape of small fields and hedgerows (« Bocage » in French) that seemed to go on for ever to a small boy like me. Every time I led the cows to pasture, I chose a different way back, only to marvel at a new viewpoint and experience new thrills.

I would often follow the winding stream and jump back and forth across it, exploring a string of beautiful miniature waterfalls. I once caught a glimpse of fish fleeing before me. Sometimes, I passed anglers, but I had no idea how they got the fish to bite.

One day, my brother-in-law, a man with a passion for trout fishing, came to spend his holidays at my parents’ house. He told me orally how to set up a fishing line, while making exaggerated gestures to back up his explanations, as hearing persons tend to do.

When I managed to set up the hook, he gave me the thumbs up to show his satisfaction. To say no, he shook his upraised forefinger with a negative expression on his face. To express doubt, he would rotate his hand with the palm turned downwards.

Once the line was set up, to please me, he mimed how he would try to catch fish the following day: his hands folded together with his thumbs pointing upwards. One hand would hold the fishing rod while the other would hold the line. Then, without moving his hands, he pretended to cast the line, letting it sink, carried away by the current. Then, all of a sudden, he would lift the line out of the water with a series of light touches. His hand mimed the wriggling fish he dreamed of catching and, with a flourish, he would show me how big it was. I was delighted with this visual and gestural outburst. The signs were easy to understand and I really understood what he wanted to tell me. What he had mimed was etched in my mind. Before seeing him actually fish, I already had a mental picture of what he was going to do. The following day, I happily went out angling with him. He caught fish exactly as he had mimed he would. If he had only tried to explain using oral language, I would not have understood, or perhaps, only after I had actually seen it happen. However, knowing what he would do beforehand gave me a new-found confidence. Without his miming, I might not have liked angling nearly so much. The visual hints supplied by my brother-in-law ensured the harmonious communication that I had the right to expect.

For me, those fishing expeditions were truly wonderful moments of my youth. They were both a kind of escape and a sort of communion with nature and all its secrets. I started looking for places where I could catch brown trout (a variety of red-spotted wild trout).

During my teenage years, when I was 15 or 16, even though I was wearing a hearing aid like all my schoolmates, my family were disappointed that I could not take part in family conversations.

They wanted me to undergo surgery in order to be able to hear and participate in their conversations. My sister, who often served as a mediator between me and the rest of my family, told me about idea one spring morning while we were sitting on the front steps of the house facing the garden. She spoke to me orally, using her usual shorthand style: family happy you surgery, you hear, can talk with family. We sad you not hear. I responded orally, in my own way, that I did not want to undergo surgery at all and that I wanted to stay the way I was. To explain this, I told her how I imagined my future would be: I saw deaf adults who had a job like everyone else, who drove cars, who were married and had kids. They practice sports with each other and even with hearing people. They live a happy life and do not mind their deafness. They often meet to discuss all kinds of things. I understood I would be like them.

From that moment on, the topic was never discussed again and my family let me do as I pleased.

In my mid-teens, I asked my parents if I could invite another deaf teenager to spend the day with me in order to communicate with someone and feel less isolated. We lived in the middle of nowhere, miles away from the city. François, the deaf teenager I was talking about, lived 40 km away from where we lived. That day, he cycled out to our house. I was not actually trying to make my parents and especially my mother understand how I could communicate with a deaf person. François and I were signing to each other about life at home or in the school for deaf people in Saint-Brieuc, and about our mutual passion for soccer. I often laughed out loud at François mimed funny stories. We also discussed more serious issues with a stern face. I gradually forgot that we were not alone. But my mother was there, watching me discreetly in the background. She gradually started laughing too as she watched me make facial and gestural expressions and ended up asking me what we were talking about. This unexpected reaction pleasantly surprised me. My mother told me she had heard bursts of laughter but did not understand what my friend and I were laughing at. I realized then we were talking in silence. I summarized in my own way what we had said. My mother told me later that she had never imagined that I could be so happy and talkative.

Later, when I was about to start looking for a job, my mother realized how much I thrived in a gestural and visual environment and encouraged me to go out and live my life elsewhere. She could not imagine me working on the family farm where I would have a hard time developing my communicational skills.

Communication at school

At school, the use of sign language was forbidden in the classroom, and oralism was the only accepted means of communication. Thanks to the hearing aids plugged into the desks, we learned how to read and we had to recite mandatory subjects learned off by heart. We had to render orally the spoken words to the teacher without understanding the content.

Since I had learned about the visual and gestural language specific to the deaf community, I had found a world suited to my needs and learned a lot from my schoolmates. I could not hear them talking with their voices, but I could see them talking with their hands, the expressions on their faces, their eyes, the movement of their lips and their body.

Thanks to them, I learned how to build up my own language skills and how to assert myself. I never thought about how sign language was structured. It came easily to me, as I absorbed the visual codes in my stride. Like all my schoolmates, I often combined two means of communication, i.e. signed French and natural sign language. The older pupils were our role-models. There was no sign language class for it was still forbidden. The real places where pupils could do what they wanted were places like the playground, outings and sometimes the refectory.

That was where you learned new things. When a pupil had learned something in class or elsewhere, he explained it to the others in sign language, just like villagers gathering in the local pub to discuss the news.

In class, the teachers only used spoken French, but sometimes they used gestures to help pupils to understand better. Indeed, teachers saw that spoken words alone did not have the necessary impact. The purpose of those visual and gestural aids was for pupils to overcome their fear of misunderstanding the oral and written language and the message they carried. It was not proper sign language but a kind of basic communication aid to enhance comprehension. However, those linguistic practices really originated with the deaf pupils and were picked up by some of the hearing teachers.

At that time, strict, even cruel measures were used to prevent pupils talking with their hands, whether in class or in the refectory. When a pupil made 20 spelling mistakes, he would automatically receive 20 strokes from a wooden or aluminium ruler on the fingers or on the knees.

Others were made to kneel atop a square-section ruler with their arms in the air for some time while their schoolmates watched. We were often made to stand in the corner of the classroom, facing the wall. Sometimes, a head would get banged against a wall or a table when someone did something wrong or when they refused to eat what was in their plate. Sometimes, at the end of the meal, we were made to sit with folded arms so we could not communicate with each other in sign language or even look sideways at another schoolmate.

However, not all the school staff condoned those inhuman methods. Some were in favour, but some were against.

Life in the institution went on behind closed doors, and boys and girls were housed in separate buildings. The great chapel in the middle was the only place where boys and girls were allowed to be together. The boys finally got to see the girls during mass and adoring looks were exchanged while the nuns looked on, furious.

I remember very clearly that we had one hearing teacher who used gestural oral communication to teach theoretical notions. He used the manual alphabet to describe difficult technical words that were hard to decipher by lip-reading. This use of dactylology was a true revelation for my schoolmates and I. We learned to use it and played around with it, but only within the classroom and the school. However, it could not help us understand the really technical notions. More often than not, there was something missing in the explanations we were given to facilitate the learning of a particular field of knowledge. What we lacked was gestural and visual language, but back then, the teachers were not aware of it.

Most of the time, when learning subjects at school, deaf pupils faced a simple alternative: either to understand what the teachers said orally, or to have a schoolmate secretly explain to them in sign language, at the risk of being punished. This hidden practice increased our confidence and helped us learn through the written and oral medium.

I found out later about the link between written and gestural languages. I was 15 or 16 then and I was learning a history course by heart. I was reciting it without understanding was it was about. It was hard for me to string it all together orally because the ideas did not do gel in my mind. An older deaf pupil came up to me, read the course notes I was studying and finally asked me if I understood what it was about. I did not know what to say.

Truth be told, I really did not know. I was only reciting something learnt by heart. Then, he explained the content of the lesson with gestures. I could see a wave of information pouring through my mind. I kept quite still. I understood everything the signer had told me. From then on, I could establish a connection between what was written and what the signer meant.

I had just found a way to improve my learning capacity no end, whether for school or for professional use. At the time, when sign language was still banned, there were no published methods linking sign language with French to help me quench my thirst for knowledge. There were not enough trained bilingual teachers who could have taught me to talk, share and communicate better. My only option was to rely on older pupils and former pupils who came back to visit the institution. Unfortunately, language practices in those days still had a long way to go meet today’s standards. In the end, we had to make do with what we had.

Unknowingly, I naturally came to understand the benefits of bilingualism thanks to my bilingual deaf schoolmate. I then used it every day at school, in my work as well as in the associations I belonged to.

I realized that oral speech did not convey the whole meaning. Resorting to visual and gestural aids, i.e. sign language, was far more useful. It enabled me to understand what a deaf person or a hearing person using gestural communication were saying and therefore helped me understand the connection between sign language and oral/written French.

At the time, some young hearing–impaired people mainly used oral speech, but both signed French and gestural language were widely used within the deaf community, despite the restrictions. Even I used it. Deaf people used it very spontaneously; everyone using signs according to their own ability and according to the ability of others to understand them.

However, when trying to explain something, we commonly used gestural language to paraphrase or to mimic the meaning. What really mattered, whatever the means of communication, were the meaningful signs which triggered understanding. This led to successful communication when the message was understood. The two means of communication seemed in no way incompatible.

In the course of my vocational training, starting in 1966, I was offered only four career opportunities within the institution: fitting, carpentry, gardening or house painting. None of those careers held much appeal, but I had