Abbé Sicard's Deaf Education

Abbé Sicard was a French revolutionary priest and an innovator of French and American sign language. He enjoyed a meteoric rise from Toulouse and Bordeaux to Paris and, despite his non-conformist tendencies, he escaped the guillotine. In fact, the revolutionaries acknowledged his position and during the Terror of 1794, they made him the director of the first school for the deaf. Later, he became a member of the first Ecole Normale, the National Institute, and the Académie Française. He is r