Charles-Michel de l'Epée

Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epée, b. in Versailles, 25 November, 1712; d. in Paris, 23 December, 1789.

The Abbé de l'Epée was a philanthropic Jansenist priest from 18th century France who has become known as the 'father of the deaf'.

Overview

Born to a wealthy family in Versailles, the seat of political power in what was then the most powerful kingdom of Europe, Epee was a practising Catholic priest for 25 years. His Jansenist sympathies were viewed with hostility at the time by the Roman Catholic church and the French royal government, and he was eventually divested of his priestly duties.

He turned his attention toward the vibrant deaf community in Paris, and sometime in the 1750s he founded a shelter for the deaf, which he ran with his own private income. In line with emerging philosophical thought, Epee came to believe that deaf people were capable of language. Motivated by the desire that deaf people should be able to receive the sacraments and thus avoid going to hell, he began to develop a system of instruction of the French language and religion. In the early 1760s his shelter became became the world's first free school for the deaf.

Though his focus was on religious education, his pubic advocacy and development of "Signed French" enabled deaf people to legally defend themselves in court for the first time. His methods of education have also spread around the world, and the Abbé de l’Epée is seen today as one of the founding fathers of deaf education.

Abbé de l’Epée died at the beginning of the French Revolution (1789), and two years later his school became the "Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets à Paris" by action of the new republican National Constituent Assembly. In 1799 the institute that Epée had founded began to receive government funding.

The Instructional Method of Signs

His educational method emphasised using gestures or hand-signs, based on the principle that "the education of deaf mutes must teach them through the eye what other people acquire through the ear". He recognised that the deaf community had their own language (now known as Old French Sign Language) and advised his (hearing) teachers to learn it so as to be able to use it for instruction. However, he viewed their language as inferior, and intended to "refine" or adapt the grammar of the sign language to comform to the grammar of French, and eventually become a word-for-word representation ('Signed French'). To this end he combined these signs with a two-handed manual alphabet, though he was more interested in building French words from signs representing morphemes or latin roots.

Epee, to a lesser degree, also used speech and lipreading with his pupils.

Educational legacy

What distinguished Epee from educators of the deaf before him, and ensured his place in history, is that he allowed his methods and classrooms to be available to the public and other educators. As a result of his openness, his methods would become so influential that their mark is still apparent in deaf education today (see Manually Coded English for modern examples of his approach). Epee also established teacher-training programs for foreigners who would take his methods back to their countries, and who established numerous deaf schools around the world. Laurent Clerc, a deaf pupil of the Paris school, went on to co-found the first school for the deaf in North America and took with him many signs that are now part of modern American Sign Language, among them the signs of the ASL alphabet (though Epee himself never used it – see below).

Deaf schools in Germany and England that were contemporaries of the Abbé de l'Epee's Paris School used an 'oralist' approach emphasising speech and lipreading in contrast to his belief in 'manualism'. The oralism vs. manualism debate still rages to this day. Oralism is sometimes called the 'German method' and manualism and the 'French method' in reference to those times.

Myths about Epée

Even today Epee is commonly described as the inventor of Sign Language, or as having 'taught the deaf to sign'. In fact he was taught to sign by the deaf. He is also wongly cited as the inventor of the one-handed manual alphabet. Epee had actually been quite disdainful of the advocates of fingerspelling, and had himself used a different (two-handed) alphabet in instances where he felt it necessary to use one.

Published works

• (1776) "Institution des sourds-muets par la voie des signes méthodiques"
• (1794) "La véritable manière d'instruire les sourds et muets, confirmée par une longue expérience" (published posthumously)
• He also began a "Dictionnaire général des signes", which was completed by his apprentice, the Abbé Sicard.