Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (born September 17, 1743, Ribemont, France—died March 29, 1794, Bourg-la-Reine) was a French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform and women’s rights. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators of the ideas of progress, or the indefinite perfectibility of humankind.

He was descended from the ancient family of Caritat, who took their title from Condorcet, a town in Dauphiné. He was educated at the Jesuit college in Reims and at the College of Navarre in Paris, where he showed his first promise as a mathematician. In 1769 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences, to which he contributed papers on mathematical and other subjects.

Condorcet was the friend of almost all the distinguished persons of his time and a zealous propagator of the progressive views then current among French literati. He was a protégé of the French philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and took an active part in the preparation of the Encyclopédie. He was elected to the permanent secretaryship of the Academy of Sciences in 1777 and to the French Academy in 1782 and was a member of other European academies. In 1785 he published his Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions), a remarkable work that has a distinguished place in the history of the doctrine of probability. A second edition, greatly enlarged and completely recast, appeared in 1805 under the title of Éléments du calcul des probabilités, et son application aux jeux de hasard, à la loterie et aux jugements des hommes.

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In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), with whom he formed a remarkable intellectual partnership on the basis of their shared democratic convictions and their benign and optimistic view of human nature. Her salon at the Hôtel des Monnaies, where Condorcet lived in his capacity as inspector general of the mint, was one of the most famous of the time, attracting foreign dignitaries and intellectuals including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Cesare Beccaria.

Condorcet published his Vie de M. Turgot in 1786 and his Vie de Voltaire in 1789. Those biographies of his friends reveal his sympathy with Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot’s economic theories about mitigating the suffering of the French populace before the French Revolution and with Voltaire’s opposition to the church. Both works were widely and eagerly read and are perhaps, from a purely literary point of view, the best of Condorcet’s writings.

The outbreak of the French Revolution, which he greeted with enthusiasm, involved him in a great deal of political activity. He was elected to represent Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became its secretary, was active in the reform of the educational system, was chief author of the address to the European powers in 1791, and in 1792 he presented a scheme for a system of state education, which was the basis of that ultimately adopted. Condorcet was one of the first to declare for a republic, and in August 1792 drew up the declaration justifying the suspension of the king and the summoning of the National Convention. In the convention he represented the département of Aisne and was a member of the committee on the constitution. His draft of a new constitution, representative of the Girondins, the more moderate political group during the Revolution, was rejected, however, in favour of that of the Jacobins, a more radical political group whose dominating figure was Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI he voted against the death penalty. But his independent attitude became dangerous in the wake of the Revolution when Robespierre’s radical measures triumphed, and his opposition to the arrest of the Girondins led to his being outlawed.

To occupy his mind while he was in hiding, his wife and some of his friends prevailed on him to engage in the work by which he is best known, the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1794; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind). Its fundamental idea is that of the continuous progress of the human race to an ultimate perfection. He represents humans as starting from the lowest stage of savagery with no superiority over the other animals, save that of bodily organization and as advancing uninterruptedly in the path of enlightenment, virtue, and happiness. The stages that the human race has already gone through, or, in other words, the great epochs of history, are regarded as nine in number.

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There is an epoch of the future—a 10th epoch—and the most original part of Condorcet’s treatise is that which is devoted to it. After insisting that general laws regulative of the past warrant general inferences as to the future, he argues that the three tendencies that the entire history of the past shows will be characteristic features of the future are: (1) the destruction of inequality between nations, (2) the destruction of inequality between classes, and (3) the improvement of individuals, the indefinite perfectibility of human nature itself—intellectually, morally, and physically. The equality to which he represents nations and individuals as tending is not absolute equality but equality of freedom and of rights. Nations and people, he asserts, are equal if equally free and are all tending to equality because all are tending to freedom.

As to indefinite perfectibility, he nowhere denies that progress is conditioned both by the constitution of humanity and by the character of its surroundings. But he affirms that those conditions are compatible with endless progress and that the human mind can assign no fixed limits to its own advancement in knowledge and virtue or even to the prolongation of bodily life. That theory explains the importance that he attached to popular education, to which he looked for all sure progress. The book is notable for its intense aversion to all religion, especially Christianity, and to monarchy. Pervaded by a spirit of excessive hopefulness, it contains numerous errors of detail, due to the circumstances in which it was written. Its value lies in its general ideas. Condorcet’s ethical position gives emphasis to the sympathetic impulses and social feelings and had considerable influence upon the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte. While Condorcet was under proscription as a Girondin, some of the other works he wrote were published by friends, and others were issued after his death. Still interested in public affairs and believing that the house in which he had been hiding was watched, he escaped and, after hiding in thickets and quarries for three days, entered the village of Clamart on the evening of March 27, 1794. His appearance betrayed him, and he was taken to Bourg-la-Reine and imprisoned. On the morning of March 29 he was found dead; whether from exhaustion or poisoning is unknown.

Condorcet, wholly a man of the Enlightenment, sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. He advocated economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, the abolition of slavery, and—unusually for his time—equal rights for women, including woman suffrage. He rejected the almost-universal prejudice, even among “enlightened” thinkers, that women were intellectually inferior to men, regarding it as an illegitimate excuse for excluding women from public life as well as from many forms of education. Women’s intellectual and supposed physical inferiority were also misused as an irrelevant bar to most occupations, he held. In his essay Sur l’admission des femmes au droits de la cité (1790; On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship), Condorcet argued that the widely shared assumption that the natural rights of men are based on their capacities for reason and moral action logically implies that women possess the very same rights:

The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.

Condorcet’s Esquisse was published after his death by his wife, who in 1798 also published her own Lettres sur la sympathie (“Letters on Sympathy”) and an excellent translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).