From pre-normal to abnormal: the emergence of a concept in late eighteenth-century France

Abstract

This article explores the concept of 'normal' in the late-eighteenth century. It focuses on how these pre-normal meanings illuminate contemporaneous depictions of the role and importance of sexuality. The current sense of the term 'normal' enters the dictionaries relatively late in the period, having been a synonymous but less common alternative for 'perpendicular' in geometry. Indeed, 'normal' is so unfamiliar a word that the important late-nineteenth-century dictionary/encyclopaedia, the Grand Larousse du dix-neuvième siècle (1866-1877), draws attention to its novelty, explaining that it is initially hard to understand. So this article partly aims to deepen our understanding of the emergence of the term, and thus to fill in the context of Canguilhem's seminal work on The normal and the pathological (1989). It investigates the proliferation of terms that indicate a deviation from the norm, many of which (such as 'enormous')predate the idea of the 'normal' by many centuries. French and English sources such as Johnson, Comte and Fourier are drawn on to chart the progress and associations of the terms and in particular to investigate the proliferation of meanings immediately before its emergence in the 'pre-normal' materialist thinkers Diderot and Lamarck.

Numbering normal

“…The term originated from geometry as a way of describing the relationship between lines. 106 In what we might term the 'prenormal' era, alternative words such as orderly, regularly, natural and virtuous were used, but historian Caroline Warman contends that such conceptions of normality were tied: '(a) with measurement and senses of straight or deviating lines (b) moral and sexual behaviour, and thus, with binaries of values which are generalised into morality' . 107 These links between measurement, morality and normalcy were strengthened by the work of Adolphe Quetelet.…”

‘The Revolution is to the human mind what the African sun is to vegetation’: Revolution, heat, and the normal school project

“…This usage was an importation from German, whose model schools, or Normalschulen , provided the name if little else (François, 2016), these French schools modelling themselves explicitly on a very specific Revolutionary military model of teaching, as we shall see. Prior to this period, in French, normal had generally been used as a synonym for the perpendicular line (Cryle and Stephens, 2017: 25; Warman, 2010: 203). Normal in connection with school was therefore a novel concept in French, as we can tell from the fact that the Décade philosophique , a journal close to the educational thinkers of the Comité d’instruction publique (Committee of Public Education), the body tasked with setting it up, published an explanatory definition in November 1794.…”