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Abstract:
The war and Nazi Occupation framed and provided a catalyst for the fight for the citizenship rights of French deaf people, which took precedence over the politics of the conflict. Based on articles published in La Gazette des sourds-muets during the Second World War, and evidence from written and sign language memoirs and interviews, a discourse emerges revealing that deaf people in France mobilised and petitioned for the recognition of their worthiness and rights as French citizens at both local and national levels. Deaf people won the right to be employed in the war factories and to "serve" France by participating in the Releve. Yet the fact that deaf people played active roles in the war as workers, soldiers, teachers and journalists, and that concerns within the deaf community were privileged above national and international politics, has meant that ambiguities remain about allegiance and collaboration. The fear that this history might create rifts within the French deaf community has meant that these stories have remained hidden until now.
Keywords
Deaf, sourds-muets, rights, citizenship, sign language, France, Second World War
There has been no academic work by D/deaf1 or hearing scholars specifically documenting the experiences of deaf people in wartime France. The sources and analysis provided here about the fight for the rights of deaf people during this period respond not only to a gap in the documentation of French deaf people's experiences in the mid-twentieth century but also to a recognised lacuna in writing by and about deaf people from the start of the twentieth century until the 1980s. This contrasts with the body of artistic and theoretical work on poetry, education, literature and philosophy/ethics that was produced by and about deaf people in the nineteenth century (Benvenuto, 2013/4; Berthier, 1852; Esmail, 2008). In Deaf Studies and Deaf Education literature, this decline in works by and about deaf people is attributed to a drop in literacy due to the phasing out of sign language teaching at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century (Cuxac, 1983; Lane, 1984; Rée, 1999).
In line with the lack of research on this period, there is a corresponding paucity of factual documentation and published works about the wartime experiences of deaf people in France.2...