The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille

By Zina Weygand

The integration of the blind into society has always meant taking on prejudices and inaccurate representations. Weygand's highly accessible anthropological and cultural history introduces us to both real and imaginary figures from the past, uncovering French attitudes towards the blind from the Middle Ages through the first half of the nineteenth century. Much of the book, however, centers on the eighteenth century, the enlightened age of Diderot's emblematic blind man and of the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, founded by Valentin Haüy, the great benefactor of blind people.

Weygand paints a moving picture of the blind admitted to the institutions created for them and of the conditions under which they lived, from the officially-sanctioned beggars of the medieval Quinze-Vingts to the cloth makers of the Institute for Blind Workers. She has also uncovered their fictional counterparts in an impressive array of poems, plays, and novels.The book concludes with Braille, whose invention of writing with raised dots gave blind people around the world definitive access to silent reading and to written communication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Aug 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9780804772389

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The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille

Zina Weygand

Emily-Jane Cohen

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

English translation © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland

Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Vivre sans voir. Les aveugles dans la société française du Moyen Age au siècle de Louis Braille © 2003, Éditions Créaphis.

Foreword © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland

Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Support for the translation and publication of this book was provided by C. Michael Mellor.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weygand, Zina.

[Vivre sans voir. English]

The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille / Zina Weygand ; translated by Emily-Jane Cohen.

p. cm.

Translation of: Vivre sans voir. 2003.

Includes bibliographical references.

9780804772389

1. Blind—France—History. I. Title.

HV1965.W4913 2009

305.9’08109440903—dc22

2008041758

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Abbreviations

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

PART I - FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE CLASSICAL AGE: A PARADOXICAL VISION OF BLINDNESS AND THE BLIND

CHAPTER 1 - The Middle Ages

CHAPTER 2 - The Beginning of Modern Times

CHAPTER 3 - Groundwork for a History of Blindness in the Classical Age

PART II - THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: A DIFFERENT LOOK AT THE BLIND

CHAPTER 4 - Sensationalism and Sensorial Impairments

CHAPTER 5 - Philanthropy and the Education of the Sensorially Impaired

CHAPTER 6 - The Move of the Quinze-Vingts and the Annuity from the Public Treasury

PART III - THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE BLIND: AN AFFAIR OF STATE

CHAPTER 7 - The Establishment of the Institute for the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind (1791–1794)

CHAPTER 8 - The National Institute for Blind Workers

CHAPTER 9 - The Merging of the National Institute for Blind Workers and the Hospice of the Quinze-Vingts

PART IV - BLINDNESS IN FRANCE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY: REALITIES AND FICTIONS

CHAPTER 10 - The Blind in France at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

CHAPTER II - Social Representations and Literary Figures of Blindness in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century

PART V - BLINDNESS IN THE CENTURY OF LOUIS BRAILLE: FROM PRODUCTIVIST UTOPIA TO CULTURAL INTEGRATION

CHAPTER 12 - The Quinze-Vingts Under the Consulate and the Empire: Implementing a Productivist Utopia

CHAPTER 13 - The Quinze-Vingts Under the Restoration: A Memory Site of the Ultra-Royalist Reaction

CHAPTER 14 - The Royal Institute for Blind Youth Under the Restoration

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Abbreviations

Foreword

By Catherine Kudlick

In this erudite, sensitive, witty, and impeccably documented book, Zina Weygand draws from the rich tradition of the French Annales school, while also offering something completely new. Thanks to her energy and creativity as a researcher, we meet scores of people who might otherwise be victims of the vagaries of existence, from the first troupe of blind actors to the individualist, dirty, noisy, and quarrelsome residents of the Quinze-Vingts hospice, not all of whom were—to invoke her phrase—choir-boys. Weygand uses these stories and better-known figures such as Denis Diderot and Louis Braille to offer a new understanding of the Enlightenment and its legacy. This is not a case of overcompensating for the seeming marginality of her subject by making a bold claim. Rather, Weygand’s in-depth study of the reciprocal relationship between the social treatment and representations of blind people from the Middle Ages to the middle of the nineteenth century invites readers to reconsider the ocularcentric roots of modernity.

After all, what better place to think about the perverted power of the visual and visual culture than in an institution for the blind?

Until just a few years ago, historians wouldn’t have had the gumption or the analytic tools to pose such a question. And even today a wary few might still find the history of blind people a useless, if quaint, undertaking. But thanks to the emerging field of disability history to which Weygand has been a tireless and highly original contributor, scholars will find questions and resources that breathe new life into the study of the French past. Influenced by work in gender, sexuality, and race, this critical approach to disability invites us to rethink everything from ideas about physical and cognitive normality to the role of the senses in shaping discourses of the modern. Provocateurs laboring in this young field assert that disability must take its place alongside these other groups to help us unpack what we take for granted and why. Thus, just as anyone hoping to understand what it meant to be European must engage with questions of how Europeans described the world beyond, so too scholars analyzing the power of visual culture need to grapple with the people who appeared anathema to it.

Like her forebears of the Annales school, Weygand ultimately offers a history of the present. When it comes to attitudes toward disabled people, she explains in the introduction, it appears that our society remains, in many respects, a prisoner of a past that refuses to die. Though largely spared the humiliation that made them buffoons of farce and the victims of trickery in the premodern era, blind people at the beginning of the twenty-first century remain misunderstood and marginalized, as evidenced by an unemployment rate of over 70 percent. They, like people with other disabilities, face rampant discrimination often disguised as benevolent paternalism or complete erasure from anything but maudlin, sentimental stories. In bringing a far richer and more complex world to life, Weygand has provided the golden hammer for driving nails into the coffins of old ideas and practices.

Catherine Kudlick is Professor of History at University of California, Davis. She is the author of Cholera in Post-Revolutionary Paris: A Cultural History and, with Zina Weygand, Reflections: The Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary Paris. She is currently President of the Disability History Association.

Preface

By Alain Corbin

There are works of history that satisfy the desire for a temporal change of scenery and stimulate reverie; others, more rare, deeply move their reader. This is the case with Zina Weygand’s book. It obliges each of us to interrogate that share of the irrational that remains deep within us when we confront blindness.

Our culture of universals, so magnified during the celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, distances us from the Anglo-Saxon culture of difference. There results an inevitable backwardness. In France, specialized histories of disabilities and handicaps are few and far between. In this barely cleared field, Zina Weygand is a vital figure. For several decades now, she has been methodically studying the representations and circumstances of blind people in the past.

The point of departure for her research concerns the inheritance of the Age of Enlightenment. From Locke to Condillac, the adherents of sensationalism posited that sensory experience was at the center of cognitive processes. They expected that an operation on a newborn that would permit the child to see would reveal the truth of the sensible. This crucial experiment, Zina Weygand assures us, was the founding myth of Enlightenment philosophy. Diderot, from the publication of the Letter on the Blind to the drafting of his final Additions thirty-four years later, struggled, for his part, to penetrate the world of the blind, thenceforth desacralized by surgery. Thanks to him, the sightless person became the subject of a dialogue between equals.

This discussion of difference led to a rereading of the hierarchy of senses and to the promotion of touch. It gave rise to a hymn to vicariance—the substitution of one sensation for another. This new way of seeing transformed attitudes. While the image of a blind citizen capable of attaining culture, employment, and dignity slowly began to take shape, the sensitive soul was moved by disabilities. Philanthropy and a passion for pedagogy, not to mention the rise of silent reading among cultivated elites, led to the desire to educate the congenitally blind.

Zina Weygand quickly understood the need for a genealogical approach. To accurately measure the importance of the revolution that took place in the Age of Enlightenment, it was necessary to plumb historic depths. Fabliaux, medieval theater, romance literature, not to mention fairground exhibits, reveal the great complexity of images, sentiments, and attitudes. Blindness long inspired terror. The figure of the blind buffoon, clumsy and coarse, exorcised this sentiment. Derision was directed at the drunken beggar, cynical and debauched, often duped by his guide. The disability, a visible mark of a hidden defect, also aroused repugnance. Blindness, along with its companions, ignorance and vice, symbolized blindness of spirit, a dimming of the intelligence.

At the same time blindness solicited compassion. It called for charity. Confraternities of the blind multiplied in the thirteenth century. The good Louis XI founded the Quinze-Vingts. On Holy Thursday, he washed the feet of disabled people. These last benefited from the privilege to beg freely, something not taken away from them until the dawn of the nineteenth century. According to an exchange of gift and countergift, it was expected that the misfortunate pray for their benefactors. The miraculous cure of the newborn in the Gospels made of him an individual who was doubtless better able than others to reveal the grandeur of God.

At the dawn of modern times, admiration grew for those who, already in antiquity, were celebrated for their rich interior visions. Deprivation of the spectacle of the world and useless knowledge facilitated spiritual illumination. The blind man of the thirteenth-century mystical theologians knew much more than did scholars, whom he was capable of confounding. In the century of the optical revolution and the Lessons of Darkness, there emerged the figure of the blind subject, alone and singular, and on many occasions, Rembrandt celebrated the dignity of the solitary blind man.

Another tension, one that has to do with social issues, structures Zina Weygand’s book. A moving cohort of visually impaired members of the elite stands in contrast to the crowd of the indigent blind, and the reader gets a good sense of the profound gap between them. At the end of the eighteenth century, steadfast souls outlined a model of cultivated sightlessness from which Valentin Haüy, protagonist of the book and creator of collective teaching for those blind since birth, took inspiration.

February 19, 1785, the date of the establishment of the first free school, divides this history into two periods. From then on and through numerous incidents, the desire to educate, to encourage free speech, to allow blind people to attain happiness, to ensure their right to carnal relations preys on the minds of responsible parties. At the end of the ancien régime, demonstrations at court, spectacles staged for learned societies, public functions, and participation in religious ceremonies paved the way and won people over. The sad performance that, as late as 1771, had marked the festivities of Saint Ovid’s fair became a thing of the past.

The fact remains that, with the political torment of the ensuing century, the history of the education of the congenitally blind, so carefully traced by Zina Weygand, is one of contradictory episodes. What persists is a faith in the possibility of apprenticeships, even when belief in the social usefulness of victims of blindness wavers. The incessant rearrangement of the taxonomies of jobs they are said to be capable of is evidence of this hesitation. Hopes peaked between 1791 and 1794. What followed was a long decline of the dream of citizenship. The desire for social control tended to replace the desire for promotion. But the concern for education and social integration expressed in the Law of July 29, 1794, was never abandoned.

Recourse to archives enables Zina Weygand to paint a moving picture of the situation of blind children admitted into the institutions reserved for them. Their fate varied to a rhythm of displacements and disgraces. The Consulate and the Empire elaborated formidable regulations that we must measure by the yardstick of those who organized life inside secondary schools. The precision and rigor of the schedule, the putting to work, the elaboration of a range of punishments, the constant surveillance to control behaviors offends our current sensibilities.

Zina Weygand also makes the crowd of blind people who contributed to the picturesque of the early nineteenth-century city come to life before our eyes. Singers and wandering musicians, animal trainers, peddlers, fortune-tellers, distributors of lottery tickets, and prostitutes make up a gallery of types whose variety reflects the multiplicity of causes of blindness. From 1749, the date of the publication of the Letter on the Blind, at the end of the monarchie censitaire,¹ a process, far from linear, reshaped the history of blindness. As the decades passed, there arose a collective belief that the visually impaired individual could have a private life and could bloom in fields beyond that of music alone.

Talented historian of culture that she is, Zina Weygand is able to reveal the process that allowed blind people to leave the sphere of otherness behind while revealing what a slow process it was. She is even better at displaying the simultaneous representations at work between 1800 and 1850. Three strata, in part consisting of cultural flotsam, are essential to the reading of moralizing novels and of melodrama. The burlesque, the derision that stigmatized the blind person, was still in evidence, as were the feelings of the sensitive soul, forged in the previous century. The main thing was nonetheless the sudden appearance of the romantic vision of blindness. The latter revived, in its own way, recent attitudes toward the ability to perceive invisible realities. The character of Dea gives meaning to The Laughing Man, the great nocturnal novel by Victor Hugo. It symbolizes the abandonment of all references to the blackness of the soul.

The book concludes with the touching presence of Louis Braille. He gave the visually impaired access to silent reading and to written communication with the sighted. Here the talent of Zina Weygand becomes particularly evident. Her dense writing, limpid and without artifice, takes its strength from the quality of her restraint. In simple phrases, without ever falling into dithyrambs, she justifies the magnitude of the cult dedicated to the benefactor of the blind.

Zina Weygand’s book does not only participate in the grande histoire of disabilities and handicaps. Beyond that, it contributes to the history of the senses, of their hierarchy, their equilibrium, their correspondences, and also to the history of vicariance, a fundamental concept throughout this work.

The emergence of spectatorial attitudes has been much studied: the elaboration of new ways of seeing, the intensification and subsequent relaxation of a policing of the gaze, the revival of procedures of ocular infractions between the end of the ancien régime and that of the nineteenth century. Zina Weygand’s book participates decisively in this abounding sensorial anthropology.

Introduction

Ignorance of the past not only confuses contemporary science; it confounds contemporary action.

—Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft¹

Despite the progressive acknowledgment, over the course of the twentieth century, that so-called handicapped people have the right to education, professional training, and employment, blind people today still face great difficulties in fully integrating themselves into French society. Moreover, in a disenchanted world, they still face irrational behaviors that condition—at least partially—the place accorded them by society.

When it comes to attitudes toward disabled people, it appears that our society remains, in many respects, a prisoner of a past that refuses to die. We believe that history, to the extent that it permits us to better grasp the origins of certain individual and collective behaviors, the sources of the exclusion and suffering of disabled persons, has a role to play in any reflection on the social problems engendered by handicaps today. This conviction and the hope to make a contribution, as small as it might be, to the construction of a society more hospitable to the blind are at the origins of the present study.

The Blind in French Society Today

Words: From Etymology to Metaphor

The word blindness [cécité in French] comes from the Latin caecitas, itself derived from caecus: blind person. As for the word for blind person [aveugle], it is likely a deformation of another Latin expression, ab oculus (literally, without eyes). In this way, from the word’s origins, we find the idea of a total absence of sight comparable to an enucleation. To this day, a blind person is generally considered to be living in the deepest darkness, even if we no longer think without eyes when we utter the word blind.

It is worth noting the negative connotation of this term that designates a person by what he or she is supposed to absolutely lack. It is equally worth remembering in passing the pejorative value of the word blind in its metaphorical applications, particularly in the intellectual and moral domains: whose judgment is clouded, who lacks light, reason; that which clouds judgment, which deprives of reason; that which does not allow for reflection, examination; who acts without discernment; oblivious, ignorant, etc.²

Legal Definitions of Blindness

If we move from semantics to legislation, there exists in France, since the ordinance of July 3, 1945, concerning the protection of persons disabled and incurable, a legal definition of cecity based on optometric criteria : practical blindness is recognized when visual acuity³ of the best eye is inferior to 1/20 or when the visual field⁴ is limited on either side by more than 20 degrees. Using a white cane is authorized when visual acuity is equal or inferior to 1/10.

This legal definition conditions the allocation of social and financial aid and the indemnification that follows accidents. It does not take into account, however, what is commonly called the capacity for practical vision. This last depends on multiple factors and can be appreciated only after in-depth assessment that includes the following:

A test of the visual field far away and up close, if possible in attenuated daylight and not in a dark room

A plotting of the central and peripheral visual field

A study of color vision

A study of light sensitivity

Possibly, an electrophysiological exploration

The assessment should also take into consideration the ability of the subject—extremely variable from one individual to another—to adapt to his or her visual situation.⁵ In effect, for the same category of visual impairments, affective, intellectual, motor and social reactions of a partially sighted or blind person can differ, facilitating or aggravating the consequences of the infirmity.⁶ There exist, then, different types of blindness, and not all blind people are affected by the total absence of visual perception the vocabulary suggests.

Some Epidemiological Data

After having tried to define blindness and after having indicated the reductive and approximate character of all definitions, we can ask ourselves how many blind people currently live in France. Here again, nothing is simple: estimations effectively range from 40,000 to 62,000 depending on the sources. On the one hand, the numbers vary according to the type of blindness considered: legal blindness, locomotive blindness, professional blindness, total blindness, partial blindness. On the other hand, and most importantly, there is no obligation to declare generative diseases of blindness in France, and censuses themselves are sometimes contested. If this gives us cause to rejoice as far as individual liberty is concerned, epidemiologists deplore it. They bemoan the lack of prospective studies concerning the evolution of ocular ailments that cause blindness and partial sightedness in our country: the total number of blind people, probably already underestimated at present and of which persons over sixty-five doubtless represent more than half, stands to grow with the increase in life expectancy. Those responsible for public health regret the absence of precise and reliable data that would permit them to undertake effective preventive action in the area of blindness and partial sightedness.

In spite of the insufficiency of precise epidemiological information, we can say that chronic glaucoma and ocular traumatisms are the highestranking causes of visual handicaps in Western Europe. The seriousness and the frequency of diabetic retinopathy, of detached retinas, and of congenital cataracts are equally known statistics for our country. That said, France has been spared trachoma, xerophthalmia, and onchocercosis, which are, respectively, and in order of importance, the first, second, and third causes of blindness in the world. And cataracts, in any event, are easily curable, even if they rank fourth in the world as the cause of blindness (due to the lack of necessary means to operate under good conditions in poor countries).

Social Legislation

Whatever their number, and whatever the causes and precise nature of their impairments may be, blind people in France today have their place in the juridical state and not just when it comes to financial assistance.

The right to reeducation, to professional training, and to employment, granted to disabled ex-servicemen by the Law of April 26, 1924, on May 5 of the same year was extended to those injured in the workplace and then to all disabled people (who, at that point, officially began to be called handicapped) by the Law of Obligatory Employment of November 24, 1957. But it was not until the Law of Orientation in Favor of Disabled Persons of July 30, 1975, that obligatory education (included in vain for blind and deaf children in the Law of March 29, 1882) was finally realized—with mainstreaming as a priority. Resistance to mainstreaming and the need to legislate anew on July 10, 1987, in favor of the employment of the disabled attest to the difficulties encountered in the application of the 1975 law. This is not the place to discuss the issue, but we can ask ourselves if, when it comes to blind people, these difficulties are a consequence of what Pierre Villey calls the prejudice of blindness: A society is composed of individuals who pass away and prejudices that remain. True or false, prejudices shape the lot of individuals. Even more than by his infirmity, the social status of the blind person has been fashioned by the incorrect idea the sighted conceive of it.⁷

Representations and Social Treatment of Blindness: The Interest ofa Historical Study

Pierre Villey attributes the origins of these prejudices to the almost visceral fear sighted people have of blindness:

The sighted person judges the blind not for what they are but by the fear blindness inspires.... Stronger than all external observations, the revolt of his sensibility in the face of the most atrocious of maladies fills a sighted person with prejudice and gives rise to a thousand legends. The sighted person imagines himself struck by blindness. Since the blind behave in ways quite different from his own, he senses everything he will lose and not what he will find [through a better use of his other senses]. An abyss opens up before him.⁸

For Villey, the psychological origin of this prejudice explains its permanence and universality. Thirty years after Villey, another blind intellectual, Pierre Henri, taking into consideration theories that the former could not have known, dedicated himself to illuminating the social components of what he no longer called the prejudice of blindness, but rather its concept.

The concept of blindness transmits itself and behaves like a social force, like one of the numerous collective representations that dominate knowledge and orient behaviors. It imposes itself upon the sighted person, constraining him to think in a certain way despite evidence and individual experience, and it determines his behaviors with respect to the blind. The concept also imposes itself externally on the latter, conditioning their reactions and shaping their mentalities such that their psychology would have been different had they not adjusted to or resisted the concept.⁹

Prejudice of blindness, concept of blindness, Henri, like Villey, in order to explain resistance to the blind’s integration into the world of the sighted, after two millennia of logical thinking and one hundred and fifty years of attempts at social reclassification of the visually impaired,¹⁰ recurs to the notion of representation.

If we follow these two authors, in order to understand what a blind person is and what the place of the blind is in society, it is not enough to define (with difficulty, moreover) blindness; it is not enough to enumerate and to legislate. We have to take into account the image the sighted have of blindness and the blind: Sociologically, a blind person is not just an individual who does not perceive forms and is constrained to think and act accordingly. He is a being who, willy-nilly, incarnates the image the sighted have of the blind and is treated in conformity with this representation.¹¹

Villey and Henri were themselves blind. Their intellectual and human qualities, their careers, and the success of their personal lives testify to all that is possible in spite of the disability, and at times, thanks to it, to the extent that it obliges the people it affects to maximize their remaining abilities. These men must have suffered nonetheless from the ignorance and behavior of the so-called able-bodied toward the blind. That is probably one of the reasons they sensed the extent to which it was important to take representations into account in any study of blindness and its consequences:

The prejudice of the blind . . . can be corrected by facts at any moment. It has persisted, however, by flouting these facts.¹²

Lacking objective data, the popular imagination has free reign. Suddenly, when it comes to a blind person, exaggerated expressions and epithets in the superlative rush in.¹³

Even while adhering to Villey and Henri’s analysis of the weight of representations on the social treatment of blindness, it seems important to us to foreground the way in which this treatment, during different periods in history, was able to act in turn on individual and collective representations of blindness and the blind. The great significance of a historical study of the blind in French society will be to demonstrate the reciprocal though not simultaneous influence of representations and social treatment over the course of time.

This is to say that such a study cannot but inscribe itself in the longue durée, and that, with respect to this history, we are not far from adhering to Jacques Le Goff’s thesis of a long, very long, Middle Ages whose structures evolve but slowly [until] the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ There exist, however, in the course of this long process, pivotal periods when new sensibilities appear, sources of social mutations and the generation of new institutional structures that, in turn, cause representations to evolve. The period that stretches from the second half of the eighteenth to the first half of the nineteenth century is one of those key moments in the history of the blind.

In 1749, Diderot published the Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those Who See in which he put the philosophical speculations of his time concerning the status of the sensorial in the elaboration of human knowledge to the test by observing a sensible blind man.¹⁵ In 1771, the Abbé Charles-Michel de L’Epée organized the first public presentation of the young deaf-mutes he had been educating for several years using the language of methodical signs. The same year, the spectacle of a burlesque concert by the blind of the Quinze-Vingts hospice, held up for ridicule to the visitors of Saint Ovid’s Fair, inspired Valentin Haüy, an obscure translator, expert in writing systems, and reader of Diderot, with the idea of helping the indigent blind escape their humiliating circumstances by educating them through the tactile reading of books whose characters are in relief.¹⁶ What amused the public of the fair without reservation, filled the heart of the philanthropist with profound dismay, and he judged the display ["monstration]—to which the blind seemed to lend themselves willingly—a dishonor to the human race." ¹⁷

The social innovation born of this new way of looking would contribute (albeit with difficulty) to the transformation of the collective sensibility toward blindness and the blind. In February 1785, at the initiative of Haüy and with the assistance of the Philanthropic Society, the Institute for Blind Youth was founded, the first school in the world whose mission was to give free instruction to the blind poor based on the principle of sensory substitution, previously used for the private education of a few individuals from well-to-do families.

On September 28, 1791, two months after having nationalized the Institute for the Deaf and Mute, created thirty years before by the Abbé de l’Epée, the Constituent Assembly nationalized the Royal Institute for Blind Youth. The principle of state responsibility for the education of the sensorially impaired was thus posited. The Blind Youth obtained this right definitively with the Law of 10 Thermidor Year III (July 29, 1795) that christened the establishment created ten years earlier by Valentin Haüy the National Institute for the Blind and created "eighty-six free positions [one per administrative département] for as many blind pupils . . . , nourished and supported at the expense of the Republic.¹⁸ Subsequently, no government would ever revisit this principle. Instead, the modalities of custodianship would vary according to different political regimes.

In the meantime, while the institute run by Haüy offered an intellectual, musical, and manual education to a small number of blind young people in order to render them useful to themselves and to society, the hospice of the Quinze-Vingts, founded by Saint Louis between 1254 and 1260, continued to help an equally limited number of blind adults from all over the country by lodging them as boarders or granting them non-resident pensions. Though the ideology of the moral, intellectual, and professional education of the indigent blind progressed, elsewhere there remained totally insufficient practices and support structures whose persistence and mode of functioning helped perpetuate the idea of the blind’s inability to fend for themselves.

Resistance to the changes under way in the social treatment of blindness quickly translated, then, into a dialectic of assistance and education, one that particularly marked revolutionary committee debates concerning the Institute for Blind Youth that, in 1801, resulted in the unification of the educational establishment created by Haüy and the ancient hospice of the Quinze-Vingts. Their cohabitation lasted until the end of the Empire.

The Restoration, by granting independence to the two establishments, turned the Quinze-Vingts into one of the memory sites of the monarchy, whereas the Institute for Blind Youth, despite a certain number of material difficulties, became the crucible in which the blind forged a new identity for themselves and gave themselves the means to fully accede to written culture, thanks to the invention of Louis Braille.

The continuity of an institution and of age-old practices; the persistence of traditional representations of blindness and the blind; the difficult triumph of innovation. To understand the forces at work in this crucial historical period, a period ranging from the second half of the eighteenth century to the 1830s, we must step back in time, at least to the thirteenth century, age of the foundation of the hospice of the Quinze-Vingts and of the appearance of the blind in comic literature written in the French vernacular.

PART I

FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE CLASSICAL AGE: A PARADOXICAL VISION OF BLINDNESS AND THE BLIND

CHAPTER 1

The Middle Ages

We must begin with an outline of the situation of blind people in Western Europe during the millennium Renaissance humanists saw as [but] a hiatus,¹ which they unfairly designated by two words forming a parenthesis: the Middle Ages. Only then can we examine in greater detail the ways in which medieval comic literature dealt with the stock character of the blind man—a character whose epigones would still be found on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage—and only then can we recall the origins and operation of the hospice of the Quinze-Vingts, whose existence was to heavily impact the representations and treatment of blindness and the blind in France.

First of all, what was the frequency and what were the causes of blindness at this time? Due to the malnutrition, lack of hygiene, and infectious diseases that chronically beset the inhabitants of cities and of the countryside, blind people were probably quite numerous in the Middle Ages. To get an idea of the prevalence of blindness in Western Europe during this long period of our story, we can turn to the present situation in third-world countries, where infections, parasites, nutritional deficiencies, and cataracts cause millions of cases of blindness and severe partial-sightedness in perhaps 1 percent of the population. In the Middle Ages, just as today, people could be blinded accidentally, most notably as a result of work-related accidents, to which the building trade doubtless paid a heavy tribute. But they could also be victims of war or violence of another order: in 1449, a case of the mutilation and blinding of children kidnapped by criminals and forced into begging was the talk of Paris. Moreover, penal corrections could be just as cruel as the crimes they were intended to punish. In several legal compendiums from the time of Charlemagne to that of Saint Louis, blindness is mentioned among the sanctions inflicted on thieves. That such a punishment figures in books does not prove that it was frequently applied. However, this atrocious punishment is cited in the twelfth-century Roman de Rou as one of the mutilations suffered by Norman peasants who revolted against Richard II.² Finally, rich or poor, a person could be the victim of hereditary diseases, as was perhaps the case with John the Blind, Count of Luxembourg and King of Bohemia (1296–1348), whose father and uncle had had poor vision and who was ministered to in vain by the doctors of Montpellier faculty before completely losing his sight at age forty.

The blind since birth or infancy; those who became blind later on; victims of illness, violence, or accidents: just who were the blind in the Middle Ages? Men, women, children, the elderly, adults in the prime of life; poor people, many poor people, most of the time nameless and yet quite present in hospice archives and in hagiographic literature; but also the not-so-poor, the rich, and even some heads of state whose exploits were the talk of the moment. They crop up here and there, in words and images, in the Lives of the saints, in collections of miracles and exempla. As in the Gospels, they are there to attest to a Light that heals the heart by healing the eyes.

The blind are also to be found in the archives of charitable institutions : they bear witness to the rich who helped them. Prestigious blind people appear in the stories of the chroniclers. There are, for example, Bela II, King of Hungary from 1131 to 1141; Dandolo, Doge of Venice from 1192 to 1205 (the year of his death in Constantinople); John of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia from 1310 to 1356, whom we already mentioned, and Jan Žižka, leader of the Hussite revolt from 1419 to 1424. These men speak for themselves and their own courage, but they also attest to the values of the society of their times. The elderly Dandolo leading the Venetians in the 1203 conquest of Constantinople or John the Blind on horseback, commanding his men at the Battle of Crécy, where he met his death on August 26, 1346: these were things made to fire the medieval imagination in the way the exploits of the winners of the Paralympics astonish a public infatuated with sports and sensationalism.

Real or fictional, the blind appear, lastly, in religious or profane theater and in the fabliaux, usually to provoke laughter at their own expense, because disabilities were often perceived quite negatively, and no one hesitated to poke fun at them.

All these blind people whose trace we find in the archives and in literature, where were they to be found? Throughout the Middle Ages, the blind poor could be found in the company of children, widows, the elderly, the lame,³ crowding in during the distributions of provisions and clothing organized in both city and countryside by the various institutions of ecclesiastical and lay charity that succeeded one another in France: hostels and monastic almonries, monastic hospices [Maisons-Dieu], communal charitable organizations, episcopal or princely almonries, and, finally, the Royal Almonry, whose founding seems to date to 1190,⁴ and which, from the thirteenth century on, played a particularly important role in the organization of aid to the blind in France.

These indigent blind people could live with their families without leaving their town or village. They could also roam the highways to take better advantage of the distributions offered by various charitable institutions. Or they might try to benefit from the generosity of individuals by begging from door to door, on roads, in public squares, or at church portals. To do so, they might be itinerant singers, animal trainers, storytellers, or musicians,⁵ professions they still practiced in the middle of the nineteenth century. Finally, they might live in institutions founded especially for them as early as the eleventh century by gentlemen of renown or wealthy donors.

If the poorest of the blind encountered each other on the roads of beggarly vagrance, both rich and poor could meet on pilgrimage trails. Indeed, the powerlessness of both learned and practical medicine to cure serious ocular ailments led those stricken to have recourse to prayer and miracles. The relics of healing saints, the fountains and the holy sites dedicated to them, and certain sanctuaries consecrated to Our Lady thus attracted numerous blind pilgrims from all walks of life. But there were also specialized pilgrimage sites under the patronage of saints reputed to cure diseases of the eye either because of the etymology or sound of their names (Saints Clair or Claire, Saint Lucy)⁶ or because of the specific details of their personal history: Saint Paul—temporarily blinded at the moment of his conversion; Saint Odile—abbess of the monastery of Hohenburg in Alsace at the beginning of the eighth century; Saint Léger—bishop of Autun in the seventh century and a martyr whose eyes were gouged out under torture. Recourse to this category of saints and other practices linked to the doctrine of signatures persisted until the nineteenth century.

If hagiographic literature of the thirteenth century shows us blind pilgrims of different stations seeking cures and sometimes alms without passing negative judgment, comic literature and theater in the French vernacular of the same period paint a very different picture.

Derision and Blindness

The character of the blind beggar, miserable and pathetic, appears in one of the first examples of profane theater in French, a short comic play in two parts: The Boy and the Blind Man. This farce, doubtless initially a fairground spectacle mimicking a street scene taken from everyday life, originated in Tournai in the second half of the thirteenth century.⁷ It presents a blind beggar seeking a guide: I must have sunk really low, laments the blind man, to not have even a youngster to bring me back home.⁸ Unfortunately for him, he finds his man in the person of a wily, penniless boy who, after gaining the blind man’s confidence, takes advantage of his disability by stealing his savings.

This play, which turns on deception, paints a deliberately unpleasant portrait of the blind man: he is a hypocrite who feigns piety in order to better collect alms. (In this way, he is a perfect fit with the social practices of his day, according to which the rich man gave to the poor to assure his own salvation—and this, in particular, thanks to the prayers of the recipient of his offering.) Sanctimonious, he is also a pseudo-pauper. Made rich by public charity, he is a miser who exploits his malady to accrue more and more money. Little by little, as his confidant wins his trust, he reveals his true nature: he’s a drunkard and a glutton, coarse, cynical, and debauched. The public, therefore, will not pity him when his valet strips him of his possessions, taking leave with these words, which express all the contempt that could be had for blind beggars at this time: ‘Shame on you! . . . To me, you are nothing but a piece of shit. You’re deceptive and envious. . . . If you don’t like it, come and get me!’⁹ The theme of the blind man duped by his guide—staged for the first time in this secular farce—had a long, bright future and provoked the laughter of theatergoers and readers of comic romances for centuries. Various examples can be found in medieval religious theater, in which the misadventures of the blind man and his (often lame) valet allow for burlesque interludes. The two disabled men sometimes dread a cure for fear of having to work, or they are cured in spite of themselves by a saint whose life and miracles are then celebrated or by Christ, in commemoration of the Passion.

The blind of comedy, suspected of every vice—laziness, foolishness, vanity, hypocrisy, drunkenness, a passion for gambling, lust—are at times, deception of deceptions, suspected of feigning blindness itself. This is precisely the point of departure for a story written by Cortebarbe, The Three Blind Men of Compiègne. This fabliau, which made its first appearance in thirteenth-century Picardy, had a long posterity.

The fabliau tells of the misadventure that befalls three blind beggars deceived by a cleric. The three blind comrades, without a single valet to guide or to lead them,¹⁰ take off on the road from Compiègne to Senlis. A cleric coming on horseback from Paris, accompanied by his squire, crosses paths with them and suspects them of faking their blindness. To put them to the test, he pretends to give them a beggar’s pouch. Each man thinks his companion has received it, and they all decide to return to Compiègne to live it up a little thanks to the unexpected offering. The cleric trails them to enjoy the rest of the adventure. The blind men, true to their reputation as drunkards and gluttons, enter an inn; they eat and drink more than they should and have a good bed prepared, in which they sleep until an advanced hour of the morning.¹¹

The next day, the innkeeper comes to ask for his due. No pouch to be found. A dispute ensues between the three thieves, each of whom thinks the other has betrayed him. The innkeeper gets angry, threatens to throw them into the latrines, and has two clubs brought so as to beat them thoroughly. The cleric, so delighted that he is convulsed with laughter,¹² plays innocent, demands an explanation, and then, feigning pity, pays the bill of the three blind men, who get off with only a fright.

In this story, meant to be read in public—and of which we have found adaptations for the theater into the eighteenth century¹³—the blind are still presented in a pejorative fashion that prevents the spectators from feeling any pity and renders them indulgent toward the rascally trickster. Even if there are scenes in medieval religious theater that are not comic in the least, in which the blind man is there only to let the grandeur of God and his saints shine forth through a miracle,¹⁴ the literature of the period often depicts the blind as buffoons whose crude manners, clumsiness, and getups provoke laughter, or as pseudo-paupers to be tricked without remorse.

This very caricatural representation of the blind poor doubtless reveals a certain type of attitude toward poverty and disability in a society torn between a too-human reality and a too-lofty ideal.¹⁵ Indeed, poverty, the antithesis of all values,¹⁶ before some people made it the very condition of their mystical quest, first appeared to medieval man as a degrading aspect of the human condition, a form of humiliation and infamy with the weight of a malediction. ¹⁷ From this perspective, the poor beggar, suspected of laziness, lying, and vice, is regarded with condescension and a certain contempt. Moreover, despite the efforts of some theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century and Jean Gerson at the cusp of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, disability was often perceived as the visible mark of a transgression or an invisible moral defect: The lame and the blind . . . are too lowly to be mentioned in front of good and honorable persons; if nature has reduced them to this point and stigmatized them, it is because they have a sin to expiate.¹⁸

This sin could be their own or even that of their parents (especially in terms of the transgression of sexual taboos at the moment of a child’s conception). It is therefore not surprising that medieval literature was able to cast the blind beggar—whose disability symbolized blindness of the spirit and the dimming of intelligence—as a negative character who could be mercilessly laughed at by the public of farces and fabliaux, a public that came from all strata of society (and not just its lower orders).

In the midst of the Hundred Years’ War, in a capital ceded to the English and a kingdom torn by civil war, derision was taken so far as to make a spectacle of real blind people during a cruel joust evoking circus games. The scene, known to all historians of disabilities, is recounted in the