IHe knows the subject and was not shy about expressing his way of thinking… Singer Gilbert Montagné, who has been blind since childhood, reacted strongly to Éric Zemmour’s remarks concerning the schooling of children with disabilities. The presidential candidate defended the opening of “specialized establishments”, pointing to an “obsession with inclusion”. “We decided to put everyone together, I think not, he said. Not to put them away, but to take better care of them. »
For the blind artist, this term “obsession with inclusion” does not pass. “It’s completely crazy in the sense that we’re part of the same world, okay? “replied Gilbert Montagné on the antenna of BFMTV. “Stupidity is to think that these people should be put in places where they are among themselves, so that it does not bother anyone,” he continued, referring to the fate of disabled people. . “Of course not. It is obvious that in certain situations, the children may prefer to stay in specialized establishments, but that must only represent a minority. We must be by your side, and vice versa, “said the interpreter ofWe are going to love each other and The Sunlights of the tropics.
And to recall his own case. “When I was little, I didn’t suffer from my visual impairment,” he said. I suffered from the fact that they didn’t take me to the kindergarten next door. I suffered from taking three quarters of an hour on the metro in the morning and evening to go to the only kindergarten in Paris that was willing to welcome children like me, children with visual impairments…”
burnt optic nerves
Gilbert Montagné was not born blind. As he has explained several times, he was the victim of a medical error that occurred in an incubator, in the 1950s, when he was very premature, the fourth child of a modest family. “I stayed three months in an incubator, he had told in 2016 in the show The storms of life, on W9. What happened was that at the time, we didn’t know the correct dosage of oxygen, they put too much in the incubator and it burned all the tissues, the optic nerves…” The infant will thus develop a retinopathy which will make him blind. But he will never blame the doctors, thanking them instead for keeping him alive. “If they hadn’t put enough in, I wouldn’t be here talking to you today…”
He grew up surrounded by his family, attended the National Institute for Blind Youth, a period when he developed his taste for music, before enrolling in second at Lycée Voltaire, in Paris, to find an education within the world of sighted people. “I never considered my disability as a barrier, he said on C8 three years ago. I always knew that I had a visual impairment, of course, but it’s when you go through an ordeal that you have to draw on your inner strength, that you have to believe in it…”
In addition to music, the artist has invested heavily in the defense of the blind, even becoming national secretary in charge of disabilities within the UMP in 2009. He applied himself to obtaining several advances, such as the generalization of the audio description of TV programs or films at the cinema, the sound touch on ticket machines and the installation of sound bus stops. And knows only one motto: “Everyone is different and important. »