Abstract
Between September 1791 and 1792, the political complexion of the Revolution had greatly changed. The guarded optimism Sicard had expressed to Laffon de Ladebat had proved warranted. The king had tried to escape France in June 1791, fearing that he could no longer rule over the powerful forces opposed to him and the limitations to his power that the Assembly had imposed on him. He had been virtually under house arrest with his family in the Tuileries Palace since the October Days of 1789. The Brissotin faction in the Legislative Assembly of 1791–1792 passed several laws over the king’s veto to indict the refractory priests (whom Louis was protecting) as dangerous counterrevolutionaries. The series of punitive laws they imposed called for such punishments as deportation or even death. The faction warned of collusion between the royal family and their Austrian Hapsburg relatives against the Revolution. (The Austrian Emperor was the brother of Marie Antoinette.) The Brissotin faction became a virtual “war party,” demanding military action against all monarchs who threatened to intervene and restore the Old Regime in France. On July 25, 1792, the Allied commander had issued the Brunswick Manifesto, holding the Parisians responsible for the safety of the royal family and threatening summary punishment of offenders.
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Notes
One example, in July 1794, was the Idéologue Destutt de Tracy while he was in prison. He learned of the fall of Robespierre when a woman appeared at the prison window and did a pantomime throwing open her robe, casting a pierre (stone), and finally making the motion of executing herself. Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology” (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), 37.
D. Berman, “Deism, Immortality and the Art of Theological Lying,” in Deism, Masonry, and the Enlightenment: Essays Honoring Alfred Owen Aldrich, J. A. Leo Lemay, ed. (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 61–78.
Tuetey, IX, 1437, 1447; X, 534; AN F/7/3366; “Procès-verbaux du comité de surveillance de l’Arsenal,” 132–133 bis., AN F/7/3366; See also the accusation of Dame Duplanoir, 2 jour, 1er mois, l’an deux, Archives de la Police de Paris, AA II A782; H. Calvet, Un Instrument de la Terreur à Paris; le Comité de Salut public ou de surveillance du département de Paris (8 juin 1793–21messidor an II) (Paris [thèse ès lettres]: Nizet, 1941), 13, 13n, 362, 318. Of the three thousand priests in Paris at one time during the Revolution, two hundred formally abdicated their faith to avoid execution, while Sicard continued to say Mass. Bernard Plonger on et al. Les Prêtres abdicataires pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1965), 13–14.
Also Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution, Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972), 148. Godechot states that 24,000 of France’s clergy emigrated.
BHVP, 811, fol. 30: Catalogue Caravan, no. 28, Letter dated 8 Prairial, Year III [May 27, 1795]; Raymonde Monnier and Albert Soboul, Répertoire du personnel sectionnaire Parisien de l’an II (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1985), 393.
Cf. Karacostas, Annexe. Popular language, as opposed to the parliamentary and journalistic prose studied by Alphonse Aulard, has been studied by Sonia Branca-Rosoff and Natalie Schneidern, L’écriture des citoyens. Une analyse linguistique de l’écriture des peu-lettrés pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Klincksieck, 1994).
Several others have studied popular writings of the revolutionary surveillance committees: Michel de Certeau and Dominique Julia and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois, L’Enquête de Grégoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). The language of the deaf during the revolutionary period belongs somewhere in here. Also, by contrast, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange studied the efforts of the Convention to impose a uniform, universal French in place of dialects and patois: Idéologie, Révolution et uniformité de la langue (Sprimont: Mardaga, 1996). See also Branca’s dissertation “Grammaire générale et éducation des sourds-muets au dix-huitième siècle; l’oeuvre de l’abbé Sicard” at the Université Paris III.
AN F/15/2459. A general account of philanthropy is Catherine Duprat, Le Temps des Philanthropes: La philanthropie des Lumières à la monarchie de Juillet (Paris: Editions du CTHS, 1983).
Moniteur 88: 28 Frimaire Year IV [December 19, 1795], 352; cf. ibid., no. 163, 13 Ventôse Year IV (March 3, 1796); R. R Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), appendix. Palmer’s chart of total budgets of all former Parisian collèges combined in the Prytanée français in 1800 was less than one quarter of the 1789 allocation. “Le Prytanée français … ,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 143 (March-April 1981): 133, 150, 151.
Règlement of 18 Vendémiaire, Year VIII (September 30, 1799); Buton, L’Administration des faveurs, passim. The Règlements of the institution seem mild compared to those of Year X at the famous Benedictine Abbaye-Ecole de Sorèze, Archives de l’Abbaye-Ecole (a military school under the Empire). This document was kindly communicated to the author by the archivist of the Abbaye, Marie-Odile Murder. Cf. Patrick Clastres, “L’internat public au XIXe siècle, Questions politiques ou pédagogiques?” in Pierre Caspard et al., Lycées, Lycéens Lycéennes: Deux siècles d’histoire (Paris: INRP, 2005), 397–419,
and Jean-Claude Caron, A l’Ecole de la violence. Châtiments et sévices dans l’instruction scolaire au XIXe siècle (Paris: Auber, 1999).
A. Debidour, Recueil des Actes du Directoire Exécutif 4 vols. (1910–1917), I, 534–35. Hauterive, II, no. 36; July 20, 1805, no. 916; March 15, 1806. For instances in 1792 of fraudulent impersonations of the deaf in order to receive public assistance, see Tuetey, Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l’histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution française, 11 vols. (1890–1914), VII, 1072, 1110. The Council of 500 also took up the question of legal procedure (“instruction”) in the judgment of deaf-mutes on 14 Pluviôse, Year IV (February 3, 1796). See A. Debidour, I, 534–35n. Two years later, a proposal was made by a former deputy, Charles Chasset, against nominating a deaf-mute as a juge de paix (Débidour, III, 114).
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© 2015 Emmet Kennedy
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Kennedy, E. (2015). Passport through the Terror. In: Abbé Sicard’s Deaf Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137512864_2
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