Article
Louis Braille, Charles Barbier, and the making of a myth
One of the most persistent myths surrounding the invention of braille is the notion that it began with a code developed for the military by Charles Barbier, which Louis Braille adapted for use by blind people -- how did this myth get started?
Philippa Campsie has a bachelor’s degree in history and biology, and a master’s degree in urban planning. For many years, she taught at the University of Toronto. Since 2016, she has been studying the early history of braille, after being given access to the papers of Charles Barbier in Paris. Earlier this year, she participated in a BBC Podcast about Louis Braille.
The image above shows Charles Barbier on the left, from a portrait in the Musée Louis Braille in Coupvray, France. On the right is a marble bust of Louis Braille in the museum at the Association Valentin Haüy in Paris. Both photographs by the author.
What Braille said
Let’s start with the words of Louis Braille (1809–1852). In the preface to his first publication in 1829, which introduced his six-dot method, he stated:
“The ease with which one can learn and put into practice the ingenious procedure for writing with dots, invented by Mr. Barbier especially for the blind, would have been more than enough reason for us to dispense with publishing an alternative procedure, if we hadn’t felt the need for a writing system in which the signs take less room than those of Mr. Barbier, were of sufficient number to represent all the characters in ordinary writing, and could be applied to music and plainsong [emphasis added].” (Braille, Procédé)
One wonders how many people have actually read those words.
School directors and historians
Alexandre-René Pignier, director of the School for Blind Youth in Paris, where Braille had studied and taught, described Charles Barbier (1767–1841) in this way:
“A man who was much occupied with different means of communication and correspondence, the author of “Essay on diverse methods of French shorthand,” Mr. Charles Barbier, had proposed a way to represent words by a certain number of points arranged in a methodical fashion, which, forming a raised surface by the way in which they were traced using very simple tools, could be felt by blind people and could thus serve as a handy form of writing and an easy method of communication.” (Pignier, Notice biographique).
Histories of the school written by Joseph Guadet in 1850 and Edgard Guilbeau in 1907 describe Barbier’s invention in similar terms: raised-point writing intended for people who were blind, created with simple tools. Nobody ever suggested that the method was meant for or used by the military.
Two facts caused confusion
Barbier had indeed been in the military. He attended a military academy as a teenager and served with the artillery for a few years before the French Revolution. In 1792, when he was 25, Barbier moved to the United States, where he worked as a teacher and surveyor in Kentucky. When he returned to France in his thirties, he did not rejoin the army.
Barbier’s method was often called “night-writing” (écriture nocturne). Barbier did not coin the expression himself – he called his invention “point-writing” or écriture ponctuée – but he did sometimes use the term. Unfortunately, “night-writing” makes it sound as if the method had been created for sighted people to use in the dark. But still, for a century after Braille’s death, nobody ever suggested that those people were soldiers.
Where did the story come from?
The myth originated in the 1950s, as plans were made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Louis Braille’s death in 1852. A new biography was called for. Two French writers got to work.
One was Pierre Henri, an academic historian who was blind. His book, The Life and Work of Louis Braille, indicates that he had no access to Barbier’s original publications or correspondence, so he had to speculate. “Former artillery captain, Barbier had perhaps earlier realized how useful it would be for officers in the field to write messages in the dark and eventually read them with their fingers.” (Henri, La vie et l’œuvre) He also suggested that Barbier offered his method to the school only after attending an event in 1819 at which students from the Institution for Blind Youth demonstrated their ability to read and write using raised letters. In fact, Barbier had offered his invention to the school shortly after publishing his book in 1815, but it had been rejected by the director at that time.
The second writer went even farther. Jean Roblin was a local historian from Coupvray, who helped set up the Louis Braille Museum (which exists to this day). He was not an academic, and he wanted to write a popular account of Braille’s life for a general audience. He took Henri’s suggestion and turned it into a good story, not letting any facts get in the way.
“Charles Barbier, an artillery captain in Louis XVIII’s army, had noticed difficulties in transmitting orders during night maneuvers. With his inventive mind, he solved the difficulty by combining on thin cardboard dots and dashes in relief, which in combination gave orders to be carried out: “Advance!” “General withdrawal,” etc. Thus no matter how dark, the order could be rapidly deciphered merely by touch. This system was called ‘night writing.’ ’’ (Roblin, Reading Fingers)
Roblin’s fictional account included giving Barbier a commission in the army of the restored king of France (who took the throne after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815) and making his invention one of dots and dashes. The myth was complete.
From speculation to accepted fact
Roblin’s short book was translated into English and circulated widely. All later writers followed his lead, some adding further colourful details, such as this example from the Australian writer Lennard Bickel, who refers to Barbier as “the Captain”:
“In his experience of battle in the Napoleonic Wars the Captain had known of a forward gunpost being over-run and the men slaughtered when they betrayed their position by lighting a lamp to read night orders from headquarters. The loss of good men fired the Captain’s fertile mind, and he began to cast around for a method of framing orders in a form that would need neither light, nor eyes, but which could be deciphered by touch, in the dark.” (Bickel, Triumph)
Ever since the 1950s, Barbier’s experience as a teacher, his experiments with shorthand and alternative writing methods, his passion to extend literacy to those who had been excluded from formal education (he also created a sign language for deaf people and a form of simplified writing for children who were otherwise deprived of an education) have been overlooked in favour of a colorful war story.
Barbier’s philanthropic intentions have been downplayed to the point at which the author of The Unseen Minority asserted: “Opening up the world of written language to the blind was the furthest thing from the mind of the man who devised the basic concept that made it possible. He was Charles Barbier, an officer in Napoleon’s army, and he was after a method of sending coded military messages that could be employed under cover of darkness.” (Koestler, Unseen)
Barbier gets the last word
Here is Barbier’s own account of his method, published in 1815:
“Those blind from birth, deprived, like other blind people, of the means of reading books and writing, experience the greatest difficulties in correctly tracing conventional letters… écriture ponctuée… executed without ink or pencil with a metal tool to impress regular points which can be felt with the hand and which remain sensible to the touch, seems to offer the greatest advantages, but it is only in establishments consecrated to their instruction that one could properly determine the results.”
Here, at least, Barbier gets to have the last word.
Further reading
Campsie, Philippa. 2021. Charles Barbier: A hidden story. Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 2.
Works cited
Barbier, Charles. 1815, p. 20. Essai sur divers procédés d’expéditive française. Paris, published by the author. Available on Google Books.
Bickel, Lennard. 2015. Triumph Over Darkness: The Life of Louis Braille. London, Bloomsbury. Available on Google Books.
Braille, Louis. 1829, pp. i–ii. Procédé pour écrire les Paroles, la Musique et le Plain-chant au moyen de points, Posted online, with English translations, by the National Federation of the Blind.
Henri, Pierre. 1952, p. 37. La vie et l’œuvre de Louis Braille. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. An English translation was published in 1987 by the South African National Council for the Blind, but it is not available online.
Koestler, France. 1976, p. 102. The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States. New York, American Foundation for the Blind. Available online through the AFB.
Pignier, Alexandre-René. 1829, p. 13. Notice Biographique sur Trois Professeurs, Anciens Élèves de l’Institution des Jeunes Aveugles de Paris. Paris, Imprimerie de Madame Veuve Bouchard-Huzard. Available on Google Books.
Roblin, Jean. 1952, p. 16. The Reading Fingers: Life of Louis Braille, 1809–1852. New York, American Foundation for the Blind. Available on the Internet Archive.
Resources from the Perkins Archives
- The history of braille : Learn more about the different types of methods of reading and writing for people who are blind over the last few centuries, and explore the resources at the end of this guide from the Research Library and Archives team.
- First embossed book for blind on Flickr.com. Printed in 1786, “Essai Sur L’Education des Aveugles,” by Valentin Haüy is the first embossed book printed for use by the blind.
- Procedure for Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong in Dots, 1829 on Flickr.com. This album features sample images of the copy of Louis Braille’s book proprosing braille that is held in the Perkins Archives. For a detailed description of the book and full transcription, please visit the Natioanl Federation of the Blind.
Recommended citation
Campsie, Philippa. “Louis Braille, Charles Barbier, and the making of a myth.” Perkins Archives blog, Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown MA, February 10, 2025.
