CONDORCET, MARQUIS DE

(1743–1794)

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, was a mathematician, politician, educational reformer, and utopian philosopher in the period leading up to and during the French Revolution. His works in mathematics include a recasting of the mathematical portion of Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie in a supplement, Encyclopédie méthodique (1784–1785). In the most memorable of his mathematical books, Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix méthodique (1785), he argued that in moral sciences the mathematical base of all analysis has to be probability.

While thousands were being conscripted and there were food riots in Paris, Condorcet wrote pamphlets on public education, the rights of women, and other hotly debated issues of the time. In his view inequality in learning fostered tyranny, and it was education that had engendered the Enlightenment. He was a member of the governing group of the Girondins, a party, as Thomas Carlyle put it, of "the respectable washed Middle Classes." A Girondin constitution that Condorcet wrote was rejected in favor of the Jacobin alternative.

In October 1793 the Committee of Public Safety under Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) executed the Girondin leaders; Condorcet was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. While in hiding, with revolutionary soldiers and loaded tumbrels passing under his window, he wrote his most famous work, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain, a history of human progress from its outset to its imminent culmination in human perfection. Soon the human race would attain universal truth, virtue, and happiness. All inequalities of wealth, education, opportunity, and sex would disappear. The earth would provide sustenance without limit, and all diseases would be conquered. "Man will not become immortal," he stated, but "we do not know what the limit is [or even] whether the general laws of nature have determined such a limit."

This book, published posthumously in 1795, is remembered largely because along with the works of William Godwin, it was a target of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). The Equisse was, in Malthus's words, "a singular instance of the attachment of a man to principles, which every day's experience was so fatally for himself contradicting." In particular, Malthus objected to Condorcet's belief that the shortage of subsistence brought about by population growth would be automatically canceled. In Malthus's mature theory he also offered a similarly optimistic future, but he believed that the lower classes would adopt the small family typical of the middle class, thus elimination any population crisis.

Condorcet was arrested, reportedly because although he was disguised as a commoner, he ordered an omelet with "an aristocratic number of eggs," and died in prison, possibly by suicide.

See also: Malthus, Thomas Robert; Population Thought, History of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY CONDORCET.

Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. 1767–1789/1994. Arithmétique politique: textes rares ou inédits. Paris: Institut National d'études démographiques and Presses Universitaires de France.

——. 1795. Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. [Paris: Agasse]. Paris: Dubuisson et Cie., 1864. Translated as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1955.

——. 1846–1849. Oeuvres, 12 vols., ed. A. Condorcet O'Connor and M. F. Arago. Paris: Firmin-Didot.

——. 1976. Condorcet: Selected Writings, ed. Keith Michael Baker. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co.

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT CONDORCET.

Baczko, Bronislaw, ed. 1982. Une èducation pour la démocratie: Textes et projets de l'époque révolutionnaire. Paris: Èditions Garnier Fréres.

Dumazedier, Joffre, ed. 1994. La Leçon de Condorcet: Une conception oubliée pour tous nécessaire à une république. Paris: Éditions l'Harmattan.

Frazer, James George. 1933. Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Goodell, Edward. 1994. The Noble Philosopher: Condorcet and the Enlightenment. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.

Palmer, R. R. 1985. The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rothschild, Emma. 2001. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Schapiro, J. Salwyn. 1978. Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism. New York: Octagon.

WILLIAM PETERSEN