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

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

He founded the world's first public school for the deaf in Paris, according to various sources either in 1754, 1762 or 1763, which became the "Institution Nationale des sourds-muets de Paris". His educational method emphasised using gestures or hand-signs to visually represent the French language, based on the principle that "the education of deaf mutes must teach them through the eye what other people acquire through the ear". He was motivated by the desire that deaf people should be able to receive the sacraments and thus avoid going to hell.

Students of Epee's teaching methods established 21 schools in his lifetime, and his method has since spread around the world.

He is said to have noticed the vibrant Deaf community in Paris at the time and, in line with growing philosophical thought of the time, came to realise that deaf people were capable of language. He used signs from the Old French Sign Language, though he didn't recognise it as a language but saw it rather as a crude system of gestures. He combined these signs with a manual alphabet that had been used in Spain to educate deaf sons of nobility, and formalised them into a system.

He has often been wrongly cited as the inventor of French Sign Language and the manual alphabet, and falsely described as 'teaching the deaf to sign'.

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 many signs with him that are now part of modern American Sign Language - among them the signs for the alphabet that Epee used.

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.

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"
• He also began a "Dictionnaire général des signes", which was completed by one of his pupils, the Abbé Sicard .