It’s 202 years ago today that Louis Braille, the inventor of braille, was born in a small village in France, the youngest and fourth child in the Braile family.
On January 4, 2009, the braille world commemorated the 200th anniversary of Louis Braille’s birth by hosting an international conference in Paris.
My partner Ron and I left New Zealand on New Year’s Eve, 2008, flying to Paris to attend this conference and associated celebrations that commemorated this great day.
On his actual birthday, January 4, 2009, we attended celebrations including a visit to the Pantheon where Louis Braille’s ashes were contained in the crypt. We attended a night time concert at Nottradame to hear a recital by five blind organists as Louis Braille himself was a keen organist.
The conference itself commenced on January 5, 2009, at UNESCO’s conference facilities where over 400 delegates from 46 countries from all over the world attended, including 10 New Zealanders. The three days was full of the contribution Louis Braille had made to the blind world through his system of reading and writing. Details of his life and code were shared and discussions held around braille and it’s future.
The conference was punctuated on Wednesday January 7 by a dinner held in the City Hall in Paris and attended by the Paris Mayor. The morning after involved a visit to Louis Braille’s birthplace in a small village 40 km east of Paris in which we travelled by bus to get there.
This was a real highlight for me as we got to go into the Braille’s family kitchen and touched the board Louis’s father had made for him to learn the shape of print letters. We even got to go into the workshop where Louis had his accident at the age of three while playing with his father’s sharp saddle making tools.
On the wall above the front door of the Brailles’ house, a plaque says this is where Louis Braille was born and that he invented the
system of reading and writing using raised dots that enabled blind people all around the world to read and write. It also says, “He opened the doors of knowledge to all those who cannot see.”
Upon leaving the Braille’s house I knelt down in the front garden and placed a NZ flag containing the silver fern, just to let the braille world know kiwis had visited this special place.
Louis Braille died in 1852, at the age of 43, from tuberculosis. No French papers noted his passing and his code was not adopted until 2 years later in 1854.
Louis Braille was originally buried in a simple grave in the
small cemetery in his hometown. In 1952, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his death, public feeling grew that his remains should be moved to the Pantheon
in Paris, where France’s national heroes are buried. The mayor of Coupvray protested that Louis Braille was a true child of the area and that some of him
should remain in his home village. His hands were separated from his arms and re-buried in Coupvray.
The rest of his body was interred in the Pantheon following a huge public ceremony attended by dignitaries from all over the world, including Helen
Keller, who gave a speech in what the New York Times reported as “faultlessly grammatical” French. She declared, to a rousing ovation from the hundreds
of other Braille readers in attendance, that “we, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg.”
To think – Louis Braille was born and died in obscurity yet his contribution to the world was immense. Just imagine his contribution if he hadn’t gone blind through that accident in his father’s workshop. Talk about silver linings!
Happy 202 birthday – Louis Braille!
what he looked like.doc
