Designing deaf spaces: education, hygiene, and citizenship in nineteenth-century France

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing architectural environments of deaf education in the nineteenth century, taking the national institutes in Paris and Bordeaux as its main focus. Founded in the late eighteenth century and initially housed in government-expropriated properties, both schools underwent comprehensive renovation and reconstruction projects in the nineteenth century to emerge as modern educational spaces. Although these projects remain overlooked in the history of modern architecture, they were closely tied to contemporary discourses on education, hygiene, and citizenship. The renovation of the Paris Institute for Deaf-Mutes during the 1820s–30s engaged pressing questions about hygiene and social progress in the postrevolutionary era of national reconstruction. The architectural transformation of the Bordeaux Institute for Deaf-Mute Girls from the 1860s not only reflected the changing pedagogical focus from sign language to oralism; it was also imbricated in broader debates about laïcité and educational standardisation as France transitioned from empire to republic. Far from being marginal, these institutions functioned as key sites for working through notions of citizenship and national identity. Their histories reveal how architectural and material frameworks could serve to impose ideology on the one hand, and provide important grounds for the formation of a minority community on the other.