The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille
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The Blind in French Society from the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804772389 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/07/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 424 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE BLIND IN FRENCH SOCIETY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO CENTURY OF LOUIS BRAILLE
By Zina Weygand
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5768-3
Chapter One
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," 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, nutritionaldeficiencies, 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. 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 Zizka, 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," 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, 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, 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) 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. 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." 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!'" 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," 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."
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," 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 century-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," 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." Indeed, poverty, "the antithesis of all values," 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." 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."
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 Journal of a Bourgeois of Paris and took place in 1425:
The last Sunday of August, there was an entertainment at the Hôtel d'Armagnac on the rue Saint-Honoré for which four armored blind men were placed in a lists, each one a baton in hand, and in the lists there was a piglet that they could have if they were able to kill it. And so it was; and this made for a battle so strange, because they administered so many great blows to each other, that they were the worse for it, because however much they thought to strike the piglet, they struck each other, and if they had really been armed, they'd have killed each other. On Saturday, following the Sunday vigils, the said blind men were led through Paris in suits of armor and were preceded by a large banner on which there was the image of a pig, and in front of them, a man playing a tabret.
In this scene where poor fellows are treated as fairground animals akin to the pig they aim to kill, we can see the most extreme relegation of the blind to a sphere of otherness on the part of a society that felt it had nothing in common with them save a charitable duty.
We still wonder whether, in this "other" that the blind person represented, medieval society could recognize that obscure part of itself that it did not know what to do with for lack of available solutions: disease, incurable; poverty, endemic; violence, omnipresent-sin, in a word, the trace of which spectators could equally detect in themselves. Otherness, then, but a familiar otherness that could be exorcised by laughter at the expense of an affliction that was, moreover, quite feared at the time, as it is to this day.
Whatever the most relevant interpretation of this-sometimes cruel-attitude of derisiveness toward the blind may be, medieval society, under the influence of the church, demonstrated much more charitable behavior toward them at the same time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE BLIND IN FRENCH SOCIETY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO CENTURY OF LOUIS BRAILLE by Zina Weygand Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Abbreviations....................viiForeword, by Catherine Kudlick....................viii
Preface, by Alain Corbin....................x
Introduction....................1
Chapter 1. The Middle Ages....................11
Chapter 2. The Beginning of Modern Times....................24
Chapter 3. Groundwork for a History of Blindness in the Classical Age....................36
Chapter 4. Sensationalism and Sensorial Impairments....................57
Chapter 5. Philanthropy and the Education of the Sensorially Impaired....................80
Chapter 6. The move of the Quinze-Vingts and the Annuity from the Public Treasury....................110
Chapter 7. The establishment of the institute for the deaf, dumb, and Blind (1791-1794)....................121
Chapter 8. The national institute for Blind Workers....................136
Chapter 9. The merging of the for Blind Workers and the hospice of the Quinze-Vingts....................158
Chapter 10. The Blind in France at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century....................173
Chapter 11. Social representations and Literary Figures of Blindness in the First Third of the Nineteenth Century....................189
Chapter 12. The Quinze-Vingts Under the Consulate and the Empire: Implementing a Productivist Utopia....................219
Chapter 13. The Quinze-Vingts the Restoration: A "Memory Site" of the Ultra-Royalist Reaction....................253
Chapter 14. The royal for Blind Youth the Restoration....................261
Conclusion....................293
Notes....................301
Bibliography....................392