Abstract This article examines new institutions of professional reeducation for disabled veterans created in France during the Great War. Using the Ecole pratique et normale de rééducation professionnelle des mutilés et estropiés de guerre founded in Bordeaux in 1915 as a case study, it argues that attitudes and measures toward disability developed in specialized schools found a critical field of application in these establishments. The institutes of professional reeducation founded during the war were variations of the boarding school model created for deaf, blind, and physically disabled children during the nineteenth century. Following those precedents, they grew into comprehensive campuses that combined intellectual instruction, physical education, vocational training, and moral surveillance with a view to reinserting disabled ex-servicemen into society and the national economy. In their lofty aims, these institutions made disability a key locus of experimentation for reconstructing a nation devastated by war, eventually helping to transform twentieth-century approaches to disability more generally.
Sun-young Park (Sun,) studied this question.