Picture at left entitled "Signature of Madeleine Le Mansois in 1810, AD of Maine-et-Loire" from Yann Cantin. Madeleine Le Mansois (1750-1826).
Orphaned early in her life, her uncle took over her care. Due to coming from an aristocratic background, she obtained an outstanding education.
Madeleine fought to choose her marriage partner, despite her uncle's opposition. At age 25 (in 1776), she plans a secret wedding, but the courts will not allow her to marry due to laws forbidding the marriage of the deaf without parental consent. She fought for the right to marry despite being deaf at the highest court, the Parliament of Paris, and won. Since then, the deaf has the right to marry whom they choose (Cantin, Yann, 2019).
English transcript of French video below.
French deaf woman who defended her right to choose the person with whom to share her life. An uncommon situation at the time in which she lived (around 1775), and more so in the case of a deaf woman. The fact of being a trained woman gave her arguments to defend her independence before the Justice. This and other illustrious deaf personalities, starred in the visit that yesterday afternoon organized the World Federation of the Deaf Ry and the FNSF Fédération Nationale des Sourds de France to the Pantheon in Paris. You can see in this video the story of Madeleine Le Mansois.
Biographical Dictionary of the Great Deaf in France
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Order through interlibrary loan. Publisher is Archives and Culture, 2017, and the information is on p 302. Available for purchase via https://www.archivesetculture.org/product-page/dictionnaire-biographique-des-grands-sourds-en-france
Elements of French Deaf Heritage
French Deaf culture is regarded as a major influence on the formation of other Deaf cultures around the world, notably American Deaf culture. In Elements of French Deaf Heritage, Ulf Hedberg and Harlan Lane document the development of Deaf culture in France by way of Deaf schools, Deaf associations, private and professional networks, publishing, and the arts. This highly visual work captures these forces from the late 18th century through the end of the 19th century, when cultural formation began to shift to cultural maintenance. Encyclopedic in scope, this examination of the evolution of Deaf ethnicity in France aims to disseminate an extensive amount of archival information, now available for the first time in the English language.
Gazette of the courts, periodical work, containing the ...
The deaf community of the Belle Époque (1870-1920)
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For the past forty years, sociological studies on minorities have multiplied. Deaf Studies bring a new perspective on the deaf, and above all a completely new angle of analysis on the question of deafness, that of the existence and development of a real community, which goes far beyond the simple hearing impairment.
The chronology usually used for these studies is based on four pivotal dates:
- 1759-1760, when the Abbé de l'Épée, initiator of free education for deaf children, structures the deaf educational landscape;
- 1834, which marks with Ferdinand Berthier the beginning of the deaf militant movement. This second period, too idealized, called the Golden Age, runs from 1834 to 1880;
- 1880, from which the teaching of sign language disappears, dark period little studied
- 1970-2005, period known as the “Deaf Awakening”, cultural renewal of the deaf community. However, the absence of in-depth work on the Belle Époque prevents a detailed understanding of the transformations. This book therefore studies this pivotal period between the emergence of the community and the era of struggles. It allows us to better understand the evolutions of this community, its internal structure, its members, and what it left to later generations.
https://www.archivesetculture.org/product-page/la-communaut%C3%A9-sourde-de-la-belle-%C3%A9poque-1870-1920
Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France
Since the French Revolution in1789, Deaf French people have struggled to preserve their cultural heritage, to win full civil rights, and to gain access to society through their sign language. Anne T. Quartararo depicts this struggle in her new book Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France. In it, she portrays the genesis of the French Deaf community, examines its identity as a minority culture, and analyzes how deaf people developed their cultural heritage, a deaf patrimonie that has been historically connected to the preservation of French sign language. Quartararo begins by describing how Abbé de l'Epée promoted the education of deaf students with sign language, an approach supported by the French revolutionary government, which formally established the Paris Deaf Institute in 1791. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the school's hearing director, Roch-Ambroise-Auguste Bébian, advocated the use of sign language even while the institute's physician Dr. Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard worked to discredit signing. In this meticulous study, Quartararo details the many variations in deaf education from 1830 to1930. She describes the banquet movement in the 1830s led by Ferdinand Berthier, Alponse Lenoir, and Claudius Forestier, which celebrated sign language and fostered the deaf association known as the Société Centrale. Quartararo also recounts how hearing educators at the Milan Congress in 1880 universally adopted oralism as the way to defeat deafness, and prohibited sign language in deaf schools. French deaf people refused to submit to this attack upon their cultural heritage, however, and an explosion of social activity among deaf people between 1880 and 1900 created a host of active deaf groups in all corners of the country. Deaf Identity and Social Images paints a unique, rich tapestry of the resilience of French deaf people in defending their culture through the most trying century in their history.
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