Condorcet and Modernity 9780521841399

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C O N D O RC E T A N D M O D E R N I T Y

The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the few Enlightenment ideologists to witness the French Revolution and participate as an elected politician at the centre of events during France’s transition from monarchy to republic. His impact on French history, and on the subsequent development of social scientific thought, has been immense. Condorcet and Modernity explores aspects of his social and political thought from 1774, the year of Louis XVI’s accession, to 1794, and in particular the interaction between Condorcet’s political theory, legislative pragmatism and public policy proposals. David Williams’s focus is on selected essays and treatises and specific projects and legislative proposals relating to rights and constitutional reform, the civil order, voting procedures, ecclesiastical powers and privileges, the judiciary and the law, economics and the grain trade, the abolition of the slave trade, women’s rights, monarchical government, revolution and republicanism. Professor Williams examines the complex links between Condorcet as the visionary ideologist and Condorcet as the pragmatic legislator, and between Condorcet’s concept of modernity, the application of ‘social arithmetic’ to government policies, and the management of change. Texts that have hitherto received relatively little attention in this context are examined in the light of a particular notion of human rights, and strategies for the implementation of those rights. Based on an extensive array of both printed and manuscript sources, this major contribution to Enlightenment studies is the first full treatment of Condorcet’s politics to appear in English for a generation. dav i d w i ll ia m s is Emeritus Professor of French in the University of Sheffield. A leading scholar of Enlightenment France, in 1999 he was made Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Acad´emiques by the French government.

C O N D O RC E T A N D MODERNITY by D AV I D W I L L I A M S

   Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge  , UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521841399 © David Williams 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 - -

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For thirty years hardly a day has passed when I have not thought about political science (R´eponse a` l’adresse aux provinces, 1790)

Contents

Acknowledgements References and abbreviations

page ix xi

Introduction

1

1 Profile of a political life

10

2 Human nature and human rights

45

3 The civil order

69

4 Managing enlightenment

92

5 Reform and the moral order

117

6 New constructions of equality

139

7 Justice and the law

172

8 Representative government

195

9 The economic order

225

10 Managing the Revolution

250

Conclusion: the human odyssey Bibliography Name index Subject index

277 288 301 304

vii

Acknowledgements

Little progress would have been made in the preparation of this monograph without the help, expert advice and strong encouragement of the many distinguished Condorcet specialists and other dix-huiti´emistes I have consulted. In particular, I wish to record my thanks to Professor Haydn Mason (Emeritus Professor of French, University of Bristol) and Professor Iain McLean (Nuffield College, University of Oxford) who both gave generously of their time to read through the typescript, and offer me many valuable suggestions for improvement. My thanks also go to Mme AnneMarie Chouillet who graciously accorded me full access to the invaluable inventory of Condorcet manuscripts held at the Biblioth`eque de l’Institut de France which she is currently preparing for publication in collaboration with M. Pierre Cr´epel and others. I am also indebted to Dr Simon Davies who thoughtfully drew my attention to manuscript material relating to Condorcet’s English contacts. I acknowledge with gratitude the help and co-operation of Mme Annie Chassagne at the Biblioth`eque de l’Institut de France with regard to the photographic reproduction of certain manuscripts. I am equally indebted to archival staff at the Biblioth`eque Nationale Richelieu, the Biblioth`eque Nationale Tolbiac, the Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal, the Archives de l’Acad´emie des Sciences and the Archives Nationales. Chapters 1, 3, 5, 6 and the Conclusion contain material to be found in the following articles: ‘Condorcet and natural rights’, SVEC 296 (1992), ed. G. J. Mallinson (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation), pp. 103–21; ‘Progress and the empirical tradition in Condorcet’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e Am´ericaine de Philosophie de Langue Franc¸aise 4 (1992), ed. C. Michael (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University), 67–77; ‘Condorcet and the politics of black servitude’, in J. Dolamore (ed.), Making Connections. Essays in French Culture and Society in Honour of Philip Thody (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 67–80; ‘Condorcet and the natural origins of justice and the law’, in G. Lamoine (ed.), Nature, Droit, Justice. Actes du Colloque des Soci´et´es Britannique et ix

x

Acknowledgements

Franc¸aise du Dix-huiti`eme Si`ecle (6–9 septembre 1990) (Toulouse: Publications de l’Universit´e de Toulouse, 1991), pp. 233–42; ‘Man in transit: the human odyssey in Condorcet’s Esquisse’, in J. Renwick (ed.), L’Invitation au Voyage. Studies in Honour of Peter France (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 2000), pp. 273–82. I wish to thank the editors of the relevant publications for kindly giving me permission to draw on this work already in print. My heartfelt thanks also go the Arts and Humanities Research Board and to the British Academy for the generous grants awarded to me to enable me to undertake archival work in Paris over a prolonged period. I also acknowledge with gratitude the support I have received from the University of Sheffield. Finally, nothing would have been possible without the support, understanding and infinite patience of my wife Colette. This book is dedicated to the memory of my step-father, Charles Verdun Rattle.

References and abbreviations

Unless otherwise stated, reference to Condorcet’s works (volume number and pages in roman separated by a colon) is to the Œuvres compl`etes de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1847–9; repr. Stuttgart: F. Frommann Verlag, 1968). A AN BIF BN(R) BN(T) D SVEC

Biblioth`eque de l’Arsenal Archives Nationales Biblioth`eque de l’Institut de France Biblioth`eque Nationale Richelieu Biblioth`eque Nationale Tolbiac Voltaire’s Correspondence and Related Documents, definitive edition edited by Theodore Besterman (The Voltaire Foundation, 1968–76) Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century

All quotations from Condorcet’s works, including manuscript sources, have been translated into modern English. An English translation of titles of Condorcet’s works forming the subject of more detailed commentary in Chapters 2–10 and the Conclusion has also been given on first reference.

xi

Introduction

In this book I have set out to examine aspects of Condorcet’s political thought from 1774, the year of Louis XVI’s accession, and also of the appointment of Turgot to ministerial office, to the marquis’s death in 1794, two decades that would bear witness to more political and social change than had been seen before in France in any single lifetime. During these interesting times Condorcet’s approach to politics gradually changed from being that of a second-generation philosophe, prominent mathematician and outspoken defender of human rights into that of a public servant and advocate of a ground-breaking scientific model of civil government and the social order. These were the years when Condorcet would also evolve ideologically from constitutional monarchist into theorist and practitioner of revolution and republicanism. The emergence of Condorcet as a public figure coincided with the passing of the ancien r´egime and the dawn of a modernity in Europe whose implications for ‘the science of society’ he understood more clearly than most. His political life really had its beginnings in 1770 following his encounter with Voltaire at Ferney, an encounter that would draw him into Voltaire’s public campaign against the injustices of the French criminal procedure fought out in the long aftermath of the notorious trial in Abbeville in 1766 of the young blasphemer, the chevalier de La Barre. However, it was not until the appointment of his close friend Turgot as Controller-General that Condorcet started to engage seriously with the art of government, a path that would soon lead him into the hurricane of revolutionary politics. From 1774 onwards he would be absorbed into the polemics and events of a fast-moving political scenario, intent on bringing his remarkable insights into probability theory and his concept of ‘social mathematics’ to the great project of enlightened reform and scientifically planned progress. One of the purposes of this study is to illuminate the pragmatics of that project, and to explore the links between Condorcet’s meteoric career as a theorist of political and social change and his activities as an elected 1

2

Condorcet and Modernity

legislator in a new, and still uncertain, world. In the shadow of the guillotine in the last two years of his life, Condorcet worked tirelessly to ensure the demise of the arbitrary powers of autocratic despotism, of the authority of the priestly caste and of the inequities of the civil order as they affected the daily lives of ordinary men and women. His vision of progress in both contexts was extraordinarily rich, forward-looking and courageous. The dimensions of this stupendous vision clarify when measured not only in the context of Condorcet’s sustained advocacy of the values and aspirations of the Enlightenment, and the record of his personal commitment to the welfare of his fellow citizens, but also in the context of his engagement with the world of mathematical physics and the calculus of probability. The mental landscapes of the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix and the Tableau g´en´eral de la science qui a pour objet l’application du calcul aux sciences politiques et morales interact closely with those of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales and many other non-mathematical political essays, including the astonishing Fragment of the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse itself. What Condorcet called memorably ‘social arithmetic’ provides the intellectual platform for a wide range of treatises, draft bills, legislative proposals, press articles, committee reports and blueprints for reform relating to a broad spectrum of issues: economics, the criminal code, taxation, social insurance, electoral processes, constitutional change, emancipation and colonial reform, minority rights, contraception, education, transport and other matters relating to French national life and its infrastructure. Statistics and actuarial science start to come of age as an instrument of social planning in Condorcet’s hands. In all of these varying contexts his political philosophy draws its uniqueness, and much of its coherence, from a strikingly original blend of science, visionary idealism and a hard-nosed pragmatism to which it always remained firmly anchored, though from which it has often been separated. Condorcet lived politics as intensely as he thought politics, and this sparked off a rare synergy between the proclamation of principles and their realisation as the building blocks of a new civil order, between the conceptualisation of progress and its social, legal and political implementation. In his view only the rational, scientific management of change, as opposed to its purely philosophical elucidation, would allow the mission of the Enlightenment to have a tangible, beneficial impact on the lives of ordinary people, and on the advancement of public happiness. His views on equality, freedom, tolerance and rights, shared with many other radical political thinkers of the time, thus acquire startlingly concrete applications in a number of

Introduction

3

contexts in which reflections on rights, equality, sovereignty, justice, economics, representation, constitutional reform, education and the political reconstruction of the citizen harden into ambitious public works initiatives, and finely detailed technicalities of complex legislation. They are given constitutional life in the minutiae of quotidian administrative modalities with which he adorned so many of his government bills and reports, not to mention his essays and treatises, and into which few contemporary political thinkers ventured with such relish. As a member of innumerable committees, boards and commissions, he demonstrated frequently how, in all these contexts, political aims and ideals could be transformed through the filter of mathematical calculation into powerful levers of decision-making, strategic planning and effective policy formulation. Condorcet was one of the few Enlightenment thinkers to witness the Revolution and to participate fully in its constitutional aftermath. He was a close ally of Turgot, knew Tom Paine, exchanged views with the fathers of the American Revolution, collaborated closely with Si´ey`es, admonished Burke, defended Price, opposed Necker and crossed swords with Robespierre. He was an active member of the first Assembl´ee nationale (from 17 June 1789) and subsequently of the Assembl´ee constituante (from 9 July 1789), a member of the Assembl´ee l´egislative (from 1 October 1791) and of the Convention nationale (from 21 September 1792). As president of various commissions, he presented, with varying degrees of success, numerous reports and projets de loi, many of which he drafted personally. He was a prolific pamphleteer and journalist, contributing regularly to journals and newspapers, and he was the official rapporteur of government business for the Chronique de Paris between November 1791 and March 1793. He took a leading role in French political life at a time of momentous dislocation. Although he was always by instinct a moderniser, more attuned to the open vistas of the future than to the closed models of the past, his ideas and initiatives were always elaborated within a framework of sustained communication with, and immersion within, the values and the traditions of the Enlightenment. He was, in short, an outstanding disciple of the Enlightenment, uniquely located at the centre of great events, political debate and constitutional and social upheaval at a seismic moment in France’s history. At the same time, Condorcet’s political thought represents not only a continuity but also a significant reorientation of Enlightenment ideology. He looks forward to a Golden Age to come, rather than backwards to a lost political Eden. The secular account of the Fall of Man that dominated so many contemporary interpretations of the human journey from the state of nature to the civil order recedes in Condorcet’s thought before a more

4

Condorcet and Modernity

positively charged, future-orientated vision of human perfectibility, and of the potential power of human energies and reason to transform the present, and lay the foundations for a better future. His understanding of the historical dynamics of progress interacted closely with an awareness of the exigencies and realities of a rapidly mutating political and social culture, to whose changing configurations he was always responsive. A mathematician at the cutting edge of research into probability theory and its applications, an engaged social scientist and elected politician, he was above all a citizen of that highly politicised Republic of Letters of the late eighteenth century. The continuous dialogue that he conducted in his writings through time and space with other citizens of that glittering republic such as Socrates, Michel de l’Hˆopital, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Newton, Sidney, Voltaire, d’Alembert, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Turgot, Franklin and Paine is the defining mark of his citizenship. This international, inter-century collegiality of contemporary political discourse is well reflected in the Lettre a` M ∗∗∗ sur la Soci´et´e de 1789. Condorcet was very much a product of what Coutel has called the age of political sociability,1 moving easily in the public space of ideological exchange and discourse of the various clubs and salons to which he belonged, and to whose ambience as sympathetic locations for reflection he responded. Towards the end of his life he paid memorable tribute to the humane benefits of that ambience in the Fragment sur l’Atlantide. With Condorcet the notion of ‘social science’ passes indelibly into the language of modern political discourse. Yet he has never occupied a prominent place in the pantheon of great eighteenth-century political thinkers, even in France where as a theorist of democracy he has always languished in the shadow of Rousseau. Perhaps, as McLean and Hewitt have argued,2 he is insufficiently user-friendly. It is true that only on rare occasions does his unappealing prose betray passion or strive for elegance, and his treatises, often hastily drafted and stylistically rebarbative, are by no means an easy read. In one of his last Fragments, written in 1794, Condorcet predicted that he would ‘perish like Socrates and Sidney’ as his reward for having worked to secure French liberty (i: 608). At the end of his life he had achieved something approaching iconic status in European political circles, his contributions recognised, if not always approved of, by Burke, Demaistre, Sainte-Beuve, Malthus, Destutt de Tracy and others. However, in the two hundred years or more that have passed since the appearance in the winter 1 2

C. Coutel, Politique de Condorcet (Paris: Payot, 1996), p. 31. I. S. McLean and F. Hewitt, Condorcet. Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Aldershot, Brookfield: E. Elgar, 1994), p. 73.

Introduction

5

of 1794–5 of the official press announcements of his death in the previous March, he has certainly had to wait a long time for the recognition that he deserves, and for perceptions of him as a prophet without honour to change. Too often he has been condemned in advance to oblivion as a second-class mind. After a brief period of Thermidorian glory, he would fade into the shadows of intellectual history, his reputation damaged by La Harpe, Lamartine, Baudrillart, Charma and others. With regard to the long silence that customarily greets thinkers whose ideas run way ahead of their times, Jean-Pierre Schandeler reminds us, in the introduction to his study of nineteenth-century interpretations of Condorcet’s work, of Nietzsche’s memorable self-reference in The Anti-Christ to those ‘who are born posthumously’.3 Condorcet must now surely be counted in the ranks of the posthumous newly born. For him posterity has really only just started. The nineteenth century, and particularly the last decade of the nineteenth century, did not entirely ignore Condorcet as a subject for scholarship. This was the century that saw the publication of Franc¸ois Arago’s informative and sympathetic biography of 1841, incorporated into the first volume of the 1847–9 Œuvres compl`etes that Arago edited in collaboration with Condorcet’s daughter Mme O’Connor and her husband General Arthur O’Connor, A. Balandreau’s 1873 biography, M. Gillet’s L’Utopie de Condorcet (1883) and J.-F.-E. Robinet’s Condorcet. Sa vie et son œuvre, 1743–1794 (1893). C. Henry published his still authoritative edition of the Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot (1770–1779) in 1883, and four years later an edition of the letters exchanged between Mlle de Lespinasse, d’Alembert and Condorcet. On 20 April 1890 the Soci´et´e Positiviste organised a Condorcet festival at Bourg-la-Reine, and in 1893 the Lyc´ee Fontanes became the Lyc´ee Condorcet. Many nineteenth-century studies of Condorcet, however, often took the minimalist form of fragmentary notices, brief encyclopaedia entries, portraits and monographs that tended to treat him as a peripheral figure, one of the crowd, as in J. Guadet’s Les Girondins (1856), F.-J. Picavet’s Les Id´eologues (1891) or A. Lichtenberger’s Le Socialisme au XVIIIe si`ecle (1895). The first major scholarly analysis devoted more exclusively and more comprehensively to Condorcet in the twentieth century was F. Vial’s Condorcet et l’´education d´emocratique of 1902, soon to be followed by L. Cahen’s magisterial Condorcet et la R´evolution franc¸aise (1904), and in the same year by F. Alengry’s Condorcet. Guide de la R´evolution franc¸aise (reprinted in 1971). 3

J.-P. Schandeler, Les Interpr´etations de Condorcet. Symboles et concepts (1794–1894) SVEC 03 (2000), p. 1.

6

Condorcet and Modernity

After the bumper Condorcet year of 1904 relatively little of substance in the way of dedicated monographs would appear for almost another fifty years, with the notable exceptions of H. Bigot’s Les Id´ees de Condorcet sur l’instruction publique, published in 1912, H´el`ene Delsaux’s Condorcet journaliste (1790–1794), Jammy-Schmidt’s Les Grandes Th`eses radicales de Condorcet a` Edouard Herriot, both published in 1931, and, more marginally, Maxime Leroy’s Les Pr´ecurseurs franc¸ais du socialisme, de Condorcet a` Proudhon, published in 1948. That year also saw the publication in English of Alexandre Koyr´e’s illuminating lecture on Condorcet.4 Only in the 1950s, however, did the case for Condorcet’s elevation to the ranks of the world’s great pioneering socio-political scientists begin to be seriously argued when he was brought to international attention with groundbreaking studies such as K. J. Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values (first published in 1951, reprinted in 1963, and translated into French in 1974), G.-T. Guilbaud’s article ‘Les Th´eories de l’int´erˆet et le probl`eme logique de l’agr´egation’ (first published in 1952, reprinted in 1968), and G.-G. Granger’s La Math´ematique sociale du marquis de Condorcet (first published in 1956, reprinted in 1984). After 1956 studies of Condorcet as a social scientist started to proliferate in the English-speaking world, particularly with regard to his work on probability theory and social choice, although commentary was not always entirely positive, as in the case of Duncan Black’s illuminating study of 1958, The Theory of Committees and Elections. More recently, still following the lead given by Arrow, scholars like A. B. Urken, S. J. Traflet, B. Grofman, G. Owen, C. Plott, W. H. Riker, H. P. Young and I. S. McLean, from different angles, have all brought Condorcet’s theory of social choice, his jury theorem, his analysis of voting procedures and other aspects of probabilistic theory with a modern relevance into closer focus. Since the 1970s much valuable work has been done on Condorcet’s mathematics and its applications by B. Bru and P. Cr´epel. The availability of modern English translations of Condorcet’s writings, including translations of more technical texts, owes much to the efforts of Baker, Urken, Pinkham, McLean and Hewitt. J. Barraclough’s 1955 translation of the Esquisse is still invaluable, but a new English edition and translation is currently being prepared by S. Lukes and U. Vogel for publication in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. My own edition and translation of the Id´ees sur le despotisme will appear in Volume ii of the new Cambridge Reader in Western Political Thought, edited by I. Harris and G. Parry. 4

A. Koyr´e, ‘Condorcet’, Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948), 131–52.

Introduction

7

The mid-century rediscovery of Condorcet has been reinforced by the remarkable editorial and publishing initiatives taken between 1968 and 1972, most notably when the facsimile of the Arago–O’Connor edition of the Œuvres compl`etes was placed at the disposal of scholars (published by Frommann Verlag), together with the Singer–Polignac facsimile edition of the Eloges des acad´emiciens and the Slatkine reprints of the work of Robinet, Cahen and Alengry. The twelve-volume Arago–O’Connor edition of 1847–9 is still the standard collective edition, although the dating of texts is not always accurate and the edition is far from being complete, a major omission being Condorcet’s mathematical and scientific works. A new, much-needed third complete edition is currently in progress, and meanwhile the publication in the last few years of useful modern editions of individual treatises has been invaluable. What Callens has called the ‘canonisation la¨ıque’5 of Condorcet gained its most dramatic twentiethcentury momentum in the English-speaking world with the publication of Keith Baker’s Condorcet. From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics in 1975. As far as recent publications contributing to the internationalisation of the great man’s writings, McLean and Hewitt’s Condorcet. Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory of 1994 stands out as a scholarly tool that opens up to a non-francophone readership key texts on the theory of voting and human rights with twenty excellently translated extracts. The birth of Condorcet’s reputation, in the Nietzschean sense, has thus been a slowly evolving event, but it has finally taken place, and in the course of the last half-century it has been carefully nourished by outstanding specialists in France and elsewhere, to whose pioneering editorial and exegetical achievements I am deeply indebted. Of particular interest is the way in which Condorcet scholarship over the last few decades has been enriched by political and social scientists, as well as economic historians, working outside France, but much interesting work on Condorcet still remains accessible only to francophone readers. Among the still relatively rare monographs published in English since 1990, the illuminating comparative study of Condorcet and Adam Smith, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, published in 2001 by Emma Rothschild, an economic historian, stands out as testimony to the increasing interest in Condorcet shown by modern scholars of the Enlightenment. Particular attention should also be drawn to three indispensable volumes of papers given by distinguished specialists at international Condorcet 5

S. Callens, ‘Condorcet dans l’histoire de la politique positiviste’, in P. Cr´epel and C. Gilain (eds.), Condorcet. Math´ematicien, ´economiste, philosophe, homme politique (Paris: Minerve, 1989), p. 501.

8

Condorcet and Modernity

colloquia: first, P. Michaud’s Hommage a` Condorcet, published by the Centre Scientifique IBM in 1985 marking the bicentenary of the first appearance in print of Condorcet’s seminal treatise, the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix; secondly, Condorcet. Math´ematicien, ´economiste, philosophe, homme politique, published in 1989, edited by P. Cr´epel and C. Gilain, and thirdly, Condorcet. Homme des Lumi`eres et de la R´evolution, edited by A.-M. Chouillet and P. Cr´epel and published in 1997. On the biographical front, interest in Condorcet has been greatly stimulated by E. and R. Badinter’s dramatic, richly documented account of a life and of events that would not be out of place in a classical tragedy, Condorcet (1743–1793). Un intellectuel en politique. This landmark biography was published appropriately in the bicentennial year of the Revolution, and was preceded in 1988 by E. Badinter’s illuminating Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et Madame Suard, 1771–1791. All this activity has helped to internationalise Condorcet and rescue him from the margins of intellectual history, allowing the voice of a political thinker of outstanding originality and relevance to be heard once more. The contention that his voice is still worth hearing in the twenty-first century has become less challengeable than it was, although it would be premature to conclude from this that the process of rehabilitation is over. Condorcet’s image still suffers from disparaging association with the cold, passionless hyper-rationality of a stereotypical Enlightenment ideologue. The unjust irony of the charges of coldness, and even monstrousness, levelled by commentators such as Sainte-Beuve and Bonald against a thinker so dedicated to the principle of human diversity, and so opposed to any unfeeling application to civil life of inflexible political and economic dogma, is only now starting to emerge. Condorcet’s remarkable contribution to the architecture of modernity, with its bold, intricately woven, forward-looking proposals intended to facilitate France’s transition from a world of ancien r´egime institutions and traditions into a more fluid world of ideologies driven by science and economics, has still to be accurately measured, but the status of his political writings as one of the great enduring legacies of the closing decades of the eighteenth century is becoming increasingly apparent. Condorcet is at last coming into his own as a thinker whose achievements helped to detonate the ancien r´egime, and usher in our modern political realities. Once known, even among eighteenth-century specialists, only as a writer whose reputation rested on the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progr`es de l’esprit humain, most social scientists will be now at least familiar with the title, if not the complete text, of the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix; economic historians

Introduction

9

will be aware of the importance of the 1776 R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es; social historians will know about the existence of the 1781 R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres (though possibly not of the expanded second edition of 1788). Condorcet was a prolific writer who treated an astonishingly wide range of political, social, financial, legal and scientific issues. He worked in several intellectual dimensions – that of political theorist, public servant, elected representative, economist and mathematical physicist, and ideally his works should be read with all those dimensions in mind. The dynamics of progress that he elaborates in the Esquisse only really make sense in the light of what he has to say about probability, actuarial science, rights, the civil order, justice, the constitutional processs and human nature itself. He helped to lay the foundation-stone of a new world whose contours he deduced with a scientifically informed prescience quite unique among eighteenthcentury political theorists. The present study seeks to bring together aspects of his mental universe that inform his political thinking, but which have tended to be treated in separate contexts, and to examine in the light of that universe a selection of his essays and treatises, some familiar but others still known today only as titles. In each chapter an attempt is also made to illuminate that remarkable interaction, characterising so much of Condorcet’s originality, between the visionary and the pragmatic legislator, between his theoretical understanding of the dawn of modernity and his approach to the problem of actually managing the changes needed to bring ‘a little good’ into the lives of ordinary men and women.

chap t e r 1

Profile of a political life

prelude: 1743–1774 Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet, nicknamed ‘the condor’ by his friends,1 was born on 17 September 1743 in the garrison town of Ribemont in Picardy. His father, Antoine, was a cavalry captain of modest means whose noble lineage can be traced back to early medieval times.2 He was killed on manoeuvres at Neuf-Brisach a few weeks after Condorcet’s birth, and Condorcet spent his childhood until the age of eleven in rural Picardy more or less tied to the apron-strings of his mother, Marie-Magdeleine Gaudry, whom he adored. Fiercely protected by his mother, who by all accounts was as superstitious and emotional as she was pious and possessive, the young boy remained exclusively under her influence for the first nine years of his life. The uneventful blandness of these well-cossetted, formative years, during which Condorcet received little in the way of formal education, but on which he would look back with great affection later on, is relieved only by the graphic account that survives in the biographies of a young boy decked out in the white dress of a girl devoted to the cult of the Virgin that his mother insisted that he should wear, no doubt to the great amusement of other boys in the town. The idyll ended, and dresses were replaced by breeches, when Condorcet’s uncle, the Bishop of Lisieux, arranged for his nephew to enter the Jesuit College in Reims in 1756.3 Adolescence with the Jesuits left Condorcet with an indelible hatred of priests, although academically he progressed well, and his precocious brilliance was recognised. Two years later, again with 1 2

3

The nickname was first used by d’Alembert in a letter to Voltaire of 6 March 1777 (D20595). On the Condorcet family origins, see S. Chamoux, ‘L’Ascendance dauphinoise de Condorcet’, in A.-M. Chouillet and P. Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet. Homme des Lumi`eres et de la R´evolution (Paris: Ophrys, ENS Editions Fontenay-Saint-Cloud, 1997), pp. 21–9. Prior to this Condorcet had received some tuition at home from the age of nine to eleven from his mother’s brother, see E. Badinter and R. Badinter, Condorcet (1743–1793). Un intellectuel en politique (Paris: Fayard, 1988), p. 17 n. 1.

10

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11

the help of his uncle, Condorcet went on to study at the Coll`ege de Navarre in Paris where his mathematical talents flourished under the stimulating guidance of the abb´e Nollet, a distinguished Newtonian who held the chair of experimental physics. He was also befriended and encouraged by another leading scientist of the day, Georges Girault de K´eroudon, and within ten months of entering this hothouse of ideas and numbers he had successfully defended a thesis on integral calculus before three of France’s most respected mathematicians, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, Grandjean de Fouchy and Etienne B´ezout. D’Alembert, an influential member of the French Academy, was stunned by the young man’s genius, and Condorcet soon found himself under the great academician’s protection. After this success all thoughts of the military career that his family had planned for him were abandoned, although on his return to Ribemont family pressure to follow his father into the army intensified, and would continue for another two years. He returned to Paris briefly in 1761 to present a paper to the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences on a method of integrating differential equations in two variables. In the following year he took up more permanent residence in the attic of K´eroudon’s house in the rue Jacob, where he embarked on a period of frenzied intellectual activity to prepare himself for a career as a mathematician. With the encouragement of d’Alembert, B´ezout and Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Condorcet published in 1765 Du calcul int´egral, a treatise whose importance was recognised with its publication in the Histoire de l’Acad´emie des sciences for the year 1765.4 At twenty-two he was starting to make a serious impression in Paris as a professional mathematician of great promise, one of the ten leading mathematicians in Europe according to the astronomer Joseph-J´erˆome de Lalande.5 Between 1765 and 1770 he would consolidate his growing reputation with a series of essays, starting in 1767 with the publication of his second great mathematical treatise, Du probl`eme des trois corps. With the publication of the Lettre a` m. d’Alembert sur le syst`eme du monde et le calcul int´egral, his first known letter to d’Alembert, published in the first volume of the Essais d’analyse in 1768, he reached international celebrity status among mathematicians, reinforced by the publication over the next ten years of the M´emoires sur les sciences exactes addressed to the Academies of Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg, Turin and Bologna, again on problems of integral calculus and differential equations. In 1769, with d’Alembert’s support, Condorcet was elected to the Acad´emie Royale des Sciences, his election 4 5

This volume of transactions was actually published in 1772, with a commentary by Lagrange. J-J. Lalande, ‘Notice sur la vie et les ouvrages du marquis de Condorcet’, Le Mercure franc¸ais (30 January 1796), n. 21.

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being approved by Louis XV in March of that year. The Academy was to be the only milieu in which he would feel completely at home. The intellectual space in which Condorcet moved has been well mapped by his biographers. It encompasses a wide range of salons, clubs and societies of varying political hues. His scientific patron, d’Alembert, introduced him, not only to the world of scientific academies, but also to the salon of Julie de Lespinasse where he rubbed shoulders with encyclop´edistes, physiocrats and id´eologues,6 some of whom held, or would hold, public office, such as Mirabeau, Turgot and Trudaine de Montigny.7 Such figures, bridging the world of enlightened theories of government and that of enlightened public administration, would have been particularly influential, as were other stars in the Enlightenment firmament like Voltaire, Condillac, Smith and, in later years, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine. Condorcet first met Julie de Lespinasse in 1768, and he remained a member of her glittering salon in the rue Bellechasse until her death in 1776.8 There is no evidence that they were ever lovers, but the intimate nature of their relationship emerges clearly from surviving correspondence. In the letters written to Condorcet in the summer of 1769 Mlle de Lespinasse urges him to stop biting his lips and chewing his fingernails, warns him of the dangers of reading in the bath, and getting chalk-powder in his ears; she comments astringently on his too closely cropped hair, and on his gauche way of standing, his body bowed like that of a priest before the altar.9 It is also to Mlle de Lespinasse that we owe the remarkable portrait, composed in 1775, of the shy, impoverished young man in whose face she saw reflected a distinctive goodness and purity (i: 626–7). Mlle de Lespinasse’s salon gatherings in 1769 also brought Condorcet into 6

7 8

9

On Condorcet’s earlier contacts with id´eologue circles, and especially with regard to his encounters with figures who would later exercise political influence and responsibilities after the fall of Robespierre, such as P.-C.-F. Daunou, P.-J.-G. Cabanis, J.-G. Lacu´ee de Cessac, D.-J. Garat, C.-F. Volney, M.-J. Ch´enier, P.-L. Ginguen´e, A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, see particularly Schandeler, Les Interpr´etations, pp. 17–63 (‘Horizons conceptuels’). K. M. Baker, Condorcet. From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 17–27. J.-F.-E. Robinet, Condorcet. Sa vie, son œuvre 1743–1794 (Paris: Libraires-Imprimeries R´eunis, 1893; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1968), pp. iv–vi. On the activities in Mlle de Lespinasse’s salon, see P. de S´egur, Julie de Lespinasse (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1931), pp. 157–92; Baker, Condorcet, pp. 16–27; J. Bouissounouse, Julie de Lespinasse. Ses amis, sa passion (Paris: Hachette, 1958), pp. 137–71. Cf. R. Grimsley, Jean d’Alembert 1717–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 90–6. See J. de Lespinasse, Lettres in´edites a` Condorcet, a` d’Alembert, a` Guibert, au comte de Crillon, ed. C. Henry (Paris: E. Dentu, 1887; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), Letters of 3 and 18 June 1769. See also Baker, Condorcet, pp. 23–6. For further details of Condorcet’s physical appearance and lack of social polish, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 24–6, 35. Cf. the official report on Condorcet’s body (Robinet, Condorcet, p. 361).

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contact with Am´elie Suard, destined to become another major female influence in his life, who advised him on matters of the heart between 1771 and 1773, and of whom he wrote in affectionate terms to Turgot in the autumn of 1771.10 The picture of ‘the good Condorcet’ that has come down to us from letters is of a youth who was painfully shy, socially ill at ease, introverted, quick-tempered and fired only by science. Even to close friends like Turgot he was ‘the rabid sheep’, calm but always on a short fuse. Mlle de Lespinasse saw him as ‘a volcano covered in snow’ whose eruptions of impatience were as incandescent as they were unpredictable. The salons which Condorcet frequented after 1789 were mostly associated with the Girondins such as those of Vergniaud, Mme Roland and Sophie de Condorcet. His wife, formerly Sophie de Grouchy, was well connected to minor aristocracy. Cabanis was her brother-in-law. Her uncle was Charles Dupaty, the radical magistrate at the centre of the storm surrounding the the famous trial of the three peasants, whose fate Condorcet discusses in the 1786 R´eflexions d’un citoyen non gradu´e sur un proc`es tr`es connu and the M´emoire justificatif pour trois hommes condamn´es a` la roue. Her marriage to Condorcet in December 1786 widened his intellectual circle considerably, particularly with regard to England.11 He worked with Sophie on translating Adam Smith’s works, and after his death she would publish a translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. The projected translation of the Wealth of Nations seems to have come to nothing, however. Surprisingly, there seems to be no evidence that Condorcet ever met Hume, despite the fact that both were members of Mlle de Lespinasse’s salon at the time of Hume’s stay in Paris in 1763, and they shared interests in free trade theory and also in marsh-draining problems.12 Other clubs and societies to which he belonged include the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, the Soci´et´e des Trente13 (active as a caucus machine in 1788, prior to the meeting of the Estates-General), the Soci´et´e de 1789, the Cercle Social (also known as the Conf´ed´eration des 10

11 12

13

Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot (1770–1779), ed. C. Henry (Paris: Charavay, 1883; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), p. 70. The correspondence between Mme Suard and Condorcet started in April 1771, Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Madame Suard, 1771–1791, ed. E. Badinter (Paris: Fayard, 1988), Letter 49. See J. P. Lagrave, ‘L’Influence de Sophie de Grouchy sur la pens´ee de Condorcet’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 434–42. See Bouissounouse, Julie de Lespinasse, pp. 102–3; R. H. Popkin, ‘Condorcet and Hume and Turgot’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1997), 48–53; Baker, Condorcet, pp. 69, 138–40; McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 9. Condorcet was a founder member of the Soci´et´e des Trente. Other members included the comte de Mirabeau, Turgot, Lacretelle, Roederer, Dupont, liberal aristocrats like La Fayette, La Rochefoucauld and Montmorency-Luxembourg and liberal parlementaires like Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and Duval d’Epr´emesnil. Talleyrand also became a member, but not Si´ey`es, although the society did finance some of his publications.

14

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Amis de la V´erit´e), the Club de Valois, and the Club des Jacobins (of which Condorcet’s name appears on the roster of presidents). The seeds of Condorcet’s political philosophy, and possibly of his republicanism, were planted well before 1774, of course, probably first germinating in the circles in which he moved just after graduating from the Coll`ege de Navarre in 1760.14 His politicisation was nurtured in 1770 in the cauldron of events stirred by the deteriorating relations between the ‘party of humanity’ and its enemies, and culminating in the formal censorship of Baron d’Holbach’s provocatively atheistic Syst`eme de la nature on 18 August 1770. The apprehensions of the beleaguered dissidents were communicated graphically to Condorcet by Voltaire in the months following Condorcet’s visit to Ferney in the summer and autumn of 1770.15 He returned from Ferney with his visceral hatred of the church confirmed, and a determination to do something about the criminal justice system and the power of the parlements. The ‘Welches’ appeared to be in the ascendancy at Louis XV’s court, and the destruction of all dissident opinion in France seemed imminent, especially after the fall of Choiseul’s administration in December 1770. Choiseul had held power for more than two decades, and his departure created a vacuum, to be filled by Maupeou who, with d’Aiguillon and Terray, formed a triumvirate that would govern France until the end of Louis XV’s reign in 1774. Their administration provides the historical setting for Condorcet’s early political apprenticeship, a period when the French monarchy was strong, but increasingly unpopular. Soon after Louis XVI’s accession, Maurepas became Prime Minister, and soon persuaded the new King to dismiss the old triumvirate, and make Vergennes Minister for Foreign Affairs, Miromesnil Chancellor and Turgot Controller-General.16 On hearing of Turgot’s appointment, Condorcet announced that he could now sleep as peacefully in his bed as if he were protected by the laws of England (iv: 74–8), and he expressed similar sentiments to Voltaire (D19043). In the summer of 1774 he prepared a memorandum for Maurepas 14

15

16

Textual evidence for a possible point of departure for his later republicanism might be a text first published by Cahen dating from the 1765–70 period, namely the deeply ironic M´emoires sur les conseils qu’un z´el´e r´epublicain, devenu par hasard favori d’un monarque, doit donner au prince pour favoriser sa chute. See L. Cahen, ‘Un fragment in´edit de Condorcet’, La R´evolution franc¸aise 42 (1902), 115–31. On Condorcet’s transition from the world of science to that of political engagement, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 57–100. See for example Voltaire’s letter to Condorcet and d’Alembert of 11 October (D16695). On Condorcet’s early association with Voltaire, see D. Williams, ‘Signposts to the secular city: the Voltaire– Condorcet relationship’, in T. D. Hemming et al. (eds.), The Secular City. Studies in the Enlightenment. Presented to Haydn Mason (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994), pp. 120–33. For an account of these and other ministerial changes, see D. Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien R´egime in France (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 118–35.

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setting out proposals for the mobilisation of scientific research under the aegis of the Acad´emie des Sciences, reflecting his increasing awareness of the public responsibilities of scientists and academicians.17 The political and legislative aftermath of well-publicised legal/religious controversies, arising in the 1760s with the Calas, Sirven and La Barre affairs, casts a long shadow over public life in France throughout the 1770s and 1780s. Condorcet became closely involved in the on-going controversy, stoked by Voltaire, arising from the case of La Barre, a sixteen-year-old youth tortured and burnt by the Abbeville magistrates for vandalism of a crucifix. Condorcet worked hard with Voltaire to rehabilitate the young blasphemer’s memory, and resolve the legal position of the chevalier d’Etallonde, one of La Barre’s surviving associates. The affair turned Condorcet into Voltaire’s apostle and trompette in Paris, and confirmed his increasingly public identification with the reformist/dissident camp.18 It was at this time that Cesare Beccaria’s influential Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) started to make an impact on philosophical circles in Paris. Impressed by Beccaria’s argument about proportionality in the matter of judicial punishments, Condorcet’s opposition to French medieval court practices, the judicial use of torture, the infamous rules of evidence, and in particular to the profligate use of the death penalty, hardened. Condorcet knew Beccaria personally, having met him in Sophie de Grouchy’s circle. His own R´eflexions sur la jurisprudence criminelle appeared in 1775. The French clergy’s declaration of war on the philosophes in 1770 affected Condorcet directly in another war zone, namely that of elections to the Acad´emie Franc¸aise where the battlelines between d´evots and philosophes were defined with particular sharpness.19 With regard to his election as unpaid assistant secretary to Grandjean de Fouchy in the Acad´emie des 17

18

19

See Baker, Condorcet, p. 195; K. M. Baker, ‘Les D´ebuts de Condorcet au secr´etariat de l’Acad´emie Royale des Sciences (1773–1776)’, Revue d’histoire des sciences et de leurs applications 20 (1967), 255–80. See also F. Bouillier, ‘Divers projets de r´eorganisation des anciennes acad´emies, Condorcet (papiers in´edits)–Talleyrand–Mirabeau’, Sciences et travaux de l’Acad´emie des Sciences Morales et Politiques 115 (1881), 636–73. Condorcet was possibly reflecting the influence of d’Alembert’s 1753 treatise, the Essai sur la soci´et´e des gens de lettres et des grands sur la r´eputation, sur les m´ec`enes, et sur les r´ecompenses litt´eraires. In his interesting analysis of the Essai, Baker stresses the links between the views it contains on the role of scientists and savants with regard to the expression of dissident opinion and those contained in d’Alembert’s Discours pr´eliminaire prefacing the Encyclop´edie. See D. Williams, ‘The Voltaire–Condorcet relationship and the defence of d’Etallonde’, in U. Kolving and C. Mervaud (eds.), Voltaire et ses combats. Actes du congr`es international Oxford–Paris (Oxford: The Voltaire foundation, 1997) pp. 527–38. See also Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 78–81. See Baker, Condorcet, pp. 29–31. Cf. M. Tourneux (ed.), Correspondance litt´eraire, philosophique et critique, par Grimm, Raynal, Meister, etc., 16 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877–82), vol. ix (May 1771), p. 308, vol. x (July 1772), pp. 16–17. Condorcet’s reactions to these events are recorded in correspondence with Mme Suard, BN(R), Nouv. Acq. 23639. Cit. Baker, Condorcet, pp. 29–30.

16

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Sciences, he explained to Voltaire his understanding of his new duties in terms that serve notice of a burgeoning sense of political and ideological engagement: When one is not fortunate enough to stay on Mount Crupak and say from there what one thinks, when one is not endowed with a voice loud enough to be heard from one’s retreat by tyrants of all stripes and to make them tremble in the midst of their slaves, then one can look on this sort of position as a means of doing on the quiet the little good that one can do. (D18372)

To the formative effect of the 1771–2 Academy machinations can be added the impact of Maupeou’s suppression of the parlements, a move defended by Voltaire and also, reluctantly, by Turgot.20 The parlements were the bodies that oversaw the criminal justice system, and they were endowed with powers to block the will of the monarch. Far from being enclaves of opposition to tyranny, however, Condorcet agreed with Voltaire in seeing them as assassins of true justice, their authorisation of La Barre’s barbaric punishment being a typical example of the grotesque consequences of a parlement-dominated system. His anger at the procedures and outcome of the La Barre trial lay behind much of his determination to apply probability theory to the process of decision-making by juries, the results of which were published in the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix. In January 1771 Maupeou denounced the abuses of the judicial system, depriving 130 magistrates of their venal offices without compensation, and replacing them with six superior Councils to exercise the judicial powers of the Paris Parlement.21 Condorcet had been shocked when Voltaire praised Maupeou in the Histoire du Parlement de Paris for this dramatic move.22 Maupeou had been, after all, one of the judges who had participated in the judicial murder of La Barre.23 However, he entirely agreed in principle with Voltaire’s support for the action taken against the Paris Parlement. The public defence of Voltaire in the Maupeou affair reflected the way 20 21

22 23

See N. Kotta, ‘Voltaire’s Histoire du parlement de Paris’, SVEC 41 (1966), 219–30. Cf. Condorcet’s letter to Turgot, Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 39. The Grand Conseil, known as the Parlement Maupeou, was retained as a special court for crown affairs and as a registry for legislation, with the right to make remonstrances. This dramatic breaking of the power of the higher magistracy was quickly followed by the abolition of the Cour des aides (the court for fiscal cases) and the Chˆatelet (the central criminal court). Despite many libels and other maupeouana, these reforms proved in the end to be a salutary step forward, as Voltaire well understood (D19111). See Williams, ‘The Voltaire–Condorcet relationship and the defence of d’Etallonde’, p. 528 n. 10. Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 48. See Baker, Condorcet, p. 32; Williams, ‘The Voltaire–Condorcet relationship and the defence of d’Etallonde’, pp. 527–9.

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Condorcet’s mind was working in 1771 with respect to the over-riding need to advance the public good, and defend his ‘cher et illustre maˆıtre’ against his enemies. His position was made clear in a long letter to Mme Suard in June/July of that year.24 The public good demanded action against ecclesiastical and governmental intolerance. Somewhat to Voltaire’s dismay,25 in the summer of 1774 Condorcet published anonymously the Lettres d’un th´eologien a` l’auteur du Dictionnaire des trois si`ecles, a fiercely anti-clerical call to arms written in response to Antoine Sabatier’s Les Trois Si`ecles de notre litt´erature, published two years earlier, in which Sabatier had sought to excoriate the pernicious influence of the philosophes in a pseudo-encyclopaedic format that mirrored parodically that of Diderot’s Encyclop´edie itself.26 The Lettres d’un th´eologien represent a forthright political defence of the Republic of Letters, and include an explosive affirmation of natural rights linked to an uncompromising insistence that the only true source of princely power and legitimacy lay in public consent (v: 537–8). With the Lettres d’un th´eologien Condorcet mounted his first serious challenge to the legitimacy of the most hallowed institutions of the ancien r´egime.27 the beautiful d ream Between 1774 and May 1776 Condorcet’s increasingly adversarial stance coincided with growing opportunities under Turgot for public service. For Condorcet Turgot was as inspiring a mentor in politics as d’Alembert had been in science, and their deep friendship, which dates from about 1770, lasted until Turgot’s death on 18 March 1781. Turgot was, in Condorcet’s view, the epitome of the enlightened political administrator, the 24

25 26

27

D17277. This long letter is really a conflation of two letters, see Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 51; Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et Madame Suard, ed. Badinter, pp. 44–5. Condorcet had in mind Arnaud who had presented in June 1771 what was in Condorcet’s view a reception speech damaging to Voltaire. See L.-A. Boiteux, ‘Voltaire et le m´enage Suard’, SVEC 1 (1955), 45; cf. P. Gay, Voltaire’s Politics. The Poet as Realist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 317, 326–8. Already the iconic Voltaire of Condorcet’s Vie de Voltaire is visible, see D. Williams, ‘Biography and the philosophic mission: Condorcet’s Vie de Voltaire’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 18 (1985), 494–502. Voltaire felt that Condorcet’s Lettres d’un th´eologien would inflame the authorities further at a delicate point in the d’Etallonde negotiations (D19082, D19083, D19084). A. Sabatier [Sabatier de Castres], Les Trois Si`ecles de notre litt´erature, ou Tableau de l’esprit de nos ´ecrivains depuis Franc¸ois I jusqu’en 1772, par ordre alphab´etique (Paris: Gueffier, 1772). This work was revised and updated in five further editions between 1773 and 1788. An Abr´eg´e was published in 1821, and reprinted in 1832. Condorcet had agreed to contribute to the Suppl´ement de l’Encyclop´edie on 20 March 1772. See Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 29–32.

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model public servant who always put the people’s interest before his own. It was Turgot, more than Voltaire, who really ignited Condorcet’s political ambitions and illuminated his political vision, especially in the field of economics. Turgot was a proponent of physiocratic views on free trade, public borrowing and taxation, and his controversial moves to get to grips with France’s fiscal problems had Condorcet’s enthusiastic support in the form of pro-Turgot pamphlets and essays on the grain trade, the corv´ee and tax reform. In the 1786 Vie de m. Turgot he set out the physiocratic doctrine of free trade, and his own contribution to the economic debate was considerable. The dream of public service under an enlightened minister became a reality in January 1775 with his appointment as Inspecteur g´en´eral des monnaies in succession to Forbonnais. With this modest post Condorcet assumed duties requiring the application of scientific expertise to the resolution of the complex mathematical, and also political, problem of establishing a unified system of weights and measures.28 His duties as Inspecteur des monnaies, which he continued to carry out until 1790, enabled him to demonstrate the indissoluble link between scientific and political progress, a link that he was to re-emphasise fifteen years later in the Discours prononc´e a` l’Assembl´ee nationale au nom de l’Acad´emie des sciences.29 He was considered for further official responsibilities in 1775 with Turgot’s reorganisation of government departments,30 but Turgot’s ministerial benevolence was to last only twenty months. Condorcet would hold other economic posts after the Revolution – he became a Treasury Commissioner in 1791–2, for example. However, witnessing and, to a minor extent, participating in Turgot’s rise and fall taught Condorcet useful, though bitter, lessons about the translation of ideals into political practice. Disillusioned, he told Voltaire in June 1776 that the ‘beau rˆeve’ of enlightened government was over, and that he was returning to the world of probability theory and philosophy (D20155). The spectacle of the celebrations at Court following Turgot’s dismissal sickened him, and in another letter to Voltaire he described Turgot’s successor Clugny contemptuously as a debauched drunkard (D20194). In spite of 28

29

30

‘It was typical of the scientism of Turgot and Condorcet that solution of the scientific problem merged in their thought with solution of the political problem’ (Baker, Condorcet, p. 65). On the general question of weights and measures in eighteenth-century France, see J. Fayet, La R´evolution franc¸aise et la science, 1789–1795 (Paris: Rivi`ere, 1960), pp. 442–56; M. Crosland, ‘Nature and measurement in eighteenth-century France’, SVEC 87 (1972), 277–309. See Documents relatifs a` la place d’Inspecteur des Monnaies, occup´ee par Condorcet de 1775 a` 1790, in Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 341–3 (Annex D) for further details about the nature of this appointment. A full account of Condorcet’s activities during Turgot’s ministry can be found in Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 101–43. See Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 232.

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the disappointments involved, however, the brief but salutory experience was enough to give him a taste for policy-making and decision-taking that would serve him well in later years. The first steps had been taken along a road that would eventually lead him to the inner circles of Revolutionary government. His views on justice and the law, economic issues, the nature of political authority, the legitimacy of monarchical prerogatives, the rights of individual citizens and the responsibilities of legislators would crystallise rapidly from now on. One of the most urgent problems facing Turgot related to the grain trade and the Guerre des farines (Grain War). Turgot had antagonised many with his decree of 13 September 1774 (a treatise in itself ), re-establishing the 1763 measures deregulating the movement of grain outside Paris. Turgot wished to see the free trade in grain re-established in order to regulate markets, standardise wages and prices and put an end to speculative dealing. The decree, not helped by the failure of the harvest, soon ignited a fierce pamphlet war between the mercantilist and free trade schools of thought. In March 1775 rioting spread to the capital where emergency measures had to be taken to protect property. The controversy over the grain trade, and the public disorder that it provoked, weakened Turgot’s position, and was one of the contributory factors leading to his replacement on 10 May 1776 by Clugny, during whose ministry the corv´ees were reimposed, and the free trade in grain suspended. Condorcet’s subsequent defence of Turgot and free trade doctrines was uncompromising, and provoked further public controversy. His target was Jacques Necker, who would succeed Clugny as Controller-General of Finance in June 1777. The publication of Necker’s anti-Turgot La L´egislation et le commerce des grains in 1775 was thought by many to have been deliberately timed to coincide with the Paris bread riots of May 1775 in order to raise the temperature of the Grain War, and put more pressure on Turgot. Condorcet shared that view.31 Towards the end of 1774, and prior to the start of the Grain War, Condorcet’s Lettre(s) sur le commerce des grains was already in draft form, possibly in anticipation of the publication of Necker’s L´egislation, and he had completed the R´eflexions sur la corv´ee, a` milord ∗∗∗ by the end of 1775.32 In 1775–6 he was also working on other anti-Necker pamphlets and essays, including Monopole et monopoleur, and Sur l’abolition des 31

32

BN(R). Nouv. Acq. 23639, f. 30. See also Boiteux, ‘Voltaire et le m´enage Suard’, 57. For an authoritative history of these events, see also Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien R´egime, pp. 177–206. Cf. V. Lublinsky, ‘Voltaire et la guerre des farines’, Annales historiques de la R´evolution franc¸aise 31 (1959), 127–45. On Condorcet’s attack on Necker, see also Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 131–4. Baker’s view (Condorcet, p. 412 n. 253). The Lettres sur le commerce des grains, written in 1774, did not appear until April 1775.

20

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corv´ees. In March/April 1776 the vitriolic Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie a` m. N ∗∗∗ , auteur prohibitif appeared, and the same year saw the publication of his most substantial treatise on the grain issue, the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es.33 With Condorcet’s intervention broader questions of liberty, justice, tax reforms and feudal privilege were injected into the economic controversy. Science, economics and politics were now converging in Condorcet’s thinking as he became involved in a number of other projects, under Turgot’s aegis, requiring technical as well as administrative skills. Some almost matched the grain trade issue for political sensitivity. The weights and measures problem, for example, had an international as well as national dimension with its implications for navigation. The end of Turgot’s ministry prevented the implementation of Condorcet’s proposals,34 but he would return to these complexities after the Revolution. Other forms of politicalscientific input into Turgot’s policies included the introduction of more accurate naval instruments, the reprinting for circulation to naval officers of Euler’s Th´eorie compl`ete de la construction de la manœuvre des vaisseaux and the setting-up of a sea-water distillation machine on La Pourvoyeuse, under the direction of Lavoisier and d’Estelle. Other projects related to schemes to improve the nation’s infrastructure. Condorcet urged the reform of public health provision in Paris with detailed proposals to replace the Hˆotel-Dieu with a more efficient system of local hospices and health centres in a bold scheme to nationalise and laicise health care.35 Good road-building plans had already been set in motion by Trudaine, with some success, and the new national system of roads would continue to be developed.36 Canals, however, remained a surprisingly neglected aspect of the transport and communications network in the ancien r´egime, little progress having been made since the construction of the Languedoc canal under Colbert’s administration in the previous century. Canal-building had been resumed in the middle years of the eighteenth century, however, and two ambitious projects were well advanced when Turgot 33 34 35

36

See Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 38–48. On Condorcet’s disappointment, see Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 277. See L. S. Greenbaum, ‘Condorcet’s M´emoire sur les hˆopitaux (1786): an English translation and commentary’, Condorcet Studies 1 (1984), 83–97. This m´emoire, dated 1786, was not printed until 1977. On the influence of physiocratic theory on Condorcet in the matter of public health and welfare, see also L. S. Greenbaum, ‘Health care and hospital building in eighteenth-century France: reform proposals of Dupont de Nemours and Condorcet’, SVEC 152 (1976), 895–930. See J. Petot, Histoire de l’administration des ponts et chauss´ees 1599–1815 (Paris: M. Rivi`ere, 1958), pp. 115–334; E. Vignon, Etudes historiques sur l’administration des voies publiques en France aux dixsepti`eme et dix-huiti`eme si`ecles, 3 vols. (Paris: Dunod, 1862).

Profile of a political life

21

came to power, namely the Picardy and Burgundy canal systems. To carry these engineering projects forward, Turgot turned to Condorcet and, with d’Alembert and Bossut, Condorcet was placed in charge of experimental research on canals. The results of their collaborative research, heralding the advent of a new science of hydrodynamics, were published by Bossut in the Nouvelles exp´eriences sur la r´esistance des fluides in 1777. The navigational and engineering challenge was formidable, and Condorcet’s research was instrumental in demonstrating the flaws in existing proposals for the tunnels for the new canals, whose design would have made it impossible for boats to pass through. In the course of the demonstration a whole new branch of physics was invented. Apart from technical issues, Condorcet also soon found himself immersed in research of a more sociological nature in Flanders and Picardy on the impact of the new canals on local communities. This resulted in an angry report to Turgot, published in 1780 as the M´emoire sur le canal de Picardie, in which the corps of engineers and the inadequacies of their professional training were strongly criticised.37 Roads and canals brought Condorcet into the adjacent political minefield of the corv´ee, and the whole system of forced labour organised under Louis XV to do the actual construction work on the roads. Condorcet did not hesitate to urge Turgot to extend to the whole of France the reforms of the corv´ee that Turgot had already implemented successfully as intendant in Limoges.38 After seeing for himself the brutal conditions which the corv´ee imposed on the Picardy labour force, with the apparent complicity of the corps of engineers, Condorcet argued strongly for the abolition of the corv´ee in Sur l’abolition des corv´ees. Unfortunately, his proposals, circulated anonymously as B´enissons le ministre, were drafted in a style that alienated rather than converted its readers.39 Turgot’s subsequent half-measures embodied in the ill-fated Six Edicts,40 watered down by opposition from Trudaine, were denounced in the Paris Parlement. Prospects for reform were damaged further in the winter of 1775–6 by another provocatively worded pamphlet on the question of seigneurial dues, the R´eflexions sur les corv´ees, a` milord ∗∗∗ . Arguably, Condorcet’s lack of diplomatic finesse in seeking to resolve these 37

38 39 40

Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, pp. 262–3. For a good contemporary account of these developments in canal-building in eighteenth-century France, see J.-J. Lalande, Des canaux de navigation, et sp´ecialement du canal du Languedoc (Paris, Dessaint, 1778). Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 200. Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien R´egime, pp. 239–51, 266–9. Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, pp. 198, 225–7. Cf. Vignon, Etudes historiques, vol. iii, pp. 1–40, 116–18. These included proposed legislation to abolish all dues levied on grain in Paris, the suppression of offices relating to the collection of customs duties and other tolls and the abolition of the Caisse de Poissy which controlled the meat trade. See Dakin, Turgot and the Ancien R´egime, pp. 231–51.

22

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issues might well have helped to end the ancien r´egime’s brief flirtation with ‘philosophic’ government. For invaluable practical experience in the formulation and management of the social-scientific mission of progress the twenty months of the Turgot ministry were crucial for Condorcet as the time during which he started to cut his political teeth. By 1776 he had more or less completed the process of intellectual relocation that took him from the private, exclusive world of academic science to the public, inclusive world of political discourse and engagement.41 This political relocation of the scientific mission can already be detected in the ´eloges of great academicians that he had started to compose for the Academy of Sciences even before his election to the Academy as pensionnaire surnum´eraire, adjoint avec survivance in 1773.42 In spite of the despair and disillusionment with politics he experienced after the ‘fatal event’ of Turgot’s dismissal in 1776, also the year in which Julie de Lespinasse died, his opposition to ancien r´egime injustice continued to grow. In the 1780s this was to express itself in new contexts with the 1781 first edition of the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, the Recueil de pi`eces sur l’´etat des protestants en France, also published in 1781, and towards the end of the decade by his pioneering advocacy of women’s civil rights. from marquis to cit izen Between 1781 and 1788 Condorcet was preoccupied with the political, economic and social applications and ramifications of probabilism, and his reception speech to the Acad´emie Franc¸aise on 21 February 1782 signalled once more his confidence in probabilism as a sophisticated instrument for the management of social policy.43 For the next few years his research was to be conducted with the potential of probability theory for public administration foremost in his mind. The first five sections of the M´emoire sur 41 42

43

On the stages of this transition, see Baker, Condorcet, pp. 27–82; Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 59–84. Condorcet was elected Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1776. Sixty-one of these ´eloges were assembled in the first collective edition of Condorcet’s works (1804) and published under the title Eloges des acad´emiciens de l’Acad´emie Royale des Sciences. A second, enlarged edition was published in 1773, see D. Williams, ‘Condorcet and the art of eulogy’, in R. J. Howells et al. (eds.), Voltaire and his World. Studies Presented to W. H. Barber (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1985), pp. 364–5. ‘A vrai dire, Condorcet ne cessa jamais de cultiver les sciences, la g´eom´etrie principalement, qui lui servit mˆeme a` tromper les heures d’angoisse pendant sa longue proscription, au cours de laquelle il sut encore poser les bases logiques de la science sociale’ (Robinet, Condorcet, p. 29). On the mathematical basis of Condorcet’s engagement with the world of social policy and public administration, see H. Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne: la pens´ee sociale de Condorcet’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1987), 155–76.

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le calcul des probabilit´es, applying probability theory to the problems of judicial reform and the assessment of evidence, appeared in 1784. It was in that year also that Condorcet delivered two important speeches to the Academy, the first on the occasion of Bailly’s reception (25 February) and the second on the occasion of Choiseul-Gouffier’s reception (26 February). The following year saw the publication of the seminal Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix, a work with revolutionary insight into the relevance of probability theory to voting procedures, decision-making and policy implementation. Condorcet reformulated the implications for social science in less technical language in the El´ements du calcul des probabilit´es, not published until 1805. ‘Social mathematics’, a term used in the full title of the latter work, was now firmly embedded in his political discourse.44 The science of mathematics and the science of society, the double legacy of d’Alembert and Turgot, would soon combine to form a single, coherent theory of progress whose implications were drawn out in his discourse to the Lyc´ee of 15 February 1786, and in the Tableau g´en´eral de la science qui a pour objet l’application du calcul aux sciences politiques et morales.45 In spite of Turgot’s opposition for economic reasons to official support for the American insurrection against the British crown, France would contribute significantly to the victory of the Americans in the War of Independence. It is not certain how far Condorcet shared Turgot’s reservations, but it is fair to conclude that he probably did share them.46 The Americans he met in Paris provided him with most of his information about the war. He knew Benjamin Franklin, who was American Minister in Paris between 1777 and 1783 and also an active member of the Acad´emie des Sciences, but he was closer to Franklin’s ministerial successor in Paris Thomas Jefferson, with whom he shared scientific interests.47 Jefferson and Condorcet had 44

45

46 47

El´ements du calcul des probabilit´es et son application aux jeux de hasard, a` la loterie et aux jugements des hommes, par feu m. de Condorcet. Avec un discours sur les avantages des math´ematiques sociales et une notice sur m. de Condorcet (Paris: an XIII [1805]). This work was intended as a textbook for use in the Lyc´ee. See R. Taton, ‘Condorcet et Sylvestre-Franc¸ois Lacroix’, Revue d’histoire des sciences 12 (1959), 127–58, 243–62. Baker sees this as ‘the clearest statement of probable belief that Condorcet attempted to build upon these mathematical foundations’ (Condorcet, p. 81). According to Robinet, the date of composition is 1787, and the work was first published in the Revue d’instruction sociale (22 June and 6 July 1795), see Condorcet, p. 378. The date of publication is also given as 1795 in the Arago-O’Connor edition. In the Almanach anti-superstitieux, the date for the completion of the Tableau is given as mid-March 1794, see Condorcet, Almanach anti-superstitieux et autres textes, ed. A.-M. Choulliet et al. (Paris: Universit´e de Saint-Etienne, 1992), p. 26. McLean and Hewitt, on the other hand, insist that the correct date of publication is 1793 (Condorcet, p. 79). McLean and Hewit, Condorcet, p. 14. F. Sommerlad and I. S. McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet II (Oxford: Oxford University Social Studies Faculty Centre Working Paper 1, 1991), pp. 186–95.

24

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much to say to each other, especially with regard to issues of constitutional reform relating to bicameralism and the separation of powers. Jefferson was probably the closest of all Condorcet’s American contacts, and the question of their mutual influence has been more closely explored in recent years.48 Condorcet also knew Filippo Mazzei, representative for Virginia in 1779, who returned to Paris in 1785, soon becoming part of the Condorcet circle. Part of Mazzei’s Recherches historiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Am´erique septentrionale . . ., par un citoyen de Virginie was translated into French by Condorcet and Sophie, and published in 1778. It was through Mazzei (and also Jefferson) that the four Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven a` un citoyen de Virginie, sur l’unit´e de la l´egislation, Condorcet’s first great essay on social choice, came to James Madison’s attention. The bourgeois in question is of course Condorcet himself, one of ten French citizens made a Freeman of New Haven, Connecticut, by the city on 10 May 1785. Mazzei is the ‘citoyen de Virginie’, as described on the titlepage of his own Recherches historiques. Madison possibly also knew about Condorcet’s second great essay on social choice, the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, although the evidence for this is not clear. Madison did not approve of Condorcet, and he disliked the latter’s views on unicameralism and federalism.49 Apart from La Fayette, the other member of the Condorcet circle with direct experience of the American insurrection was Thomas Paine, whom Condorcet might have met initially through Franklin and Sophie de Grouchy when Paine first visited Paris in 1781 to seek aid for the American insurgents. Paine and Condorcet certainly became close friends after Paine’s second visit in 1787, and Paine owed much of his fluency in French to Condorcet’s help. Condorcet also had some contact with two other American ‘founding father’ figures, namely John Adams and Governor Morris. Adams’s 1787 Defence of the Constitutions of the United States was translated into French in 1789, and was criticised in a pamphlet by William Livingstone. Cahen attributed the French translation with notes on this antiAdams pamphlet to Condorcet, although additional input from Mazzei 48

49

On the relationship between Jefferson and Condorcet, and Jefferson’s role in the propagation of Condorcet’s ideas in America, see particularly M. Albertone, ‘Condorcet, Jefferson et l’Am´erique’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 187–99; I. S. McLean and A. B. Urken, ‘Did Jefferson and Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’, Public Choice 73 (1991), 445–7; A. B. Urken, ‘The Condorcet–Jefferson connection and the origins of social choice theory’, Public Choice 72 (1991), 213–16. See J. P. Boyd, C. T. Cullen, J. Cantonziriti et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 27 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951–97), vol. xiv, p. 437; McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 66–7.

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and Jefferson has since been identified.50 Adams was familiar with the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven and, as in the case of Madison, the Lettres further confirmed his dislike of what he perceived to be Condorcet’s fanciful radicalism, a dislike that was to last for more than twenty years.51 Morris, a leading member of the Constitutional Convention, was not a great admirer of Condorcet either. He met Condorcet in March 1791, and judging from his diary entry the meeting was not a great success.52 By 1786 Condorcet had recovered from his despair at Turgot’s dismissal, and much of his happiness in that year can be attributed to his marriage. He and Sophie would have one child Eliza, born in 1790. The year of the American Declaration of Independence was also a year which saw the publication of important works whose themes on power, sovereignty and justice interlock closely. These include the first volume of the Vie de m. Turgot, the R´eflexions d’un citoyen non gradu´e sur un proc`es tr`es connu, the R´ecit de ce qui s’est pass´e au Parlement de Paris le 20 aoˆut 1786 and De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe, in which the American Revolution was seen as a philosophical, as well as political, event and as an example not to be copied slavishly in every respect by the French. Other ‘revolutionary’ texts would follow in the next two years leading up to the convocation of the Estates-General, including the Sentiments d’un r´epublicain sur les assembl´ees provinciales et les Etats-G´en´eraux, the Lettres d’un r´epublicain sur les affaires am´ericaines, the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais sur les affaires pr´esentes, the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven, the Sentiments d’un r´epublicain sur les assembl´ees provinciales et les Etats-G´en´eraux, the R´eflexions sur les affaires publiques par une soci´et´e des citoyens, the Id´ees sur le despotisme and the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales. This corpus of seminal essays was all published between 1787 and 1788 against a background of increasing political and economic volatility in France and in the colonies. The year 1788 also saw the publication of the second edition of the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, and Condorcet’s presidency between 13 January and 31 March of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs. 50 51

52

‘They generally back Livingstone’s republicanism against Adams’s alleged monarchism’ (McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 67). He was still warning Jefferson about it in 1813, see L. J. Cappon (ed.), The Adams–Jefferson Letters. The Complete Correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), p. 355. With regard to Jefferson’s reactions to Condorcet’s political views, and especially to the four New Haven letters, see D. Huggins, ‘John Adams et ses r´eflexions sur Condorcet’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 211–17. The entry is quoted in McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 68. One further American connection with Condorcet has been suggested by McLean and Hewitt, namely Alexander Hamilton, co-editor with Madison and Jay of the Federalist, but the link has not been finally proved (p. 69).

26

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The May 1788 edicts, drafted by Malesherbes,53 failed as public opinion swung to the cause of the parlementaires, and pressure to convene the Estates-General became irresistible. Change could not come from above, and by the middle of 1788 it was clear that the monarchy could no longer draw its authority from the structures and precedents of the ancien r´egime.54 Brienne’s proposals to resolve the growing financial crisis, some of which had already been made by Calonne,55 included projets on which Condorcet had worked in the Turgot years, such as the abolition of the corv´ees, free trade in grain, removal of tax privileges and anti-parlementaire judicial reform. Once again he found himself defending a beleaguered reforming minister.56 Condorcet’s renewed political commitment to the public good in the light of anticipated change generated a number of interesting essays in 1789, including the four Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du Tiers-Etat, the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs et instructions a` donner par les provinces a` leurs d´eput´es aux Etats-G´en´eraux, not forgetting his clarion-call for freedom for 400,000 black slaves in the French West Indies, in response to the growing crisis in Saint-Domingue, in the form of a series of remarkable abolitionist addresses and press articles. By now he was a regular contributor to the Journal de la Soci´et´e de 1789, a journal for which he wrote the Prospectus, and which he would co-edit with Dupont de Nemours and C.-E. Pastoret from 5 June until 15 September 1790. During the next four years he would also contribute to other political journals such as La Bouche de fer (January 1790–24 July 1791), the Bulletin de amis de la v´erit´e (31 December 1792–30 April 1793), Le R´epublicain, ou le D´efenseur du gouvernement repr´esentatif, founded with Brissot and Paine (July 1791), La Feuille villageoise (from 30 September 1790), the Journal de Paris (from 1 January 1777), on which he would briefly replace Garat as the official reporter of the proceedings of the National Assembly,57 the Chronique de Paris (24 August 1789–25 August 53 54

55

56

57

On Lamoignon de Malesherbes’s role, M. Marion, Le Garde des Sceaux Lamoignon et la r´eforme judiciaire de 1788 (Paris: Hachette, 1909), is still authoritative. For a succinct account of the undermining of divine-right monarchical structures during the years between Turgot’s departure and 1788, see J. Bosher, The French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 85–132. On 20 August 1786 Calonne presented the King with his Pr´ecis d’un plan d’am´elioration des finances. Condorcet knew Lom´enie de Brienne well, having met him some twenty years previously in Mlle de Lespinasse’s salon. Baker reminds us that Condorcet’s support for Brienne was not unconditional. He had particular reservations, for example, about the proposals to establish a plenary court, and had serious concerns about Brienne’s overall policy (Condorcet, p. 249). Condorcet’s official duties lasted from 23 October until 10 November 1791 when the Directors dismissed him following readers’ complaints, see Chronique de Paris 2 (1791), 1285, for the text of the letter of dismissal. On Condorcet’s activities as a journalist, see H. Delsaux, Condorcet journaliste (1790–1794) (Paris: Champion, 1931).

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1793), the Chronique du mois, ou Les Cahiers patriotiques (November 1791– July 1793), the Journal d’instruction sociale, edited with Si´ey`es and Duhamel (1 June 1793–6 July 1793), Le Moniteur universel (from May 1789), Le Patriote franc¸ais (28 July 1789–2 June 1793) and the Biblioth`eque de l’homme public, ou analyse raisonn´ee des principaux ouvrages franc¸ais et ´etrangers (1790–2). After the first ill-fated meeting of the Assembly of Notables in February 1787, whose proceedings Condorcet was able to follow closely despite the secrecy in which they were held, and with the approach of the historic meeting of the Estates-General, Condorcet’s profile as a public figure gradually acquired more substance. In March 1789 he addressed the Electoral Assembly of Mantes, and although this body did not mandate him as one of its official representatives to the Estates-General, it did elect him to a board of six commissioners responsible for the preparation of the cahiers de la noblesse. On 20 April he registered on the role of noble electors for the fifteenth d´epartement in Paris as a resident of the Hˆotel des Monnaies in the Luxembourg district. He was duly elected to the Chambre de la noblesse.58 A few days later he was elected to the General Assembly of the Paris municipality as Commissaire, although again he was unable to win a nomination to the Estates-General itself. He was kept well informed of developments in that body by deputies like La Fayette, Montmorency and Si´ey`es with whom he shared membership of the Club de Valois. Excluded from direct participation, however, he would concentrate for the next three months on reworking the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, now overtaken by events and to be reissued hastily as Sur les fonctions des Etats-G´en´eraux et des autres assembl´ees nationales. Condorcet shared the rising public concern at the interminable manœuvrings of the Estates-General, and in the R´eflexions sur les affaires publiques par une soci´et´e de citoyens he proposed measures to speed things up. Incredibly, he was also preparing at the same time the Vie de Voltaire for volume lxx of the new monumental Kehl edition of Voltaire’s works, in which he was to play an increasingly large editorial role. There is little firm evidence of Condorcet’s direct participation in the events of 11–17 July 1789, or of his immediate reactions to the fall of the Bastille. His role seems to have been little more than that of a spectator (by no means uncritical), and his presence in Paris during those turbulent days is confirmed by his well-documented activities in the Soci´et´e des Amis 58

Condorcet was chosen together with La Rochefoucauld and S´emonville. The forty-seven aristocratic deputies who joined with the Third Estate on 25 June 1789 were led by Clermont-Tonnerre, a colonel in the Royal Navarre regiment, see L. Cahen, Condorcet et la R´evolution franc¸aise (Paris: F. Alcan, 1904; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), p. 181.

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des Noirs and in the Acad´emie des Sciences. Cahen’s reference to a ‘moral revolution’ is difficult to substantiate, though not as difficult as Michelet’s delicious contention that Eliza was actually conceived on the night of the fall of the Bastille.59 All that is known is that Condorcet enlisted with some urgency in the National Guard set up in the wake of Necker’s dismissal by the Paris Commune to assume responsibility for the administration of the city, and destined later to become Robespierre’s power-base during the Terror. He was seen wearing the uniform of the National Guard, but carrying a large umbrella instead of a sword.60 Whether Condorcet enlisted to show support for the course that events had taken, or because he feared their consequences for public order, is not clear,61 but he emerged from the chaotic aftermath of the storming of the prison as the representative for the district of Saint-Germain in the new municipal body.62 servant of the revolut ion Condorcet’s first task as a servant of the Revolution was to report on the impact of foreign troop movements on the city, and by the end of September he was acting as the municipality’s envoy to the Constituent Assembly at Versailles.63 Though there is no direct evidence, as a member of the Comit´e de constitution, it is possible that he participated in the drafting of the preamble and seventeen articles of the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, officially adopted on 4 August, though not sanctioned by Louis XVI until 5 October. His signature is not on the document, however, possibly because he was not entirely satisfied with the wording of the D´eclaration, judging it in the R´eponse a` l’adresse aux provinces, ou R´eflexions sur les ´ecrits publi´es contre l’Assembl´ee nationale to be too vague and too ambiguous as a practical guarantee of citizens’ rights (ix: 491). He contributed to the attempts to restore calm during the October Days (5–6 October), when escalating public discontent, aggravated by severe food shortages, culminated in the removal of the royal family from Versailles to the Tuileries, 59 60 61

62

63

Cahen, Condorcet, p. 137; J. Michelet, Histoire de la R´evolution franc¸aise, ed. G. Walter (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), Part 1, p. 656. Alexandrine Louise Sophie was born in mid-April? 1790. E. and R. Badinter cite a nineteenth-century source for this gem of information, Condorcet, p. 281. Baker, Condorcet, p. 267. Baker prefers, more persuasively, to take the view that any changes in Condorcet’s mind brought about by the 14 July insurrection, on the suffrage for example, was the result of a ‘gradual evolution rather than any sudden conversion’ (p. 267). Robinet draws attention to the fact that Condorcet was not elected immediately to the Assembl´ee constituante, in contrast to mediocrities such as Pluvinet, Levacher de La Torini`ere and Garnier, Condorcet, pp. 85–6. On Condorcet’s activities in the context of the Paris Commune, see Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 85–130.

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the relocation of the Assembl´ee constituante to Paris, and a further wave of emigration. Condorcet’s experience of these dramatic developments bred in him a deep fear of anarchy, and he expressed this fear in the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait, et sur ce qui reste a` faire, lues dans une soci´et´e d’amis de la paix.64 The R´eflexions offer an eloquent analysis of a dangerously unstable political environment in which rights had been restored to the people in principle, but in which the people, moved still by understandable hatred and suspicion, had not yet shown themselves capable of enlightened judgement in the exercise of those rights. The problem of educating public opinion and of the civic formation of the citizen was to be central to Condorcet’s educational reforms, as can be seen from the Prospectus du Journal d’instruction publique and also the Projet de d´eclaration des droits, both of 1793. The Club des Impartiaux, a caucus of constitutional royalists led by Malouet and Maillet du Pan, had been meeting regularly since the winter of 1789 to discuss ways in which the moral and political sciences could be applied to the problem of restoring order.65 In January 1790, as a moderate response to the Club des Jacobins, many impartiaux, including Si´ey`es and Malouet, transferred their allegiance to the Soci´et´e de 1789, of which the first meeting was held at the Palais-Royal on 13 May 1790.66 The first volume of the journal of the Soci´et´e de 1789 appeared on 5 June, and it contained fifteen articles relating to the society’s procedures and aims, of which nine were written by Condorcet. It was in this journal that his defence of women’s voting rights, Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cit´e, was first published. By the spring of 1791 the Soci´et´e de 1789 had acquired a more reactionary character, and many members, including Condorcet (in May), Si´ey`es and Talleyrand, defected to the Club des Jacobins, while others opted for the Feuillants.67 Condorcet’s political steel was forged in the furnace of Parisian municipal politics. On 3 December 1789 he was elected to the Comit´e des VingtQuatre, becoming president the following day. It was in that capacity that 64 65 66

67

See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 139–41, 158–71. The ‘Society of Friends of Peace’, a group of moderates meeting at La Rochefoucauld’s house, mutated into the Soci´et´e de 1789. Propaganda was disseminated through the Journal des Impartiaux (February–March 1790). The plans for the future of this society were set out by Si´ey`es in the Ebauche d’un nouveau plan de la soci´et´e patriotique, adopt´e par le Club de Mil-sept-cent-quatre-vingt-neuf, probably published in March or early April 1790. They were elaborated further by Condorcet in the Prospectus. Membership of this group in 1790 stood at about 400. For an autograph of the Avertissement, dated May/June 1789, in which Condorcet records the decision of ‘a few citizens from different orders united by a love for equality and justice’ to found the society, and sets out the editorial conventions, see BIF Condorcet MS 858, ff. 31–2. For an account of the history and demise of the Soci´et´e de 1789 and the Feuillants, see Baker, Condorcet, pp. 272–85.

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he elaborated a set of proposals on behalf of the Commune for the constitutional reorganisation of municipal powers, printed as Sur la formation des communes. His role as an active member of the Comit´e des Vingt-Quatre was to come to an end in June 1790, but by then, astonishingly, he had written more than forty addresses, pamphlets and essays, including the inflammatory Sur le choix des ministres (April 1790), and many probing analyses of fiscal and taxation issues, foreign policy, assembly procedures, representation and the franchise.68 His stature and influence as a political figure, rather than simply as a philosophe and Voltaire’s representative on earth, was now growing, not only as a consequence of his writings, but also as a consequence of the network of powerful political allies he had built up by 1790.69 He was considered ‘ministrable’, although he never showed any overt signs of ministerial ambition, and he failed in August 1790 to win re-election to the municipality. However, his interest in public finance, kindled in the Turgot years, was still strong, and his views on the need to reform the Treasury and the taxation system were expressed in numerous essays in 1790, including the M´emoire sur la fixation de l’impˆot, Sur les op´erations n´ecessaires pour r´etablir les finances and Sur la constitution d’un pouvoir charg´e d’administrer la tr´esorerie nationale. On 8 April 1791 Condorcet was appointed, on the comte de Mirabeau’s nomination, as one of six Treasury administrators. Political life in Paris was becoming bitterly factional, and Condorcet tried to avoid open affiliation with either the Girondins or the Montagnards, despite being by now a member of the Club des Jacobins.70 In an attempt to heal divisions he published, in collaboration with Si´ey`es, a Profession de 68

69

70

In 1790 alone these include, in addition to the five m´emoires on education, the R´eponse a` l’adresse aux provinces, ou R´eflexions sur les ´ecrits publi´es contre l’Assembl´ee nationale, the R´eflexions sur l’action judiciaire, the R´eflexions sur l’usufruit des b´en´efices, the R´eflexions sur l’´etendue des pouvoirs de l’Assembl´ee nationale, the Eloge de m. Franklin, the Discours a` l’Assembl´ee nationale, the Lettre au Pr´esident de l’Assembl´ee nationale and the Instructions adress´ees aux Directoires des quatre-vingt-trois d´epartements (all on the weights and measures problem), Sur les conditions d’´eligibilit´e, Sur le d´ecret du 13 avril, Des lois constitutionnelles, Sur l’administration des finances, Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cit´e, Sur la constitution civile du clerg´e, Sur le pr´ejug´e qui suppose une contrari´et´e d’int´erˆets entre Paris et les provinces, Sur les tribunaux d’appel, Aux amis de la libert´e sur les moyens d’en assurer la dur´ee, Sur le mot pamphl´etaire, Des causes de la disette du num´eraire, de ses effets et des moyens d’y rem´edier, Sur la constitution du pouvoir charg´e d’administrer le Tr´esor national, Sur les op´erations n´ecessaires pour r´etablir les finances, Sur les caisses d’accumulation, Sur la fixation de l’impˆot, Sur l’impˆot personnel, Sur la proposition d’acquitter la dette exigible en assignats. See Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 88–9. These included La Fayette, Mirabeau, Si´ey`es, La Rochefoucauld, Montmorency and Liancourt, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 290–3; J. Guilhaumou, ‘Condorcet–Si´ey`es: une amiti´e intellectuelle’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 223–9. On Condorcet’s party allegiances, and in particular the case for associating him with the Girondins as a cause if not as a party, see M. Dorigny, ‘Condorcet, lib´eral et girondin’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 333–40.

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foi patriotique which appeared just before the flight of the royal family to Varennes. Tom Paine had arrived in Paris for the second time in June 1787 on a scientific mission in connection with his design for an iron bridge, and by the summer of 1791 he was more or less part of the Condorcet household, Sophie even undertaking a translation of parts of the Rights of Man, written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. On the question of rights generally, and the rights of women and slaves in particular, Condorcet and Paine shared much common ground. Together they defended the republican cause against Si´ey`es and other advocates of constitutional monarchy, and towards the end of June Condorcet founded, with Paine, Bonneville, Lanthenas and Achille Du Chastelet, the Soci´et´e R´epublicaine. It was almost certainly as a result of Paine’s influence that Condorcet’s republicanism was by now so outspoken. With Paine’s help he drafted a provocative poster which appeared on the streets on 1 July denouncing the absence of the King from Paris, and accusing him of deserting his people. Condorcet’s republicanism was given further radical expression in articles for Le R´epublicain, a new journal co-edited with Brissot, in which De la R´epublique, ou un roi est-il n´ecessaire a` l’´etablissement de la libert´e, originally a speech read out to the Cercle Social in the grounds of the Palais-Royal on 8 July, together with the brilliantly satirical Lettre d’un jeune m´ecanicien aux auteurs du R´epublicain appeared in mid-July, attributed by some to Sophie.71 From now on Condorcet would seek to rally public opinion to the cause of republicanism, and Le R´epublicain would provide an influential vehicle for this. Anti-monarchical views were also expressed in Sur l’institution d’un conseil ´electif. Unsurprisingly, after these publications Condorcet was crucified in the moderate and royalist press.72 At the end of October 1791 Condorcet was elected president of the Comit´e d’instruction publique, and his articles on education, first published in the Biblioth`eque de l’homme public, a journal that he had helped to launch in February 1790, were grouped together as the five M´emoires sur l’instruction publique, and supplemented by an extended essay, Sur la n´ecessit´e de l’instruction publique. The M´emoires were written for the guidance of the Constituent Assembly, and contained far-reaching proposals 71

72

See B. Vincent, Thomas Paine ou la religion de la libert´e (Paris: Aubier, 1987), p. 209. According to Jaur`es, De la R´epublique was ‘le premier manifeste grand et noble de l’esprit r´epublicain’, see J. Jaur`es, Histoire socialiste de la R´evolution franc¸aise, 6 vols. (Paris: Messidor/Editions sociales, 1983–6), vol. ii, p. 419. On Sophie’s putative authorship of the Lettre d’un jeune m´ecanicien, see McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 18; Lagrave, ‘L’Influence de Sophie de Grouchy’, p. 437. See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 263–5; Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 31–41.

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for a root and branch reform of the curriculum in schools and universities, plans to introduce the teaching of moral and political science as well as the physical sciences, advice on the political responsibilities of primary and secondary schools for the formation of citizens, the democratization of knowledge, universal literacy and the reconciliation of natural equality of rights with natural inequality of talents. The Rapport et projet de d´ecret sur l’organisation g´en´erale de l’instruction publique, postulating nothing less than a fully integrated national education system from infant school to university, was presented for approval to the Comit´e d’instruction on 9–18 April 1792, and to what was by now the Legislative Assembly, on 20–4 April.73 For Condorcet, educational reform went to the heart of the mission of the Revolution, liberation from ignorance and prejudice being in his view the key to true political freedom in an enlightened Republic of Citizens.74 His scheme would provide the basis for the next century’s framework of public education in France, but had little chance of immediate implementation. As with so many of Condorcet’s projects, it was overtaken by events. Even as he was speaking the Assembly received the King’s reluctant invitation to declare war on Austria, Hungary and Bohemia, and although Condorcet was able to complete his presentation of the report on 21 April, it was not debated. The Assembly registered general approval, but Condorcet was deeply disappointed with the outcome.75 In the first six months of 1791 he had witnessed a serious deterioration of the already fragile relationship between Louis XVI and the Constituent Assembly, exacerbated by the confiscation of the biens nationaux and the introduction of the civil constitution of the clergy. The gathering constitutional storm broke with the abortive attempt of the royal family to escape from Paris on 20 June, resulting in their arrest at Varennes. The event triggered a massive emigration of members of the officer corps, and exposed France’s military vulnerability. On 21 June the Constituent Assembly, under Condorcet’s presidency, recommended the suspension of Louis XVI from his constitutional functions, widening the schism in the Assembly between republicans and constitutional monarchists. The impact of the flight to Varennes on the evolution of Condorcet’s political thought has been much discussed. Before Varennes his stance inclined towards that of the moderate Girondin camp on the question of 73 74 75

Condorcet was not elected to the Legislative Assembly until 25 June 1791 on his third attempt to secure a seat, see Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 132–3. On the formative principles behind Condorcet’s ideal of a republic of citizens, see C. Coutel, Condorcet. Instituer le citoyen (Paris: Michalon, 1999), pp. 85–113. See the Fragment de justification (i: 591). Cf. Robinet Condorcet, pp. 165–9.

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the position of Louis XVI within the framework of the new republican civil order.76 Certainly his commitment to republicanism, encouraged by Paine, started to grow seriously after Varennes, and the resulting collapse of public support for the royal family.77 The view that elements of Condorcet’s republicanism were in place long before Varennes has been raised frequently in recent years,78 and the textual evidence does suggest that his post-Varennes position reflects a measure of historical coherence, linking together the 1765 M´emoire sur les conseils, the ‘American’ texts of 1788, the 1789 Lettre d’un gentilhomme du tiers ´etat and the 1793 Projet de constitution.79 In constitutional matters, as in other areas, Condorcet was a gradualist, always as much concerned with the practicalities involved in the implementation of change as with the ideological justification for it. This was almost certainly a crucial factor in his decision to vote for the 1791 constitution.80 The 210 articles of the 1791 constitution were ratified by Louis XVI on 13 September 1791, establishing constitutional monarchy, indirect representative democracy, the separation of powers, and a property franchise. Under its terms, while the King retained personal inviolability and executive powers, he no longer had legislative or financial powers, and was obliged to take an oath of loyalty to the new constitution.81 On 14 September 1791 Louis XVI accepted the new constitution, and Condorcet entered front-line 76 77

78

79

80

81

See Cahen, Condorcet, p. 321. See M. Reinhard, La Chute de la royaut´e (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 139–55. The Cordeliers, or Soci´et´e des Amis des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, mobilised public opinion against the monarchy and the 1791 constitution, and helped to organise the events of 10 August 1792. Membership in 1791 included Danton, Desmoulins and many lawyers and journalists. The group’s influence waned after 1792, and the group disappeared from the political scene in 1794 after the execution of H´ebert, by then its leader. According to Alengry: ‘Sa ligne est droite. Il a toujours e´t´e un r´epublicain . . . un ami de la souverainet´e du peuple, un apˆotre de l’´egalit´e et de la libert´e’ (F. Alengry, Condorcet. Guide de la R´evolution franc¸aise, th´eoricien du droit constitutionnel, et pr´ecurseur de la science sociale (Paris: V. Giard and E. Bri`ere, 1904; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1971), p. 834. Nora and Baker, on the other hand, refer to a post-Varennes conversion, see P. Nora, ‘R´epublique’, and K. M. Baker, ‘Condorcet’, in F. Furet et al. (eds.), Dictionnaire critique de la R´evolution franc¸aise (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), pp. 239, 835. Guilhaumou prints an interesting MS letter (BIF Condorcet MS 861, ff. 401–6) relevant to this issue, see Guilhaumou, ‘Condorcet–Si´ey`es’, pp. 235–9 (Annexe). Coutel concludes: ‘Comme la raison, l’id´ee r´epublicaine chez Condorcet a une histoire et une perfectibilit´e’ (Politique de Condorcet, p. 68), and asks the more interesting question, ‘comment devient-on r´epublicain?’. See Coutel, Politique de Condorcet, pp. 68–9. Condorcet was not entirely silent about the flaws he perceived in the 1791 constitution, and again advocated a gradualist approach to change in the Chronique de Paris (26 September 1791): ‘A true republican, under a monarchical government, knows how to wait for the slow but sure effects of reason.’ Condorcet, in collaboration with Si´ey`es, composed an address to the Assembl´ee Constituante on the need for an oath of loyalty to the new constitution in the light of anti-Revolutionary conspiracy. The Pr´eambule contains the draft text of the oath. See BIF Condorcet MS 861, ff. 415–18. Cahen dates this text June 1791, but Chouillet suggests a correction to August/September (A.-M. Chouillet, P. Cr´epel et al. (eds.), Inventaire des manuscrits Condorcet, BIF Usuels, p. 23).

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politics as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly, with the support of Brissot and others now grouped around the influential journal Le Patriote franc¸ais, journal libre impartial et nationale, and bitterly opposed to the royalist and moderate camps. Condorcet was older than the average deputy,82 his reputation as a philosophe and embodiment of Enlightenment values was unassailable, but his political reputation was suspect in what was basically a monarchist assembly. At the same time, because of his known republican sympathies, the royalist press continued to denounce him. He participated in the October debates on the refractory clergy of the Vend´ee and the Auvergne. He voted on 6 October for the right of the nation’s legislators to remain seated with heads covered in the King’s presence, presenting various financial measures in the same session. He was by no means an outstanding orator, but by the end of 1791 he had emerged as one of the most prominent theorists and defenders of the Revolution, and also as one of the most frustrated of the people’s representatives. Caught up in the political maelstrom, he deplored the lack of progress on pressing matters such as the constitution, taxation, education and social welfare, and blamed the Assembly’s endemic factionalism for the inertia.83 He was also becoming increasingly aware of the threat to legislative progress caused by the distractions of counter-revolution, and on 28 October he gave a speech to the Assembly on the dangers posed by the armed ´emigr´es gathering at Worms and Coblenz (x: 223–42). The military crisis was exacerbated internally by the urgent need to fill more than a thousand commissions in the ranks of the army caused by the emigration of royalist officers after Varennes,84 and also externally by the Pillnitz Declaration whereby Leopold II of Austria and Frederick William II of Prussia threatened intervention. On 9 November 1791 the Assembly declared all ´emigr´es participating in foreign troop manœuvres who failed to repatriate themselves by 82

83

84

On his decision to stand, see his letter accepting candidacy dated September 1791 (BIF Condorcet MS 863, f. 1). There was considerable intrigue surrounding his election, see Cahen, Condorcet, p. 273; Robinet, Condorcet, p. 123; Alengry, Condorcet, p. 117. Unlike its predecessor, the Assembl´ee Constituante (July 1789–September 1791), the Legislative Assembly (September 1791–September 1792) drew its membership more widely from the professional classes. Over 40 per cent were Montagnards or Montagnard supporters, see E. Lemay, ‘La Composition de l’Assembl´ee Nationale Constituente: les hommes de la continuit´e’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 29 (1977), 341–63; C. Mitchell, ‘Political divisions within the Legislative Assembly of 1791’, French Historical Studies 13 (1984), 356–89. Approximately 10 per cent of the total emigration, see D. M. Greer, The Incidence of the Emigration during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), p. 112 (Table 1); J. Vidalenc, Les Emigr´es franc¸ais 1789–1820 (Caen: Ozanne, 1963), pp. 63–78; C. Blum, ‘Condorcet and the problem of emigration in 1791’, Condorcet Studies 1 (1984), 61–71. By 1792 60 per cent of the officer corps had emigrated.

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1 January 1792 guilty of treason,85 and similar measures were taken against clerics who refused to take the oath of loyalty of 27 November 1790. The measures were vetoed by Louis XVI. On 20 October Brissot demanded military action to disperse the ´emigr´e troop formations, and on 23 December Condorcet supported Brissot and the case for a declaration of war in the Opinion sur le rapport des comit´es militaire, diplomatique et de l’ordinaire des finances r´eunis, and again in the D´eclaration de l’Assembl´ee nationale aux Franc¸ais of 16 February 1792.86 The Discours sur l’office de l’empereur, his most detailed analysis of French foreign policy at this time, appeared on 25 January 1792. He was elected president of the Assembly on 5 February 1792, and it was ironically at this culminating point in his career that he lost the support of both the Girondins, who suspected him of plotting to dethrone the King, as well as the Montagnards.87 The picture starts to darken as Condorcet’s enemies close in, and the disfavour in which Condorcet was now held by the Girondins was mirrored in pro-royalist scientific circles outside France when the academies of Berlin and Russia withdrew his membership. The spring and summer of 1792, a time of increasing public disorder, were to see a sharp deterioration in Condorcet’s relationship with Robespierre, for whom the moment to unmask traitors had come. The extremist Montagnard, Franc¸ois Chabot, following the lead of the ‘sea-green incorruptible’, accused Condorcet of being a stooge of the Girondins. Condorcet responded vigorously with counter-accusations against Robespierre in the Chronique de Paris (26 April 1792). Robespierre dismissed Condorcet’s republican credentials in his own journal, the D´efense de la constitution, in the following month.88 From now on Condorcet would be perceived by the Montagnards as an enemy of the Revolution, a perception he was never able to shake off. 85

86

87 88

On the urgency for legislation on the confiscation of ´emigr´e property to help pay for the war, ‘the property of those traitors who are the instigators and instruments of the war’, see the draft decree of five articles in Cardot’s hand, BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 211–13. The date given for the Discours sur les ´emigrants is that of the manuscript, BIF Condorcet MS, ff. 33–41. See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 288–91. On France’s right to declare war in the circumstances following the Declaration of Pillnitz in the winter of 1791–2, see also BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 19–29: ‘Let us show Europe that France is united in a single act of will.’ Y. Benot defends the coherence of Condorcet’s affiliation with the war party in the light of the apparent discrepancy of his support on 22 May 1790 for the decree declaring peace to the world, ‘Condorcet et la r´epublique universelle’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 251–61. Condorcet recorded his dismay at the prospect of war towards the end of 1790: ‘War at this moment would be a catastrophe with incalculable consequences’ (BIF Condorcet MS 861, f. 363). Cf. Cahen, Condorcet, p. 297. For some of the texts relating to the attacks on Condorcet by the Feuillants and the Montagnards, see Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 169–81. On Robespierre’s confrontation with Brissot on 23 April 1792 in the Club des Jacobins, see E. Guibert-Sledziewski, ‘Condorcet et Robespierre’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1987), 177–83.

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The anonymous, acidically satirical portrait of Robespierre which appeared in the Chronique de Paris on 1 May 1792, attributed immediately by an unforgiving Robespierre to Condorcet, did little to help Condorcet deflect charges of counter-revolutionary conspiracy. The three Girondin ministers were dismissed from office by the King on 13 June. As the war situation worsened, the position of Louis XVI, whose use of the veto and whose choice of ministers seemed to Condorcet to undermine the government’s authority and legitimacy, and also the position of Marie-Antoinette, widely perceived to be openly in league with France’s enemies, were now major preoccupations. Despite his aversion for displays of mob rule, Condorcet did not protest against the interruption of Assembly business when an armed and angry crowd invaded the royal palace on 20 June 1792 demanding that measures be taken against Louis XVI.89 The placing of the bonnet rouge on the King’s head and the smashing of doors and windows did not amount in Condorcet’s view to mob violence. On 6 July he addressed the Assembly on the neutralisation of royal powers in Opinion sur les mesures g´en´erales propres a` sauver la patrie des dangers imminents dont elle est menac´ee.90 His views on the deployment of the mob to force through constitutional change now evolved rapidly under the pressure of events. Condorcet never openly condoned insurrection, but he certainly invoked it as a threat on 18 June 1792 in the Chronique de France, and again in 1793 in the Fragment de justification.91 By August 1792 Louis XVI’s authority was collapsing, as was the principle of representative government itself, to which Condorcet would remain unequivocally committed. The report of 6–9 August, which Condorcet presented to the Assembly on behalf of the Comit´e des Vingt-et-un, was a lucid and sober assessment of the implications of any move to depose the King, but its recommendation to engage in further negotiation with the King was not accepted.92 Condorcet’s presentation of the report, just 89 90

91 92

See, for example, his sympathetic account of the 20 June demonstration in the Chronique de Paris (21 June 1792). Condorcet was speaking here on behalf of the Comit´e des Douze. For a text that goes further than that printed in the Arago edition, see BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 206–21. Parts of this MS are in Cardot’s hand with Condorcet’s annotations. See also the Chronique de Paris (5 August 1792), pp. 869–70. See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 413–19. As the September massacres began, Condorcet’s abhorrence was unambivalent, and he was anxious to protect the people and the Revolution itself from any blame: ‘The massacres of 2 September, the work of a few ferocious madmen, have soiled this revolution. They were not the work of the people who, believing that they had neither the strength or the motivation to put a stop to them, averted their eyes. The massacres were the work of a small number of agitators with the ability to paralyse the forces of law and order and to deceive the National Assembly . . .’, Fragment de justification (x: 603–5).

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before the historic assault on the Tuileries, removed any chance he might have had of managing the direction of constitutional change scientifically, and in a spirit of rational moderation.93 His increasing disillusionment with monarchy was given further expression in numerous essays that appeared in the summer and autumn of 1792, of which De l’influence d’un monarque et d’une cour sur les mœurs d’un peuple libre and the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature, both appearing in September of that year, are among the most interesting. On 8 August the Assembly refused to sanction proceedings against La Fayette, the General in command of the National Guard during the Champ de Mars massacre of 17 July 1791, when republican petitions had been presented on a makeshift altar. The Assembly then set aside, in full knowledge of plans for an uprising, the demand made by all forty-eight sections of the Paris Commune for the deposition of Louis XVI. The next two days saw the replacement of the Paris Commune by the Commune insurrectionnelle. Condorcet did not participate directly in the uprising of 10 August 1792, passing the night of 9–10 August in his apartment in Auteuil,94 where he drafted an address to the people of Paris urging them to support the Assembly’s attempts to protect freedom and equality, and denouncing defecting army officers (x: 543–4). He was present for at least some of the sessions to address the deputies, his presence confirmed by the Fragment de justification in which he recorded his dismay at the bloodshed in the Champ de Mars for which he would never forgive La Fayette. His wife and his baby daughter had been among the crowd on which La Fayette’s men had fired. The liberal aristocracy, in whose circles Condorcet had moved, continued to resent his conversion to republicanism, and he was reviled as a class traitor, Mme d’Enville even leaving his bust on a dung-heap. Many would hold him personally responsible for the atrocities soon to come in the Terror of 1793–4, and the antipathy worsened with his support for Danton’s appointment as Minister of Justice in the wake of the events of 10 August. Condorcet reviewed the Revolution’s progress in the Exposition des motifs d’apr`es lesquels l’Assembl´ee nationale a proclam´e la convocation d’une Convention nationale et prononc´e la suspension du pouvoir ex´ecutif dans les mains du roi, circulated as a special decree to all departments. This was followed by a series of addresses and declarations between 4 and 19 September on the 93

94

‘There can be no more poignant expression of the failure of Condorcet’s conduct in the Legislative Assembly than the spectacle of the philosophe lecturing the people on the principles of representation on the very eve of the insurrection of 10 August 1792’ (Baker, Condorcet, p. 314). ‘They are sounding the alarm . . . I was in Auteuil; I went to Paris. I got to the National Assembly a few moments before the King . . .’ (x: 597–601).

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necessity for war, public order and national unity in the wake of the surrender of Verdun on 1 September. Condorcet did not falter in his political duties in this critical period,95 but he was becoming more and more apprehensive at the direction events were taking, a direction signalled clearly with the power-struggle between the Assembly and the Commune insurrectionnelle. Attempts to disband the latter were resisted, and inevitably the Assembly was obliged to recognise the Commune’s superior political strength by conceding on 20 September 1792 Robespierre’s demand for the replacement of the Legislative Assembly by a National Convention, elected by universal suffrage. With the surrender of Verdun, the last fortress between Paris and the allied ´emigr´e armies, the Commune was able to exploit the war-fever, and declare a state of emergency. The ensuing butchery of more than a thousand prisoners in the violence of 2–7 September coincided with elections to the Convention, and it soon became clear to members of the Legislative Assembly, haunted by fears that the guillotine would soon touch the necks of the nation’s representatives, that time was running out for the Assembly in its current form. During these terrible days, when the heads of aristocrats like the Princesse de Lamballe were being paraded on spikes below MarieAntoinette’s prison window, and the butchered body of La Rochefoucauld (a former member of the Condorcet circle) was being displayed before his wife and his mother (Mme d’Enville), Condorcet remained dismayingly silent before finally expressing formal regret for the violence in the Chronique de Paris on 4 and 9 September in what some still regard as shamefully weasel words. His wish to ‘draw a curtain’ over the whole episode has received much criticism from modern historians.96 The appeal for calm contained in the eloquent Adresse de l’Assembl´ee nationale aux Franc¸ais was approved unanimously on 19 September. After much opposition from Robespierre, who continued to associate Condorcet with the Girondins, Condorcet was elected to the new Convention nationale in five districts, and chose to accept the seat for the department of the Aisne. The new concept of the Left and the Right in political life became 95 96

Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 182–6. Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 487. See also McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 24. The fall of Verdun on 3 September, and the resulting threat to Paris itself, might have inhibited Condorcet. His silence prior to 9 September could also be explained by political considerations relating to the elections to the new National Convention and by the risk of being seen as a conspirator in a time of national crisis when any criticism of the killing of prisoners would run the risk of accusations of counter-revolutionary plotting. Condorcet’s silence during the September massacres remains, nevertheless, a rare example of an apparent willingness to sacrifice principles to expediency. He would later denounce the massacres as a stain on the Revolution in the Fragment de justification.

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39

a physical reality in terms of seating arrangements in the new National Assembly. It is not known where Condorcet’s seat was actually located in the disposition of 189 deputies which saw the Girondins occupy the right-hand side of the chamber, with the Montagnards on the left and the moderates in between on the ‘plaine’. He was nominated secretary at its first meeting on 20 September, and vice-president the following day. A motion from Collot-d’Herbois and the slippery Si´ey`es to abolish royalty, to which Condorcet was ex officio a signatory, was passed.97 On the previous day a decree had been issued offering fraternal support to all peoples seeking to throw off the yoke of tyranny, and in the course of the next twelve months Condorcet would associate himself with the drive to internationalise the Revolution in a series of addresses and pamphlets, many commissioned by the Convention, some more attractively written than others.98 d ecline and fall Between 10 August and 20 September 1792, the weeks of the ‘First Terror’, marked by the deportation of refractory priests, the arrest of aristocrats and the September massacres, power was shared on an emergency basis between the Legislative Assembly, its successor the National Convention, a new Conseil ex´ecutif provisoire, headed unofficially by Danton, and the Commune insurrectionnelle controlled by Robespierre. The First Republic was proclaimed on 21 September 1792, and the new dawn of Year I was saluted by Condorcet in the Eloge de Danton, in which he also attempted once more to distance himself from the Girondins and improve relations with the Montagnards. He marked the proclamation of the Republic in De la nature des pouvoirs politiques dans une nation libre, an essay in which the Projet de constitution first started to take shape. This is followed by another manifesto, Sur les ´elections, which picks up the threads of a much longer work that had been published in 1789, entitled Sur la forme des ´elections. Condorcet still seemed to be poised at the edge of a brilliant political future in the new Convention, although his popularity probably still owed more to his status as a philosophe rather than as a politician.99 As the Convention consolidated its powers, however, his political influence 97 98

99

See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 436–7. Robinet, Condorcet, p. 221. Condorcet commented with some bitterness on the attempts to block his election in the Fragment de justification. These include the R´eflexions sur la R´evolution de 1688 et sur celle du 10 aoˆut 1792, De la R´epublique franc¸aise aux hommes libres, the Avis aux Espagnols, the Adresse aux Bataves, Aux Germains, Lettre a` un Suisse, Appel a` tous les peuples, Lettre de Junius a` William Pitt. A. Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic: Political Alignments in the National Convention of 1792 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), p. 178.

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and standing would decline, ill-health gradually undermining his energies. For the time being, however, things looked promising. On 11–12 October he was elected to the important Comit´e de constitution, along with Si´ey`es, P´etion, Vergniaud, Paine, Brissot, Gensonn´e, Bar`ere and Danton, and work started on the ambitious, but ill-fated, Projet de constitution. The so-called Girondin constitution would be presented to the Convention on 15 and 16 February 1793, and was received with a notable lack of enthusiasm. In the closing months of 1792 the most urgent issue before the Convention was the question of whether or not Louis XVI was ‘jugeable’. Deputies hesitated, fearing international repercussions as well as internal dissension as a consequence of any move against the King, who was by now incarcerated in the Temple.100 At first it was felt that the trial and execution of Louis XVI would deprive the Revolution of its most valuable hostage, and provide an already hostile Europe with the provocative spectacle of another Charles I on the scaffold. On 7 November, however, a report was received from the twenty-four-member Comit´e de l´egislation, set up after 10 August to examine the incriminating documentation found in the Tuileries. Chaired by a Toulouse lawyer Jean Mailhe, deputy for the HauteGaronne and Public Prosecutor, the committee confirmed the Convention’s right to put the King on trial. There is no direct evidence of any role played by Condorcet in the Mailhe committee’s deliberations, and on 7 November Condorcet simply noted in the Chronique de Paris that the last act of the drama of the French Revolution had started. The debate on the King’s fate opened on 13 November, inaugurated by a powerful maiden speech from Saint-Just, and the royal interrogation before the bar of the Convention began on 10–11 December, following Lindet’s reading of the list of charges on 10 December. It was on that day that Condorcet was nominated to a committee of six commissaires with responsibility for the presentation of documentary evidence to be used at the trial. Condorcet agreed only in part with the conclusions of the Mailhe report. Louis XVI was certainly guilty, in his view, of crimes 100

See the interesting post-scriptum to a letter sent by Stanhope to Condorcet towards the end of 1792, warning him about Burke’s contribution to English hostility towards the Revolution, and about the danger of English military action against France, Robinet, Condorcet, p. 350 (Annex F (v)). For fragments of the Condorcet–Stanhope correspondence between 1786 and 1789 see BIF Condorcet MS 867, ff. 34–65. Condorcet’s appreciation of Stanhope (and also Price) in the context of liberty is recorded in BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 283–4. In 1790/1 Condorcet criticised the praise that had been accorded to Burke by the Mercure de France in a letter now only in fragmentary MS form, commenting on Burke’s attacks on the French constitution (BIF Condorcet MS 860, ff. 215–17). On the contrasting attitudes of Burke and Condorcet towards revolution, see M. Ludassy, ‘La Tradition lib´erale divis´ee: Condorcet et Burke devant les r´evolutions anglaise, am´ericaine et franc¸aise’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 341–8.

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against the state, and of betraying his oath. He agreed with Mailhe that the King must be called to account, but he opposed adamantly the death penalty, rejecting in the Chronique de Paris on 5–6 December Robespierre’s demands to execute without further delay those already found guilty in the court of public opinion. In the Opinion sur le jugement de Louis XVI, presented on 19 January 1793, two days before the King’s execution, he also recorded his disagreement with Mailhe’s recommendation that Louis XVI should be judged by the Convention, preferring to see an elected national jury have that onerous responsibility instead. It was one of the few points, ironically, upon which Condorcet and Robespierre agreed. In the event, the Convention decided on 3 December to put Louis XVI on trial, and the King duly appeared before it on 11 December 1792.101 Condorcet was under no illusion about the outcome, and his misgivings are recorded in the articles printed in the Chronique de Paris on 15, 28 and 29 December. In the actual vote he supported Mailhe’s first proposition, namely that the King was guilty of plotting against the people, thereby constituting a threat to the security of the state. He voted with the Montagnards against the second proposition to make the judgement of the Convention subject to ratification by the people.102 On the sentence itself, he voted for the imposition of the severest penalty, excluding death. Brissot and the Girondins pressed for any sentence passed to be suspended, and made a number of moves to save the King’s life. In calling into question the legitimacy of the Convention’s actions, however, they dug their own graves, politically and literally. Louis XVI was declared guilty on 14 January 1793, and on 16–17 January the death sentence was passed, the vote to reprieve being lost on 19–20 January. The King was guillotined on 21 January. Although he had accepted the right of the Convention to try the King, Condorcet had warned in the Opinion sur le jugement de Louis XVI that Europe’s monarchs would accuse the Convention of lynch-law justice if it acted as judge and jury, and that as a consequence the Revolution would be associated only with bloodshed, regicide and mob rule (xii: 308). In the Opinion he had proposed the abolition of the death penalty as a general principle, along with other judicial reforms, in a vain attempt to save the King’s life, and France’s international honour. Surprisingly, the Opinion had been welcomed by the Convention, and its publication and distribution authorised in spite of its author’s refusal to countenance regicide. In the vote on the King’s life, Condorcet was 101

See Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 247–52.

102

Cahen, Condorcet, p. 463; AN, C243.

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among the seventeen deputies who abstained, abstention ending once and for all his brief flirtation with the Montagnards. His political future, already in ruins along with the ‘Girondin’ constitution he had presented to the Convention in February 1793, received a further setback when he was not appointed to the committee established subsequently to review the draft. His voice as a journalist was then stilled by the decree of 9 March 1793 requiring deputies to cease all press activity. The next day he would witness the invasion of the Convention chamber by an armed crowd, soon to be followed by Robespierre’s demand for the establishment of a Tribunal r´evolutionnaire with executive powers. Condorcet was now dangerously isolated, and would be further exposed after the purge of the Girondins on 2 June 1793 and the arrest of twenty-nine deputies, plus the Girondin ministers Clavi`ere and Lebrun-Tondu.103 The summer of 1793 saw the start of the second phase of the Terror, which was to last until the spring of 1794, and the rise to power of the Comit´e du salut public, established on 6 April, together with its auxiliary arm, the Comit´e de sˆuret´e g´en´erale. Condorcet was nominated to neither of these powerful bodies, although he did act for a while as an advisor to the former,104 in spite of his well-known distaste for the use of terror as an instrument of revolutionary power. On 8 July, after the clandestine circulation of Aux Citoyens franc¸ais, sur la nouvelle constitution, in which he attacked bitterly the opponents of his discarded and discredited Projet de constitution, he was denounced for conspiracy by the ineffable Chabot105 in a poorly attended meeting of the Convention. This was followed by the sealing of his apartment, and by the promulgation on 3 October of a warrant for his arrest and the confiscation of his possessions. In the last fragment that he would write, he would compare his fate to that of Socrates and Sidney, dying in the cause of freedom and freely accepting death as a necessary sacrifice to the gods of justice and truth (i: 609). The dark days of the winter of 1793–4 were illuminated only by the courage and steadfastness of friends such as the Suards and Mme Vernet, the landlady who gave him shelter, by the undying love of his wife, forced for her own safety to divorce him, and not least by his own heroic conduct. 103

104 105

On the impact of the fall of the Girondins on Condorcet, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 574–82; cf. M. Dorigny and M. Ozouf, ‘Girondins’, in F. Furet et al. (eds.), Dictionnaire critique, pp. 374–85. With a membership initially of nine, the Comit´e de salut public was dominated by Danton until its membership changed in July, and control passed to Robespierre. See Sommerlad and McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1991), pp. 219–21. Chabot would be later accused of fraud and guillotined within a week of Condorcet’s death.

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After completing the Conseils a` sa fille (i: 610–23) and his Testament (i: 625), he fled Paris as soon as the Suards could no longer protect him. Citizen Caritat Condorcet would never see Sophie and Eliza again. He spent the last days of his life as a refugee travelling under the name of Pierre Simon, in poor health and constant danger. His tribulations did not, however, prevent the completion by mid-March 1794 of the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progr`es de l’esprit humain, published in October 1795. Badly wounded in the leg, Condorcet was arrested in Clamart-leVignoble on 27 March 1794,106 having been reported to the police, so legend has it, by an innkeeper whose suspicions had been aroused, not only by Condorcet’s dishevelled appearance, but also by his aristocratic request for a twelve-egg omelette. He was searched, and then transferred to the prison in Bourg-la-Reine, where he died on 28 March. The cause of death was declared to be a seizure, and on the death certificate it was noted that there was bleeding from the nostrils,107 but the circumstances of Condorcet’s death have been the subject of much speculation ever since. According to Garat and others, he took poison to escape the indignities of the guillotine, and there is some evidence that he had already made contingency suicide plans along those lines.108 The evidence for suicide remains, however, inconclusive. No poison phial was found among his possessions, and a modern interpretation of the medical report on the body, as well as the position in which it was found, would suggest a heart attack, possibly the result of weeks of hardship and stress, exacerbated by hard interrogation. The true circumstances of those last moments will probably never now be known, and we are left simply with the bleak fact of a pauper’s burial in a communal grave in the local cemetery on 30 March 1794. His death was not announced in the press until the end of December. Mindful perhaps of its shabby treatment of one of the most gifted and courageous of the Revolution’s servants, the Convention approved on 13 March 1795 the purchase of 3,000 copies of the Esquisse, and authorised Sophie de Condorcet to reassume possession of her husband’s confiscated property and papers. Sophie would live on until 1822. Together with Barbier, Cabanis and Garat, she would protect the moral and intellectual 106

107 108

For the text of the proc`es-verbal of Condorcet’s arrest, the report on the discovery of his body, an inventory of the items found in his pockets by his jailors, the wording of the death certificate and other relevant documentation, see Robinet, Condorcet, pp. 358–69 (Annex H (i–v); Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 627–8. ‘Proc`es-verbal de la lev´ee du corps’, Robinet, Condorcet, p. 361. BIF Condorcet MS 475, f. 37 (correspondence of the O’Connor family). See also Alengry, Condorcet, p. 326; Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 631–2.

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legacy of one of the great political visionaries of the later years of the French Enlightenment in the form of the monumental twenty-one-volume collective edition of the Œuvres compl`etes, published in the tenth anniversary year of Condorcet’s death in 1804. It would fall to her daughter and her son-in-law, General Arthur O’Connor, to ensure Condorcet’s survival in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the great 1847–9 edition of his works that they prepared in collaboration with Franc¸ois Arago.

chap t e r 2

Human nature and human rights

Condorcet’s views on the natural origins of law, justice and human rights are scattered across no fewer than ninety-eight essays, proclamations and treatises. In nearly all of them at some point Condorcet would remind his reader that the only true purpose of the civil order was the protection of natural rights, and that the art of jurisprudence related solely to the fulfilment of that purpose. The notion of rights per se was never seriously questioned, only affirmed and refined. Rights were not given to man by a divine agency, nor were they brought into existence and legitimised by reference to philosophical principle or historical tradition, as Condorcet pointed out with characteristic sharpness in Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire: ‘When it came to building freedom on the ruins of despotism, and equality on the ruins of the old aristocracy, it was wise not to go looking for our rights in Charlemagne’s chapter-houses or in the laws of the ripuarian Franks; they were founded on the eternal rules of reason and nature’ (xii: 618). Natural human rights preceded and transcended all positive law codes. However, although after the Renaissance modern states had started to recognise the legitimacy of rights as a political concept, that legitimacy had been located, not in nature, but rather in biblical and mythological traditions, or alternatively in Greek republican principle and practice.1 Natural rights were literally in nature, and endemic in human nature. In so far as their political implications crystallised with the operations of reason, enlightenment itself became for Condorcet a deeply political phenomenon, representing in effect the greatest revolution of all. In the anonymously published Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-unis a` un Franc¸ais sur les affaires pr´esentes2 he specifically linked rights to the process of 1 2

See Condorcet’s comments on Blois in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 354–65). This work, along with other 1787–8 texts such as the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, were praised by Jefferson who sent copies back to America, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 244 n. 1. The Lettres were not signed in order to avoid offence to friends and allies who remained supporters of the parlements. On Jefferson’s role in the propagation of Condorcet’s

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enlightenment, thereby identifying the enemies of enlightenment as the enemies of those rights: In every civilised nation with a moderately sized population there can be no enjoyment of natural rights without enlightenment; the enemies of enlightenment are thus the enemies of men’s freedom to enjoy their rights. Now, just trace the history of French philosophy and literature since the Renaissance, and see whether the blame for the countless obstacles that have been placed in the path of enlightenment can be put on the government or on aristocratic bodies . . . Was it the government which prevented the publication of a general dictionary of sciences, a monumental work that has since become indispensable to the progress of reason? . . . It was the aristocratic corps of lawyers that blocked it. (ix: 105–6)

Only through enlightenment could men be saved from their chains; enlightenment being both a right in itself, and a means to achieve rights.3 For Condorcet natural rights were incontrovertible, ineradicable donn´ees of the human condition, derived from the nature of man and of things, eternal, inalienable, inviolable and universal. All individuals shared in a common genetic and physiological equality, an equality derived from nature whose implications extended into the political world. That was the equality which authenticated society’s moral, political and legal structures, an order of natural equality in which the origins of natural rights were to be found. Rights furnished the absolute benchmark of justice, and as such required the law to be universal and consistent. Condorcet took issue on this specific point with the more relativistic approach adopted by Montesquieu.4 Justice was not a contingent concept, and rights were not subject to variation in accordance with wealth, climate, geographical location, national character, race, rank or sex: ‘all men by their very nature possess equal rights’ (vi: 178).5 Only with universality of the law, reflecting the universality of human nature and human need, could the principles and purposes of natural justice be assured, and universally applied in the civil order.6

3 4

5 6

ideas in America, see M. Albertone, ‘Condorcet, Jefferson et l’Am´erique’, pp. 187–95; McLean and Urken, ‘Did Jefferson and Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’, 445–58. Cf. F. Sommerlad and I. S. McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet (Oxford: Oxford University Social Studies Faculty Centre Working Paper 1, 1989), p. x. On this point, see also the Eloge de m. de Fouchy, 16 April 1788 (iii: 323–4). See the Observations de Condorcet sur la vingt-neuvi`eme Lettre de l’Esprit des lois (i: 378); cf. Alengry, Condorcet, pp. 745–76; J. S. Schapiro, Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934; repr. 1963, 1978), p. 119. In the Fragment sur l’Atlantide (vi: 631) rights assumed political tangibility in response to man’s evolution as a rational being and the consequential imperatives of moral awareness. Cf. Baker’s comments on Condorcet’s critical reactions to Montesquieu’s methodology, and in particular to Montesquieu’s approach to the invariability principle in legislation. For Condorcet Montesquieu

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Man thus emerged from wild nature as a fully fledged political creature with natural rights built in as quasi-biological attributes, awaiting only the development of their potential strength as in the case of other mental and physical attributes.7 Rights were literally natural; they were not acquired or granted, but derived from man’s nature as a sentient being. Condorcet’s position did not change on this point, and he would return to the issue at length in the Esquisse where he ascribed only to the ninth ´epoque the forging of the essential connection between man’s nature and man’s rights.8 Such rights drew their legitimacy and authenticity from human sentience which permitted the emergence of a moral dimension to human life. Sentience authenticated civil society, and the growth of sensation was the first thing that Condorcet would stress in his analysis of man’s emergence from primitivism. The point was made, for example, in the second of the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven9 a` un citoyen de Virginie where he noted that rights were natural because they are derived from the nature of man; that is to say, because man is a sensitive [i.e. sense-driven] being, able to reason and have moral ideas from the very first moment of his existence. It follows from this, as an obvious and necessary consequence, that he must enjoy these rights, and that he cannot be justly deprived of them. (ix: 14)

Political rights emerged from natural rights as a consequence of relationships as the civil order replaced the state of nature. With political rights came the

7

8

9

had failed to define scientifically the criteria for recognising a just law. The question of influence and of the general relationship between Montesquieu’s thought and Condorcet’s has yet to be fully explored. According to Baker, ‘there is evidence to suggest that Condorcet cut his teeth in questions of politics and legislation on De l’esprit des lois’. Baker draws attention in this respect to the evidence of an early Condorcet manuscript entitled M´emoires sur diff´erents sujets adress´es a` m. le vicomte de Condorcet, par m. le marquis de C ∗∗∗ (Condorcet, p. 221). For a brief, cogent analysis of Condorcet’s objections to Montesquieu’s view of a ‘virtuous’ republic, see C. Kintzler, ‘Condorcet et la lettre des lois’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 279–87. Cf. C. Kintzler, ‘Condorcet critique de Montesquieu et de Rousseau’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e Montesquieu 6 (1994), 10–31; R. Niklaus, ‘Condorcet et Montesquieu: conflit id´eologique entre deux th´eoriciens rationalistes’, Dix-huiti`eme Si`ecle 25 (1993), 399–409. ‘In other words, man sprang from nature a political animal, fully endowed with rights that needed only to be declared, as, in a biological sense, he was born with capacities that needed only to be developed’ (Schapiro, Condorcet, p. 112). ‘After making errors for a long time, after having lost themselves in vague or incomplete theories, publicists have finally managed to understand the real rights of man, and to reduce them to this single truth: that man is a sense-based being, capable of making rational judgements and of having moral ideas [Condorcet’s italics]’ (vi: 176). New Heaven in the title printed in the first collective edition of Condorcet’s works, edited by Mme de Condorcet, A.-A. Barbier, P.-J.-G. Cabanis and D.-J. Garat, 21 vols. (Brunswick and Paris, 1804), vol. xii, p. 3. Whether the pun is intended or not is unknown.

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obligations and responsibilities of citizenship.10 In the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven he also stressed the importance of correct voting procedures as a means to protect rights. Thus, for Condorcet, the political actuality of natural rights did not come into existence through civil society; on the contrary, civil society and the system of laws it generated only gained meaning and purpose in as much as they ensured the rediscovery and continuing affirmation of those primordial natural rights. Rights thus assumed an increasing political resonance in response to man’s perfectionnement ‘because the more enlightenment advances, the more men will know their rights, and the more clearly they will be able to discern the obvious consequences of those rights’ (ix: 165). When law codes were realigned with rights, justice and moral authenticity would enter into civil life. Prior to that realignment those features of the civil order belonging to conditions pre-dating the recognition of rights were designated privil`eges, whose destruction was the proper business of enlightened legislators or, failing that, of revolution. Like many of his contemporaries, Condorcet saw nature and society as the embodiment respectively of the world of human realities and the world of institutionalised artifice. However, he did not see in that dichotomy a juxtaposition of values that was irretrievably sinister or malevolent. The two could be made to complement each other in ways that would produce a harmonious social environment. The first step towards complementarity was to ensure that a culture of rights informed political decision-making, and that the law permitted the full recognition of natural rights through a formal constitutional written declaration of those rights. Without such a declaration, a legal and moral vacuum would exist, and despotism would flourish.11 Condorcet set out the consequences of such a legal vacuum in the 1789 Id´ees sur le despotisme 10

11

In the May 1793 prospectus for the Journal de l’instruction sociale, a journal that Condorcet edited with Si´ey`es and Duhamel, the genesis of political rights is related to the transformation of individuals into an association of men: ‘Individuals, as men and as members of political society, have relationships with each other, from which their rights and duties spring.’ Such rapports also arose from man’s relationship to the fruits of his work, and were, moreover, in a constant state of evolution, driven by economic as well as social factors: ‘There exist other relationships between individuals and the society to which they belong. Finally, men’s needs and industry generate new relationships between themselves and the things they can produce, perfect, consume or use’ (xii: 605). Cf. article 6 of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 496). In the 1789 R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs a declaration of rights was described as the cornerstone of the new constitution: ‘It is thus necessary for a nation to be free in order to allow it to deliberate, and for its freedom to be assured so that its will can be carried out; now its freedom can be assured only by a charter [Condorcet’s italics], and this public corner-stone of the constitution must be established and maintained by all of the nation’s forces’ (ix: 281). In an earlier MS fragment Condorcet had written of his intention to provide ‘a picture of everything that exists in a free, well-regulated society . . . The first purpose of political association is to ensure, extend and facilitate the enjoyment of natural rights . . . In order to enjoy these rights society must have recognised the obvious and immediate

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where he insisted that only a solemn declaration of rights would prevent tyranny (ix: 165). After 1789 Condorcet referred frequently to the notion of natural rights in several essays,12 in his biography of, and correspondence with, Turgot and in many public addresses. He had also frequently invoked the relationship between the law and natural rights in legal controversies in which he had been involved, such as the defence in collaboration with Voltaire of the chevalier d’Etallonde, the Lally affair and the affaire des trois rou´es (see below pp. 183–6), about which he had written with such passionate commitment in the 1781 R´eponse au premier plaidoyer de M. d’Epr´emesnil dans l’affaire du comte de Lally (vii: 25–58), and the 1786 R´eflexions d’un citoyen non gradu´e, sur un proc`es tr`es connu (vii: 141–66). In the 1786 De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe, Condorcet expressed his admiration for the American Revolution,13 and he identifed in the introduction four core natural rights, from which all positive laws should emanate: the right to personal liberty, that liberty requiring protection from the aggression of others and constrained only by the degree to which the well-being of others is infringed; the right to property; the right to a system of laws, impartially administered and embodying the principles of equality and universality; and lastly the right to participation in the framing and enactment of laws, ‘a necessary consequence of the natural, primitive equality of man’ (viii: 5–6). The fourth natural right was that of the franchise, to be enjoyed by all those capable of exercising a rational judgement that would benefit the public good.14 As with public opinion in general and its role in political decision-making, Condorcet had in mind only enlightened propri´etaires. Ideally, in a society liberated from the yoke of irrationalism, every individual would be enfranchised. In practice, Condorcet envisaged the exercise of the fourth natural right only in strictly limited contexts.15 Nevertheless, the prerogative of enfranchised citizenship remained a natural right, ‘the right given by nature to all men

12

13 14

15

consequences of them so that no group or individual could take it upon itself to undermine them. This is the purpose of a declaration of rights’ (BIF Condorcet MS 859, f. 91). Including Sur l’admission des femmes aux droits de cit´e (1790). Among those essays that have so far received little attention from scholars are the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait et sur ce qui reste a` faire (1789), Sur l’´etendue des pouvoirs de l’Assembl´ee nationale (1790), De la nature des pouvoirs politiques dans une nation libre (1792) and La R´epublique aux hommes libres (1792). His admiration was tempered by reservations about the American notion of democratic rights, see Sommerlad and McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet, p. 286. Thus in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales he disqualified children, lunatics, monks, servants, criminals, foreigners, itinerants, and non-property owners: ‘it can be assumed that none of these have an enlightened will’ (viii: 130). See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 31–5.

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living in a state to contribute to the formulation of the rules to which every inhabitant of that state must submit in order to maintain the rights of all’ (viii: 127).16 In the Projet de d´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes (Proposal for a declaration of man’s natural, civil and political rights) these four core rights were refined further with the addition of the right of the dispossessed to resist oppression (xii: 417), but this was really not a right in the technical sense that Condorcet gave to the concept but rather a formulation of the regrettable consequence of the state’s denial of natural rights, and particularly of the fourth. The 1792 Adresse aux Bataves clarified the point in more urgent historical circumstances: ‘If the inhabitants of every well-populated, poor and ignorant nation were to be deprived of their rights, they would soon turn into a population that was both vile and seditious, and just as ready to rise up against the law as to break the power of a tyrant’s hand’ (xii: 142). The fourth right, as formulated in De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe (On the influence of the American Revolution on Europe), took Condorcet into more complex, controversial and certainly more subtly argued areas – if only because it opened up that most dangerous and volatile of Pandora’s boxes, namely exclusions from the franchise arising from the preconditions relating to public rationality and virtue. In later years, in the Esquisse, for example, Condorcet would place less emphasis on the issue of exclusions in order to emphasise the franchise more positively on egalitarian grounds as an unqualified natural right: It was felt that this method of ensuring the rights of all men, who in every society must submit to common rules, of ensuring the power to choose such methods, to determine such rules, can only belong to the majority of the members of that society, because as each individual, in exercising this choice, cannot follow his own reasoning without making others submit to it, the will of the majority is the only expression of truth that can be accepted by everyone without damaging the principle of equality. (vi: 176)

The fourth natural right encompassed nothing less than the people’s democratic prerogative to alter laws and constitutions, the right to change the political order, thereby embodying dynamic principles of upheaval and mutation ‘as men grow more enlightened’ (vi: 177). It reflected a consistent concern on Condorcet’s part to retain flexibility in the provisions of any measure to reform the constitution, the on-going right to change constitutions being ultimately the only practical antidote to inevitable 16

See Baker, Condorcet, pp. 225–44. On Condorcet’s calculus of consent theory and other aspects of his thinking on the electoral process, see Chapter 8.

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human error that might otherwise subvert even the most enlightened theoretical advancement of liberty. The concern is reiterated in the Id´ees sur le despotisme, a` l’usage de ceux qui prononcent ce mot sans l’entendre (Thoughts on despotism, for the use of those who say the word without understanding what it means): ‘Without such a precaution, whatever form the constitution takes, citizens will not be shielded from tyranny; the constitution might be established legitimately, but it will still be a tyranny, just as an unjust sentence is no less unjust for having been passed in accordance with the legal formalities’ (ix: 166). The fourth natural right was in effect the right from which the first three acquired their constitutional force. Participation in law-making and constitution-changing, however, depended for its success on an enlightened citizenry that understood its true needs and interests, and the true nature of the liberty to which it aspired. Without enlightened participation, the law would become the plaything of a corrupt judiciary, ruthless magistrates and unbridled sectional interests.17 Condorcet returned to this key provision in his more extended formulation of rights in Section 19 of the Id´ees sur le despotisme, a text that serves in effect as a prefatory statement to the D´eclaration that Condorcet would compose later in the same year. The American Revolution represented the expression of the individual’s right to freedom which the individual could claim directly from the state in terms of specific measures that safeguarded personal freedom. In Condorcet’s political philosophy, on the other hand, reason was derived on a collective basis from the general will of the majority. Whereas the American Revolution emphasised individuality in the question of rights, Condorcet tended to define freedom in terms of the individual’s obligation to act in accordance with the rules devised democratically to protect the common interest, although it did not follow from this principle that the welfare of the individual would necessarily be compromised. This was the guiding principle behind the elaboration of rights in the 1793 Projet de d´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes.18 Freedom for Condorcet thus took two forms, as he made clear in the 1781 R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres: political freedom, in which the individual is subject only to the laws emanating from the general will (as in Rousseau’s theory), 17

18

Democracy was a volatile and unpredictable commodity, to be handled with great caution. In the Id´ees sur le despotisme Condorcet made clear that the despotism of the people was to be feared, and he had much to say in that essay about the nature and consequences of arbitrary insurrection and the art of managing the blind, inchoate forces of the mob (ix: 161–4). On Condorcet’s ‘centrist’ tendencies on this point, see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 162. For an interesting comparative analysis of the text of Condorcet’s 1789 D´eclaration and the re-worked version that Robespierre presented to the Convention on 24 April 1793, see J.-P. Faye, ‘La Matrice des droits: Condorcet et Robespierre’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 313–21.

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and personal freedom. It is the latter form of freedom that ensures the right to dispose freely of one’s person, of not being dependent on the whims of others for food, opinion, feelings or taste. Loss of freedom in this private sense is felt by all, and is the condition of true servitude (vii: 122).19 Constitutional recognition of rights on that basis, and of their inviolability, remained for Condorcet the precondition for achieving the collective happiness that justified civil association.20 For Condorcet, however, the route forward did not lie in the arbitrary day-to-day balancing of the cogs and pulleys of conflicting interests, but in well-managed legislative reform that anchored the law and the constitution to the terms of an agreed declaration. Thus in the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait, et sur ce qui reste a` faire (Reflections on what has been done and on what remains to be done) the first step that he urged the National Assembly to take to avert anarchy in 1789 was to ensure that rights were solemnly recognised and declared: ‘Recognition of these rights is the basis of all societies, the only bastion that citizens have against the unjust laws which their representatives might be tempted to pass, and the surest way to keep ideas of freedom safe in the collective mind and prevent the people from ever forgetting the dignity of human nature’ (ix: 447). Condorcet emphasised repeatedly in the years leading up to the Revolution the crucial importance of a declaration of rights, formally drafted in constitutional terms, in order to give political abstractions concrete, legislative reality.21 Many of the elements that he envisaged and drafted for such a declaration prior to the meeting of the Estates-General would be enshrined in due course in both the 1789 and the 1793 D´eclarations, although the draft 19 20

21

On the notion of freedom as a sentiment, see E. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 201–3. Condorcet was not a convinced utilitarian, the doctrines of utilitarianism leading in his view only to ‘a state of perpetual warfare’ (viii: 5). Cf. C. A. Helv´etius, De l’esprit (Paris: Durand, 1758), pp. 322, 375. On Turgot’s opposition to utilitarian doctrines, so influential as far as Condorcet was concerned, see Baker, Condorcet, p. 443 n. 68. Condorcet was not the first of course. A proposal for a Declaration of Rights incorporating a social contract had been proposed on 9 July 1789 by Jean-Joseph Mounier, the organiser of the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June. Condorcet was drawing in fact on a long tradition of codification of rights inherited from England in the form of the 1215 Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights addressed to Charles I by Parliament in 1628 and institutionalised in 1679 as Habeas Corpus under Charles II, and the Bill of Rights proclaimed as the basis to the English constitution after the defeat of James II and the replacement of absolute monarchy under the Stuarts with constitutional monarchy under William III of Orange. Locke’s influence on Condorcet in this area was considerable, see D. Williams, ‘Progress and the empirical tradition in Condorcet’, Bulletin de la Soci´et´e Am´ericaine de Philosophie de Langue Franc¸aise 4 (1992), 73–7; D. Williams, ‘Condorcet and the English Enlightenment’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 16 (1993), 163–6. Models for Condorcet’s 1789 D´eclaration have been suggested by McLean and Hewitt (Condorcet, p. 57). They include Jefferson’s Virginia Declaration of Religious freedom, passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, and the draft declaration issued in January 1789 by La Fayette and Gem. Of these Jefferson’s seems to have been the most influential. See also n. 24 below.

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of the declaration of rights to go before the Assembly in July 1789, and promulgated in August as the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, was not Condorcet’s but La Fayette’s.22 The question of Condorcet’s influence over La Fayette’s draft remains open, but after his break with La Fayette he would refer to the text in disparaging terms. The question of the wider impact of Condorcet’s D´eclaration is still to be fully explored. Jefferson, whose thinking was behind the La Fayette Declaration, took Condorcet’s text back to America, and his subsequent letters to Madison offer interesting evidence of Condorcet’s influence on the 1791 Bill of Rights.23 Through Mazzei Condorcet also knew King Stanislas Poniatowski, and the Polish King was certainly impressed by Condorcet’s thinking on social choice. It would seem that he did give Condorcet’s view on rights and voting procedures some consideration, although little trace of Condorcet’s influence on the Polish constitution has been found. Condorcet lost favour with Stanislas once his republican sympathies became clear. In the 1789 Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat (Letters from a gentleman to the Third Estate) he identified a declaration of rights as the second most urgent issue to be addressed by the Third Estate in its choice of representatives (the first being agreement on the modalities for the new assembly): The most important objective is a declaration of men’s rights, a declaration that protects their enjoyment of those rights from arbitrary legislation and, more importantly, from existing laws which contravene those rights, as well as from future laws and even from laws to which other assemblies might agree. These rights are those which nature has given to all men, and which all must enjoy equally. They are common to all orders of society, and to maintain them the Third Estate must choose deputies who it thinks will attach most importance to the conservation of those rights. (ix: 222–3)

A declaration would provide an impenetrable shield against the depredations of tyranny. Its constitutional implications would be far-reaching, 22

23

See also the Notes pour une d´eclaration des droits (BIF Condorcet MS 859, ff. 44–59). This draft appears to be in Condorcet’s cramped hand, but Chouillet questions the authorship (Inventaire, p. 20). Clearer manuscript evidence that Condorcet was contemplating an ambitious, lengthy work on the subject of a declaration of rights is available, however (BIF Condorcet MS 859, ff. 60–124). These autograph notes are partly in Condorcet’s hand, and partly in Cardot’s (with Condorcet’s annotations). The text is distinct from that printed in the Arago-O’Connor edition (ix: 175–212). For what is probably the finalised text, see BN(R) l39 7672, 6914(80). Cf. Cahen, Condorcet, pp. xvii– xviii, 177–80. On La Fayette’s draft, and also on the connection between Condorcet’s Declaration and that of the radical English doctor and revolutionary Richard Gem, see McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 55–6. See below p. 255 n. 8. See Boyd et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. xv, p. 392; McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 58–9; Sommerlad and McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), pp. 319–24.

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imposing the responsibility on deputies to destroy all laws and customs that sought to violate its articles (ix: 234–7). Natural rights were known, through rational deduction, to exist in a Platonic sense, though their full extent and their implications for the civil order were not. Moreover, the relationship between rights and duties was complex and poorly understood,24 so for progress to be made in these areas a declaration of rights would be particularly useful and illuminating, although in the Id´ees sur le despotisme Condorcet was not optimistic about the prospects for its immediate acceptance by all nations, ‘habit having accustomed man so much to his chains’ (ix: 167). Condorcet noted the encouraging precedent set by the adoption of a declaration, albeit incomplete, by the state of Virginia in May 1776, soon to be followed by six other states, but noted also the minimal progress made since 1776. No declaration of rights had yet addressed the question of rights in crucial areas affecting individuals directly, and in Section 21 of the Id´ees Condorcet reviewed the state of play on the question of declared rights in pessimistic terms: no declaration of rights had so far even defined the limits of sovereign power.25 In Section 22 of the Id´ees Condorcet gave serious thought to the challenge of drafting a new and comprehensive declaration of rights, paying particular attention to the management of the practicalities involved. Clarity, precision and pragmatism would be the prerequisites. It was perhaps the most urgent political challenge faced by the Enlightenment, and that challenge could be met only by harnessing the energies of enlightened minds. Condorcet envisaged the establishment of co-ordinated teams of ‘enlightened men’, each team working to produce its own model (ix: 170). Teams would be charged with compiling lists of unambiguous, clearly defined rights which would be in due course consolidated and refined as a single, agreed draft, so that, while avoiding verbosity and miniscule detail, it would illuminate each right so clearly that any serious violation of that right would be obvious, open to simple demonstration and understandable to all . . . Finally, after having compared various drafts, and made a complete list of what constitutes those rights, this preliminary enunciation should be drafted in such a way as to allow a large assembly to say yes or no to what it believes should be incorporated in a declaration of rights, or judges to be fantastical or exaggerated. (ix: 171) 24 25

Condorcet cited on this point the example of America, see De l’influence de la R´evolution de l’Am´erique sur l’Europe (viii: 13–14). Specific areas listed by Condorcet here, in which the individual urgently needed in his view the benefits of a declaration of rights, included capital punishment, taxation, trade, property and the produce of property (property meaning not only land but skills and talents), conditions of military conscription and service and juries (ix: 169–70). See also the Vie de Voltaire (iv: 298–301).

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The formulation of rights in a finalised form for translation into constitutional principle would emerge from the interaction of enlightened minds engaged in a co-ordinated process of consultation and evaluation. The consultative aspect was not, however, to be exclusive to the drafters but open to all citizens through the promulgation in print of the results of the deliberations: there would be a double advantage, namely that of submitting the results to all citizens for approval and of benefiting from the light that might shine out from them, and that of being able to say that no right that any member of the state might wish to claim had been neglected . . . The more comprehensive and the more extensive a declaration is, the more transparent and precise it will be, and the more the nation which recognises it, and is committed to it out of principle and conviction, will be sure that it is shielded from tyranny; for any tyranny which might openly attack one of those rights will encounter general opposition. (ix: 172)

In Section 23 Condorcet stressed the advantages of a D´eclaration generated through a broad mechanism of consultation and mutual agreement for public peace and confidence in times of constitutional uncertainty. The procedures would, moreover, provide for the illumination of an informed citizenry, no longer to be so easily duped, as in the past, on the question of its rights and of the legitimacy of ancien r´egime privileges ‘contrary to those very rights’ (ix: 172). In addition to the Id´ees sur le despotisme, two other texts are particularly relevant to an understanding of Condorcet’s evolving position on the constitutional definition of rights, and the problem of translating those rights into legislative measures. The first is his D´eclaration des droits of 1789, and the second is the Projet de d´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques which formed part of the Projet de constitution presented to the National Convention on 15 and 16 February 1793. Condorcet’s 1789 D´eclaration was supposedly published in London, purporting to be a translation of an English text (widely attributed to Mazzei, but in fact by Richard Gem), issued to encourage the meeting of the Estates-General to start with a declaration of rights.26 In the Avertissement to the D´eclaration des droits, its composition timed to coincide with the meeting of the Estates-General, 26

Jefferson gave the game away on the titlepage of one of his three copies: ‘par le marquis de Condorcet, traduite en Anglois par le Docteur Gem avec l’original a` cˆot´e’, see McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 57; Boyd et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. xv, pp. 384–99. For the MS text of the D´eclaration see BN(R) Lb39 7672. For the MS text of the misleadingly anonymous ‘original’ text, see BN(R) Lb19 6914. See also Cahen, Condorcet, pp. xvii–xviii. Jefferson returned to Virginia with this text, and it might well have had some impact on the US Bill of Rights.

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Condorcet warned against raising expectations too high. Rights could not be instantly implemented, and a declaration of rights was a beginning, not an end: ‘A comprehensive and precise declaration of rights is perhaps the most useful work that can be offered to men in any country; but that work, like astronomical tables, can only be perfected with the help of time, the co-operation of many people, and a long process of correction resulting from a scrupulous and thoughtful examination’ (ix: 179–80).27 Condorcet would return to a strategy of gradualism in a number of other proposals for reformist legislation, gradualist strategies being a characteristic feature of his approach to the political management of change, and to the advancement of policies that would carry change forward and have impact on the everyday life of the individual citizen in the short term rather than the long.28 Condorcet’s D´eclaration is divided into five main sections, each with a differing number of sub-sections or divisions, many being further sub-divided into numbered paragraphs each containing a list of italicised proclamatory articles constituting the D´eclaration itself. Most of the preamble is concerned with voting rules and procedures, and the rights that are categorised subsequently encompass the rights defined in the August 1789 Declaration of the Assembly and also those set out in the Virginia Bill of Rights. At the start the prerequisite of public consent is reaffirmed as the litmus test of political legitimacy and governmental authority. Rights were proclaimed to be immune from legislative interference unless authorised by a process of consent that was continuously invoked, thereby underpinning the right to change constitutions to which Condorcet had given priority in the Id´ees sur le despotisme. The legislative application of rights in the constitution, and the protection of their integrity, was a matter for the governed not for governments: 27

28

‘Condorcet’s Projet de d´eclaration des droits was deemed a prerequisite to any pact that brought people to unite in society. The declaration of rights had to precede the formulation of constitutional mechanisms since the latter were to provide the instruments for guaranteeing the sustenance of the former’, V. G. Rosenblum, ‘Condorcet as constitutional draftsman: dimensions of substantive commitment and procedural implementation’, Condorcet Studies 1 (1984), p. 191. In the Esquisse Condorcet observed that historically the actual exercise of rights had always lagged fatally behind their legal recognition: ‘In reviewing the history of societies we have been able to show that a long interval often exists between the rights which the law recognises in citizens and the rights which they actually enjoy, between the equality established by political institutions and that which exists between individuals.’ This hiatus had often caused the destruction of the fragile shoots of liberty in ancient republics, exacerbating the constitutional tensions to which they became vulnerable, and the weaknesses that eventually exposed them to the mercy of their enemies (vi: 244).

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No power, except by the unanimous consent of all members of society, can legitimise an attack on these rights; such an attack would be even more lacking in legitimacy unless every man, on reaching the age of reason, gave fresh consent to that violation, that it affected only those who agreed to submit to it, and that this consent could be withdrawn after a pre-determined period. It cannot be said either that society can act more legitimately by just constraining those rights within certain limits; it can only define precisely what nature has already placed within those limits. (ix: 181)

Rights could be threatened by laws designed deliberately to undermine them, or by laws whose implementation posed, even unintentionally, the threat of violation.29 Condorcet defined the meaning of the individual’s vote to establish a representative assembly strictly within the framework of a consensual political contract between voters and the elected that had the protection of rights at its centre, and the assurance that those rights would determine the formulation of laws: Each man, by voting into existence an official legislative body, is saying to it: I am establishing you so that you can control the way in which I and my fellow citizens can be assured of our rights; I submit myself to the general will that you will embody in the laws; but I must place limitations on that will, and prevent you from using against my rights the power that I have given you to defend them [Condorcet’s italics]. (ix: 183)

In the D´eclaration natural rights are reduced to five: personal security, personal liberty, security of property, freedom to enjoy the benefits of property and natural equality, each of which is then reformulated as measures, with commentary, in the five corresponding sections that constitute the D´eclaration itself. In the first of the three divisions of Section 1, on rights relating to the individual’s security, Condorcet proposed eight measures to counter with immediate effect the malign and unjust effects of contemporary criminal codes and judicial procedures (ix: 184–90). These included the establishment of clear criteria to be used in the definition of punishable offences, the removal of the prerogative of government to impose taxes that require arbitrary powers of enforcement, the clear and consistent formulation of the criminal code and the systematic regularisation of penalties, the restriction of criminal procedures to legally established courts, and the restriction of the death penalty to proven cases of murder or intended murder in which 29

The distinction was, in Condorcet’s view, a crucial one: ‘If a law condemns a man to death by an imprecise, summary process, it directly undermines the security of all; but if the death sentence is passed by a majority of two it could not be said that the law directly undermines my personal security, but only that it exposes me to the risk of being unjustly condemned’ (ix: 182).

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the perpetrator posed a threat to society,30 the abolition of torture as part of trial procedures,31 and the right of defendants to know the nature of the charges against them, the evidence of their alleged crimes, the identity of witnesses, the substance of their testimony and the right to a defence procedure. The eighth measure was concerned with the extension of the protection of rights in the light of changing definitions of crime when the state was at war.32 In the second and third divisions Condorcet turned to the means by which governments could ensure the impartiality of the judiciary, the most dangerous adversary of rights in general, and of the first natural right to security in particular: ‘Judicial power is a dangerous weapon that is easy to abuse against citizens, and which can, if not confined in pure, impartial hands, be more fatal to their security than the private acts of violence from which it should be defending them’ (ix: 187). Eight amendments to contemporary practices relating to the appointment of judges, the election of court officials and the abolition of special courts are set out, all aimed at the elimination of arbitrariness and irregularity in political and legal mechanisms relating to tenure of judicial office, the establishment of the right of the accused in civilian and military courts to a partial veto over trial procedures and reforms in the use of pardons. The sixth and seventh measures provide for legislation to prevent the arbitrary use of military force against the people, whether for reasons of public order or to ensure obedience to the law, unless such action was sanctioned by a specific law, 30

31

32

Condorcet’s application of probability theory to decision-making by juries indicated that proof of guilt could never be sufficiently watertight to ensure that the accused was the guilty party. He supplemented probability-based arguments about juries with humanitarian concerns about the efficiency of executions and the problem of the irrevocability of the sentence, once carried out, ‘for neither judges, and still less the body politic . . ., can be absolutely certain of the crime; the possibility of the innocence of the person found guilty of it is never completely eliminated, and consequently all irrevocable punishments are unjust, unless it can be proved that they are necessary’ (ix: 185). He also rejected the justification of the death penalty as an effective deterrence. Interestingly, he did, however, accept the need for the death penalty in the case of insurrectionists and traitors, whose imprisonment might constitute an on-going danger to the security of the state. Condorcet’s opposition to torture was almost certainly fired by his involvement in Voltaire’s campaign to rehabilitate the chevalier de La Barre and his co-defendants (see Introduction, pp. 15–17). In the D´eclaration his concern was to separate barbaric judicial procedures from the individual acts of raw vengeance that operated in the state of nature: ‘Actually, in order to be legitimate, punishments can only replace, while at the same time softening, what the vengeance of individuals would permit in the state of nature by assuming the role of a man not deprived of his reason by anger; and punishments must not go beyond what is necessary to prevent crime, and to protect society from the criminal acts of the guilty’ (ix: 186). Condorcet observed here the differing definitions of crime in a war situation affecting the conduct of civilians as well as soldiers. The special responsibilities for the administration of justice in these circumstances by military commanders were heavy, but respect for individual rights remained paramount (ix: 186–7).

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and carried out within the framework of that law. The seventh measure stipulated that such a law would authorise military measures only against the people in circumstances involving ‘an open violation of natural rights of individuals as well as of society’ (ix: 188). In the eighth measure set out in the third division Condorcet, ever concerned with the technical detail needed to flesh out the abstractions of principle, concentrates on specific regulations governing the number of judges to be appointed to a court, voting procedures, the establishment of tribunals to monitor court procedures, appeal courts and the monitoring of government measures to invoke force against the people. A similar level of close scrutiny of administrative detail is apparent in the second section of the D´eclaration relating to the right to freedom. Proposals are listed again in three divisions, of which the first, containing fourteen measures designed to protect freedom from ‘direct attacks’, is the longest. In addressing an issue that might easily have been treated as a purely philosophical problem, Condorcet again reveals his grasp of the pragmatic, street-level policies required to give legislative abstractions relevance to the real world. Thus the first measure engages immediately with the abolition of restrictions on freedom arising from the rules of exclusion in the trades and professions, which militated against the natural right of the individual to benefit from the exercise of his talents and skills: ‘all restrictions in this respect being contrary, not only to the freedom of those who are forbidden to carry out a particular function, or do a certain job, but also to the freedom of other citizens who would like to employ them to carry out that function, or do that job’ (ix: 191). Measures with a similarly sharp cutting edge and profoundly beneficial social implications for ordinary people include the abolition of all forms of conscription, whether military or civilian,33 and the removal of domiciliary restrictions. Other measures relate to the powers of husbands over wives and children, the removal of arbitrary powers of arrest, the policing of taxation, the obligatory taking of oaths, freedom of the press,34 religious tolerance and freedom of association. The problem of making the people aware of their right to freedom without provoking 33

34

The commentary on this measure contains interesting, and subtle, qualifications. Refusal to do public service when such service might be urgently required might be ‘contrary to humanity’, but would infringe justice, and men can only be forced to comply with justice. The only penalty possible, therefore, was that of public shaming (ix: 191–2). Press freedom was a crucial matter for Condorcet, and he addressed it frequently. In the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais, for example, he described the degree of government opposition to press freedom as ‘the true thermometer by which one measures the intentions of public men or political bodies’ (ix: 106). In the D´eclaration the press would be subject to penalties only in cases of personal libel (ix: 193). Even that restriction would not survive in the 1793 Projet de d´eclaration. In general, Condorcet saw censorship as an offence, not only against the natural right of freedom, but

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insurrection is not raised in the commentaries on the measures listed in the D´eclaration.35 However, Condorcet does refer here to the tensions between the right to freedom and the need to maintain public order, but not from that standpoint. In the second section of the D´eclaration he is much more concerned with the threat of repression from above rather than revolt from below, ‘for it is not enough to enjoy freedom, to not fear that freedom will be troubled by the civil authority; freedom must be protected from the violence and the attacks that prejudice can inspire’ (ix: 195). The second and third divisions of Section 2 of the D´eclaration, containing three and five proposals respectively, relate to conditions of arrest, limitation on detention and sentencing in which Condorcet clearly has the English provision of habeas corpus in mind. The third division, on the form of legislation needed for the preservation of freedom, is relatively concise, but covers a wide and, at first sight, disparate range of issues. The first two measures are concerned with the use of public space and facilities, ‘ordinary things like views, rivers, etc.’, and the third with the regulation of public order in that context (ix: 263). The individual’s right to freedom and security imposed on the state the obligation to provide for the policing of public order which constrained the rights of the few in specific situations threatening those of the many, such as outbreaks of public violence. In order to enjoy the right of freedom, it was not enough to remove the fear of encroachment by the state; and rights of redress against government infringement of individual freedom are therefore set out in the fourth measure. It was above all incumbent on the state, under the terms of the social pact, to take positive steps to shelter individuals from the effects of the illegal, rights-depriving actions of others to which they become exposed

35

also as an offence against reason itself, ‘the control of books’ being an arbitrary act of intellectual aggression, see the notes to the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 289–90). The 1779 Dissertation philosophique et politique, ou R´eflexions sur cette question: S’il est utile aux hommes d’ˆetre tromp´es? contains a full defence of the right of access to truth in the cause of public enlightenment, and the urgent need to purge the popular mind of error and prejudice (v: 359–60). At the start of that essay he listed eight justifications for the protection of freedom of information (v: 343–5). He also listed four areas in which it would be impolitic to spread enlightenment: thus he advised caution with regard to destroying popular belief in a vengeful God, at least until theological doctrine had been replaced by a reason-based moral system; with regard to the right of resistance in nations where the police and armed forces were not administered in the name of the people; with regard to the communication of information useful to the enemies of enlightenment; with regard to the communication of truths whose benefits were not yet understood, and to which ignorant reactions might reinforce opposition to progress (v: 381–3). See also the 1776 Fragments sur la libert´e de la presse (xi: 253–314, especially Sections 3 and 4). This problem is examined briefly in the Dissertation philosophique et politique where he underlined the positive role to be played by the press, education and legislation in the exercise of control over public passions (v: 373–5), although he acknowledged that the influence of the press as an instrument of persuasion in the matter of ‘false opinions’ would count for little with an illiterate people.

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in the civil order: ‘The social state, by bringing men together, by locating them in defined areas which it is often difficult for them to leave, exposed them to violence, and consequently the government must protect them from this violence’ (ix: 195). The right to freedom did not end at the cell door, moreover, even for the guilty, and it was characteristic of Condorcet’s whole approach to rights in his D´eclaration that the fifth, most detailed and perhaps most forward-looking, measure listed in the third division should be devoted to the improvement of prison conditions, the needs of prisoners’ families, sanitation, welfare and other issues related to the preservation of human dignity, even for those legally deprived of freedom (but not permanently of the right to freedom).36 The three divisions of Section 3 of the D´eclaration, together with the three divisions of Section 4, on the right to own property, property taxes, abolition of hunting rights over land belonging to others unless their permission is given, legal procedures in connection with property transactions and security of property, also reflect a characteristic emphasis on administrative detail, and a readiness to engage with the practicalities involved in the rationalisation of rights of ownership, the protection of property against damage (caused by hunting privileges, for example), sale of land, public access to private land, the circumstances under which land can be acquired for the public good (building of roads, canals, drains, military defences, etc.), the reform of arrangements for the compulsory purchase of land (even for the publicly beneficial purpose of acquiring land for the construction of hospitals, prisons and schools), the raising of taxes for public services and public works and the methods by which such taxation should be calculated (ix: 196–202). The right to own property also encompassed the right to benefit from the produce of property, and the laws necessary to protect this benefit form the substance of the three divisions of Section 4, concerned with ‘libert´e des propri´et´es’, and comprising a total of ten measures (ix: 202–6).37 36

37

Condorcet was not sanguine about the prospects for human dignity in the post-Cartesian age even in the supposedly optimistic Esquisse. The right to freedom, upon which human dignity was largely predicated, was still chimerical in most, ‘so-called free’, countries (vi: 172). Cf. the Remarques sur les Pens´ees de Pascal where he compared the contemporary conditions of life of European serfs to those of colonial black slaves (iii: 652–3). In the Vie de m. Turgot, Condorcet had defined what he meant by property and the rights associated with it in the following terms, making clear that while the right to property was regulated by law codes, it was not derived from those codes but from natural law itself: ‘Property is nothing more than the right to freely dispose of what one possesses legitimately. In the state of nature, everything one enjoyed, unless it was taken from someone else, constituted this property; in society property becomes what one has received from one’s family, what one has been able to acquire by one’s labour, what one has obtained by contract. The laws regulate the way in which this right can be exercised,

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Condorcet’s approach to the question of property coincided fully with the views of the physiocrats, with some echoes of Lockean property theory.38 Far from being an act of theft and deception, perpetuated and consolidated by civil institutions and the law, and culminating ultimately in class warfare, the right to own property was fully accepted by Condorcet as part of the natural order of things, and as such a legitimate expression of freedom. The right to own property worked, moreover, in the interests of the have-nots as well as the haves.39 By property he did not mean feudal land-holding, which was related to hereditary privilege, and therefore contrary to nature. The right to property involved the return of land to the peasantry, the return of control over the marketing and distribution of goods to merchants and manufacturers and the return to workers of their freedom to sell their labour.40 Property was freedom made visible, its origins to be found in the animals killed by the hunter and the fruits of the soil that man cultivated in the state of nature.41 The fifth and sixth measures extend proposals to reform legislation into the area of free trade, the free movement of goods and the abolition of taxes payable on those goods and disproportionate levels of taxation on the produce of agricultural property contravening the right to the protection of property as well as freedom (ix: 204). The last section, again with three divisions, addresses the question of equality, and the need to ensure that institutional privileges favouring

38 39 40

41

but it is not from the law that one derives the right to have property’ (v: 179). Property predated the civil order (v: 180). References to the interface between natural rights and the authority of the law occur frequently in Condorcet’s political writings. It received particularly careful attention in the context of the right, not only to private ownership, but also to public ownership of civic institutions. The right to own land, and the produce of land, was in Condorcet’s view derived from nature, and the protection of that right was a key objective of civil association. In the civil order, public ownership of institutions was authorised, on the other hand, by public consent, ‘and the right to reform them or destroy them when they become useless or dangerous is a necessary condition of that consent’. Condorcet’s view on the public ownership of institutions, and the buildings and amenities that go with them (including royal palaces), offers an interesting pre-Marxist intimation of the logic of nationalisation as an extension of the natural right to property: ‘Thus the nation alone is the real owner of the property belonging to those institutions, given to them only by the nation and on behalf of the nation’ (v: 24). In the Eloge de Franklin Condorcet defined freedom itself as a form of property, ‘an equal and inalienable property belonging to the whole human race’, corresponding to natural human need (iii: 395). On this point, see also the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 178–9), the R´eflexions sur les bl´es (xi: 162–4) and Sur l’´etat des protestants (v: 495–6). Condorcet explains why in the Dissertation philosophique et politique (v: 362) and in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 128–31). See Schapiro, Condorcet, pp. 174–5; Cahen, Condorcet, p. 45. Cf. Turgot, R´eflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses (Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, ed. G. Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1913–23), vol. ii, p. 537). P. Sagnac, La L´egislation civile de la R´evolution franc¸aise: la propri´et´e et la famille (1789–1804) (Paris: Hachette, 1899), p. 243. On the evolution of property legislation in France between 1785 and 1795, Sagnac’s work is still authoritative (see especially pp. 57–243).

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particular individuals or groups are neutralised.42 Condorcet had explored some of the implications of equality in the Id´ees sur le despotisme, where he had made clear that equality did not mean an unqualified abolition of all forms of inequality, such an ideal being unrealisable in practical political terms. Inequalities arising as a necessary consequence of the nature of man and of things were ineradicable (ix: 166). Thus inequality of wealth was not necessarily contrary to natural law, but a necessary consequence of the natural right to acquire property and to enjoy its benefits, a freedom that embodied the auxiliary right through inheritance to the indefinite possession of property. Such a right would be contrary to natural law only if it drew a false legitimacy from an unjust positive law. Similarly, the inequality arising from the exercise of power and authority inherent in the responsibilities of public office on the one hand, and the obligations of duty and obedience owed by subordinates on the other, would not infringe natural law because it was derived from the necessary modalities of the social pact. Such authority would contravene natural law, on the other hand, if it resided in privilege, or if it transgressed the boundaries of legally sanctioned duties. Nor would the principle of equality be infringed by the restriction of the franchise to property-owners, although it would be in the case of an electoral system that favoured some property-owners more than others, ‘because such a distinction does not arise from the nature of things’ (ix: 167). Thus not all inequalities should be seen as a violation of natural rights. In the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais sur les affaires pr´esentes the defence of the weak against the depredations of the strong, the natural condition of the pre-civil state, remained nevertheless an obligation on rulers and a right of the ruled: ‘Equality is nothing less than one of the natural rights of humanity. Men are born equal, and society is created in order to prevent that form of inequality based on strength and force, the only inequality which exists in nature, from creating with impunity violent acts of injustice’ (ix: 101).43 Equality meant universality of rights.44 From property Condorcet moves on to formulate proposals to abolish hereditary privileges relating to appointments to public office and the award 42

43

44

In the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales Condorcet observed that ‘unfortunately, most men are more attached to the prerogatives that distinguish them from others than to the rights which they have in common, even when those rights are important and those prerogatives frivolous’ (viii: 278). In the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais Condorcet adds: ‘Every inequality, which in the social order is established by law, and is not the necessary consequence of true merit, of the right to property, of public opinion, of the importance of social duties, is a violation of that right’ (ix: 101–2). See Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 162–4.

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of honours, but much of the first division of the last section is also devoted to matters relating to representation and the franchise, and the preconditions for civil obedience to the laws that elected representatives might wish to promulgate. Here Condorcet envisaged five ‘natural conditions’ for the exercise of a reformed franchise, restricting the vote to property-owners, to those free of convictions, to the sane and to those not subject to contractual or other formal obligation to others. The right to vote for representatives is closely followed in order of priority by the right of association. Condorcet was concerned not only to protect this right, but also to prevent its abuse (ix: 208). Thus the corps of priests, soldiers and lawyers should not enjoy privileges of association that were any different from that of theatre-goers (ix: 209). Equality before the law for all citizens, regardless of status or sex, is raised to the level of a mandatory constitutional requirement. The key component principles of a modern polity – continuous evolution, popular consent, eternal vigilance (a review every ten years), transparency, accountability and the legally endorsed provision for corrective action that applies not only to a constitution but also to a declaration of rights itself – remain paramount: No constitutive law, not even this declaration of rights, will be considered perpetual or fundamental, but a fixed term will be established, at the end of which one or the other will be re-examined; and as it would be both absurd and dangerous to charge the legislative with that function . . . a small commission will be set up every ten years by the generality of citizens, charged with reviewing that declaration of rights as well as the constitution [Condorcet’s italics]. (ix: 210)

This would require within a year the submission of a report to ‘a general convention . . . nominated by the generality of citizens’ (ix: 211), separate from, and independent of, the legislative. The ‘general convention’ would have powers to add further articles to the draft of the D´eclaration, to extend, correct and refine the text on the basis of a simple majority vote, any changes to be ratified by a three-quarters majority. For Condorcet rights could be assured only by independent deputies elected in accordance with procedures that would ensure their enlightened impartiality.45 The thirty-three articles of Condorcet’s second declaration of rights, the 1792–3 Projet de D´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des 45

‘The free vote of elected representatives in accordance with procedures which would ensure both impartiality and enlightenment; these are the true defenders of the people’s rights; only they are worthy enough to support such a fine cause’, Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 558). Cf. Esquisse (vi: 176).

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hommes, draws on principles elaborated in a more discursive way in the 1789 D´eclaration, but its provisions were far more radical, and would provide the basis for the 1793 constitution.46 The Projet de D´eclaration is a more crisply formulated and better organized text, less encumbered with the qualifications, clarifications, examples and exceptions that had proliferated in the earlier text. Presented to the Convention as part of the Projet de constitution, there is no intercalated commentary, and the tone is more r´eglementaire, as might be expected, with obligations as well as rights receiving closer attention. While the D´eclaration had been framed in the aftermath of the Estates-General, and the urgent need to enunciate and defend a concept of rights in the context of an ancien r´egime civil order, the Projet de D´eclaration was drafted in the context of a reformed contract, and to the requirements of a republican civil order. Equal civil rights are now for all, and the three core rights, originally identified in the Id´ees sur le despotisme, and expanded in a multiplicity of contexts and applications in the D´eclaration, are now consolidated and re-prioritized as four: liberty, equality, security and property. With regard to the franchise, the property qualification now disappears. Condorcet also adds two safeguards: ‘the social guarantee’, meaning in effect the constitutional formalisation of those rights, and the right to resist oppression.47 Liberty now becomes the right to do anything that does not contravene the rights of others, and is in accordance with the law, ‘which is the expression of the general will’ (xii: 418). The auxiliary rights to freedom of expression and freedom of the press appear as articles 4 and 5, and the right to freedom of worship constitutes article 6. Equality (articles 8–9) meant universality of rights and equality before the law, ‘whether it offers recompense or punishment, protection or curbs’ (xii: 418). The lengthy legal provisions to ensure security of the person and of property, which had extended through four sections of the 1789 D´eclaration, are distilled in the Projet de D´eclaration as two short articles of about eighty words in total (10–12). Article 13, on the constitutional provision for equal educational opportunity, opens up a new area. Provisions relating to the criminal code of punishments, presumption of innocence, 46

47

The full text of the Projet de D´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes, as presented to the National Assembly on 15/16 February 1793, has been reprinted by Coutel (Condorcet, pp. 115–18). ‘If somewhat esoteric, amorphous or even mystical, [the social guarantee] was nonetheless formulated to relate national sovereignty to the general will’ (Rosenblum, ‘Condorcet as constitutional draftsman’, 191).

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police procedures of arrest48 and due process (14–17) coincide closely with the corresponding texts in the D´eclaration, although there is much less detail.49 The long statement in the D´eclaration on the applications of the death penalty has been replaced with a simple requirement in article 17, reflecting Beccaria: ‘Punishments must be proportionate to crimes, and useful to society’ (xii: 420). The right to own property, the right to freedom of work and the right to sell and market the produce of labour are defined in articles 18 and 19. Importantly, article 20 seeks to ensure that individuals cannot be treated, even by themselves, as marketable commodities, their person being inalienable. The word consentement appears for the first time in articles 21 and 22 in connection with property tax, a tax to be used only for ‘a useful public purpose or to address the people’s needs’ (xii: 420), its level to be decided on the basis of public consultation and consent. The positive right to education is defined in article 24, and Condorcet’s emphasis throughout on usefulness and need in the expenditure of taxation income is reinforced in article 24, which examines the case for the funding of public services to help those in need (xii: 421). Condorcet had much more to say in articles 25–30 about the social guarantee, to which he had alluded without elaboration at the start of the Projet de D´eclaration. Arguably this concept, as developed especially in article 27, injects the most powerful political ingredient of all into the chemistry of radical constitutional change. The social guarantee of rights was predicated on, and was an expression of, a view of sovereignty that informed all aspects of Condorcet’s thinking after 1789. It would involve the relocation of sovereignty with the people, a revolutionary sovereignty that should lie at the heart of a liberal constitution: ‘The social guarantee of the rights of man rests on national sovereignty. Sovereignty is one, indivisible, indefeasable and inalienable. It is located essentially in the whole people, and every citizen has the right to participate in the exercise of it’ (xii: 422). The social guarantee could only become operative in constitutions in which 48

49

See paras. 6–8. In the Questions addressing strategy to be adopted by the provincial representatives attending the meeting of the Estates-General that constitute the last part of the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs there is a lengthier attack on the lettres de cachet (orders for arrest issued under the King’s private seal) as one of the worst examples of terror induced by the arbitrary use of power: ‘Lettres de cachet have arrested the progress of enlightenment. They have prevented men from knowing their rights, from helping each other, from defending each other, and even from coming together to discuss their misfortunes. For whole centuries lettres de cachet have sapped the courage and stifled the efforts of bodies whose duty was to oppose the collection of illegal taxes. They have attacked these bodies in their inner sanctums, and in this way have been the cause of the enormous burden crushing the poor’ (ix: 274). Compare, for example, the third paragraph of the first division of Section 1 of the 1789 D´eclaration with the single, brief sentence that constitutes article 15 of the 1793 version.

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legislative power was sanctioned by popular consent, and the accountability and responsibilities of public officials carefully defined. Popular sovereignty thus combined with the social guarantee as a sine qua non of the effective management of rights.50 The last three articles of the Projet de D´eclaration, drafted in the accelerating flow of events between 1789 and 1793, address the delicate circumstances arising when these conditions were not met. A sovereign people, denied its rights, was constitutionally empowered to resist oppression, recognised in article 31 as the ultimate prerogative of all men ‘united in society’. In his 1 April 1791 speech to the Cercle Social, printed under the title Des Conventions nationales, Condorcet had already commented at length on the conditions for legitimate resistance to arbitrary rule (x: 197–8). In the Projet de D´eclaration Condorcet is anxious not to legitimise anarchy. Resistance to arbitrary rule must have only those laws violating natural law as its target if it is to avoid ‘the tumult of arbitrary violence’. Resistance to oppression was a right, but its exercise was permissible only within a framework of legislation which the new constitution must provide: ‘in every free government, the form that resistance takes to different acts of oppression must be regulated by the constitution’ (xii: 422). In the last, and in constitutional terms the most crucial, article Condorcet reiterates his insistence on the right to review and, if necessary, alter constitutions, but here the formulation of that right is less precise than in earlier statements, and the procedures for review are surprisingly vague. Article 33 is in fact limited to a bare assertion that the people always have the right to reform and change the constitution in order to protect future generations, living in different times requiring different provisions, from the tyranny of the past. The language and substance of the seventeen articles of the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, proclaimed on 26 August 1789, reflected aspects of Condorcet’s own D´eclaration, designed prior to the meeting of the Estates-General in May 1789 to guide the deliberations of a new National Assembly.51 The 1793 Projet de D´eclaration, drafted for the constitution of 24 June 1793, which introduced supplementary articles relating to happiness, free speech, legal process, economic and social rights, and included the rights to education and civic formation, equality of opportunity, 50

51

On this point, see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 164. On the originality of Condorcet’s thinking on the relationship between sovereignty and representation, see L. Jaume, ‘Individu et souverainet´e chez Condorcet’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 297–304. The constitutional status of the 1789 D´eclaration was not validated until its solemn reaffirmation in the preamble to the Constitution on 27 October 1946, reconfirmed by the constitution of 4 October 1958 in which the rights of man were balanced by Gaullist principles of national autonomy and authority of the Fifth Republic.

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employment and state support, bear even more clearly Condorcet’s stamp.52 Condorcet’s Projet de constitution was not adopted officially, but the language and much of the substance of his second declaration of rights did find their way into the text eventually approved by Robespierre, in spite of the latter’s detestation of the author.53 A year after Condorcet’s death the Directoire reverted to the seventeen articles of the 1789 D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. Condorcet’s achievement, if not his name, in the area of rights and their place in modern constitutions would, however, survive to provide the compass from which the next two centuries of ideological engagement with the vexed question of human rights would take their moral and political bearings. 52 53

See, for example, the wording of articles 2, 6, 7, 11, 18, 21 (note the reference here to state assistance for the poor being ‘a sacred debt’), 22, 25 and 35. Faye, ‘La Matrice des droits’, pp. 305–12.

chap t e r 3

The civil order

the social pact The historical canvas that Condorcet painted in the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progr`es de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a historical survey of the progress of the human mind) not only measured the distance from the pre-social state of nature to modernity, but also explored the links that modernity still had with that remote dawn of human society. Continuity is no less important a factor in Condorcet’s view of the passage from the state of nature to the civil order than the complementary phenomena of rupture and regeneration. Nine of the ´epoques into which he divided the stages of the human journey in the Esquisse are a celebration of the slow but sure emergence of man from the darkness of his early history, a process shaped by the irresistible dynamics of perfectionnement. Condorcet located the start of man’s transition from the nomadic, individualist isolation of wild, brutish nature to vestigial forms of civil society in a period of undated time prior to the first ´epoque of early communal life that he described in great detail in the opening pages of the Esquisse. From small groups of hunter-gatherer families, gradually refining their skills, developing language and ‘a small number of moral ideas’, communities evolved. Progress was slow, with survival still dependent on chance and the seasons. Natural communal life was born in the experience of pain and pleasure interacting with the stimuli of the external world to produce an awareness of communal contexts and needs that Condorcet considered to be still relevant: Man is born with the faculty of receiving sensations . . . This faculty develops in him through the effect on him of external phenomena . . . These sensations are accompanied by pain and pleasure . . . Finally, from this faculty, joined to that of forming and combining ideas, relations between him and his fellows arise, based on interest and duty, to which nature itself has attached the most precious part of our happiness and the saddest of our ills. (vi: 11–12) 69

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The significance of this opening statement of the Esquisse, with its lengthy description of the phenomena of sensation as the ordering principle of individual perception and communal organisation, is crucial. From sensation all else will follow, and Condorcet’s use of the verb sentir (to feel) in his writings on constitutional law, criminal law, tax law and the issues arising out of specific causes c´el`ebres in which he was involved, often triggers an assertion of the rightness of natural principles of justice and morality over other considerations, or the superiority of feelings over opinion and authority as the guarantors of legitimacy and authenticity in the civil order. Sentir is used in a technically precise way that relates specifically to this opening description of sentience as a political phenomenon. The heroes of progress and reform in Condorcet’s pantheon of great academicians1 are all men of reason and enlightenment, but also men (and women) of sensation and sentiment too, and thereby in tune with a primitive, but authentic, element in their nature and in nature itself. Civil society for Condorcet came into existence through the natural needs of the sentient individual whose possession of natural rights was an innate feature of his being, those rights pre-existing his entry into civil society. Civil society was as natural to man as it was to the bees.2 In the concept of nature which informs all aspects of Condorcet’s political thought the only difference between the savage with endemic natural rights and the modern citizen is that the latter was once, and is still theoretically, aware of his rights, although after centuries of tyranny, repression and usurpation those rights have been largely ignored and forgotten. Their re-discovery was the achievement of the Enlightenment. Assent to a pact of association was thus motivated by, and originated in, the need to embed natural rights in the subsequent conditions of the civil order.3 From sentience and sensibility, the civil state arises.4 Condorcet’s state of nature was, it should be noted, not all that wild, certainly not Hobbesian, and in the opening pages of the Esquisse he portrayed natural man living in small communities, or peuplades, as hunters 1 2

3

4

See Williams, ‘Condorcet and the art of eulogy’. The analogy is taken from a MS note destined for the Esquisse, first published by L. Cahen, ‘Un fragment in´edit de Condorcet’, Revue de m´etaphysique et de morale 22 (1914), 584–5. BN(R), Nouv. Acq. 4586, f. 36–7. In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet related this crucial point to the law itself (v: 186, 254, 258). Cf. the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 496); Eloge de m. de l’Hˆopital (iii: 536). In his description of the first peuplade, Condorcet observed, like Rousseau, that as far as possible he was extrapolating the picture from information at his disposal about contemporary primitive societies, although, unlike Rousseau, he did not permit hypothesis to masquerade as fact in later stages of the argument.

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and fishermen with sufficiently developed skills to make weapons, utensils and crude houses, and with a language to communicate their needs (vi: 14).5 Man was naturally good, and the community had a moral life in which man discovered ‘common rules of behaviour’, but without yet any formal code of laws to govern behaviour other than ‘general custom’. Condorcet’s natural man is evidently situated much further along the historical-social trajectory traced by Rousseau in the Discours sur l’origine de l’in´egalit´e parmi les hommes and Du contrat social.6 He is located at a point where he is already participating in a natural, though as yet not formally structured, society, with a natural propensity for government and law-making, and a natural need for both. There is no painful hiatus between the self-sufficient individualism of pre-communal savagery and the political collectivism of the family-based group (vi: 25). Man in the state of nature and man in the civil order represented a continuity rather than a hiatus. In the Esquisse, composed at the height of Condorcet’s political maturity, the seeds of the civil order are not rooted in the notion of a contract, fraudulent or otherwise, and he does not refer to a state of nature precisely in the Rousseauist sense of a pre-communal, pre-political condition which terminates at a defined historical moment through a contract of association.7 In Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire (On the meaning of the word Revolutionary) he does use the term ‘social pact’ (xii: 620), and again in the Projet de d´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes: ‘The purpose of every association of men in society being the maintenance of their natural, civil and political rights, these rights are the basis of the social pact’ (xii: 417). However, Condorcet never speculated in any great detail on the processes by which this ‘crude form of government’ came about, 5

6

7

Condorcet’s vision of the origins of civil association followed quite closely the traditional three-stages theory of human socialisation (to which Adam Smith was to add a fourth stage), elaborated in an anti-Hobbesian context by Pufendorf in De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem (On the duty of man and citizen according to natural law) (1673). See I. Hont, ‘The language of sociability and commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the theoretical foundations of the “four stage theory”’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 253–76. Condorcet’s history of societies in the Esquisse, centred on the history of science and enlightenment, is anchored to historically verifiable events in the post-Grecian ´epoques. Schapiro has rightly drawn attention to the centrality of Rousseau’s doctrine of popular sovereignty to Condorcet’s thinking in this context (Condorcet, p. 114). Baker concentrates usefully on the links between Du contrat social and the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix (Condorcet, pp. 229–31, 235, 243). In many ways Condorcet’s allusions to nature in one of the manuscript notes for the Esquisse are a more transparent representation of his thinking, see Cahen, ‘Un fragment in´edit de Condorcet’ (1914), 584–5.

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beyond linking it to the empirically verifiable needs of man as a creature of sentiment and sensation. Natural needs for self-defence and the assurance of sustenance necessitated common decision-making and ‘common rules’. Condorcet did not, in his later years at least, argue the legitimacy of civil institutions and law codes from the consolidating and self-authenticating effects of the historical process per se. What we see in his thought is the gradual fading away of interest in the development of society as a historical phenomenon in favour of a more scientific concentration on the natural logicality of social organisation. The term ‘social pact’ in the Esquisse signifies little more than the general principle of individual consent to that organisation.8 The terms of the social pact were very much in Condorcet’s mind in the months leading up to the meeting of the Estates-General. In the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs et instructions a` donner par les provinces a` leurs d´eput´es aux Etats-G´en´eraux (Reflections on the powers and instructions to be given by the provinces to their deputies at the meeting of the Estates-General), he insisted on the biologically determined primary motivation for entry into civil association, namely the avoidance of pain and the quest for pleasure. As isolated individuals, human beings are too weak to defend themselves against the discomforts and dangers of their environment, and the collectivist terms and conditions for the pact emerge necessarily from the fact of individual vulnerability in the encounter between the strong and the weak, and in the encounter between the whole of humanity and nature itself: They make an agreement between themselves; each is committed to help society with all his strength; with regard to each of its members society is committed to use in defence of the agreement all the powers of association; and this contract is obligatory for society as a whole, as well as for each individual as it is the result of a unanimous act of will determined by the common interest. (ix: 270)

The social pact, when freely entered into, was simply an exchange of terms between contracting members of a community in which equally shared advantage is balanced by equally shared obligation. In particular, the pact would neutralise the natural physical advantage that the strong have over the weak: ‘On the contrary, the force exerted over the weak gives no advantage; it takes all without giving anything; nothing is exchanged between oppressor 8

‘When Condorcet spoke of a pacte social, he meant only to emphasize that the principle of individual consent is, and must be, the logical foundation of political and social arrangements’, Baker, Condorcet, pp. 224–5.

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and oppressed; there is therefore no obligation on the part of the latter, except what nature imposes on him, to submit himself.’9 In this way the community became an integrated moral entity. Moral life developed with the exchange of goods for labour, and with the increasing ability of the civil order to provide the security which facilitated opportunities for leisure, meditation and observation, as well as provision for a group of individuals not totally absorbed by the need to work. With consent to the pact, a civil order linked to human well-being would emerge, the pact exacting a necessary balance between individual and communal interests and happiness.10 The right to withdraw from the pact if its terms were not met was a condition of its existence, and for Condorcet this condition had on-going implications for modern governments. The exercise of political power was not a property owned by any individual or privileged order. No rules of association that advanced sectional interests could ever be legitimately enforced as this would entrench privilege at the expense of the interests of all. Condorcet explored the consequences in the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs. The existence of privilege sustained the proposition that the state was created for the prince, and not the prince for the state: ‘That the prince is its owner, not its head [Condorcet’s italics]. That he alone, at the centre of a court, preoccupied with the corruption of his virtues and his talents, is better able to decide what the general interest is than the nation itself’ (ix: 271). Condorcet then listed the conditions necessary for the terms of the pact to be honoured, emphasising in each case the need for laws to be made consensually, their purpose being the protection of the interests of all: ‘Society is therefore exclusively and pre-eminently its own ruler.’ In the Plan de constitution (Plan for a Constitution) he would warn the Convention that without those conditions in place the pact would be invalidated, and individuals would revert to the uncertainties of life outside the civil order where rights existed in theory, but were in practice inoperative (xii: 366–8).11 9

10 11

In the Esquisse Condorcet commented at length on the corruption of the terms of the social pact to the advantage of the strong, and invoked the authority of Rousseau and also Locke whose defence of the principle of equal partnership between rulers and ruled inferred that the division of men into two races, ‘one of which is destined to rule, the other to obey; one to lie, the other to be lied to’ (vi: 178), could no longer be sustained. Cf. Eloge de m. Franklin (iii: 400–1). Condorcet’s friend, Jules-Michel Duhamel, also defined the pact precisely in the same terms in the Journal d’instruction sociale (6 July 1793), see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 173. ‘The purpose of the social pact is to facilitate the equal and complete enjoyment of the rights which belong to man; it is based on the mutual guarantee of those rights’, Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire (xii: 620).

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The empire of the natural, sensation-based past extended to the socialised, reason-based present, the three fundamental characteristics of the natural past being sensation, need and custom. Condorcet maintained that these still applied to modern civil institutions and law codes. Laws drew their authority most particularly from need, which justified the delegated exercise of power in the interests of all (vi: 27). Need bound men together, and created the conditions for political association, provided it retained its link to nature and human nature: ‘All of nature’s needs are in the links between men . . . All of vanity’s needs are in men’s chains; for every man that these apparently raise up, they oppress and degrade a thousand others’ (x: 277). The purpose of the law was to give formal recognition to the natural need of the community, and to balance this against the natural need of the individual. Need was an authentic expression of man’s sense-driven nature, hence the important emphasis that Condorcet placed on sentiment and sensibility in public life and in the acquisition of civic virtue.12 In linking the origins of morality and the civil order with sensation Condorcet managed to avoid the utilitarian doctrines of Helv´etius’s Legislator and Condillac’s Political Engineer, preferring to follow Turgot in the rejection of self-interest in the crude, narrow sense as the key driving force of the civil order, although he recognised it as a force to be managed in the implementation of the social pact. He did not in fact follow the physiocrats in advocating the complete subordination of individual interest to the common interest. Individual and communal needs were not necessarily incompatible, being in nature (that is, in the nature of man) coincidental.13 Self-interest in the peuplade, in which the ‘immutable laws’ of nature prevailed, generated a social pact that was just and equitable. The conditions favourable to the social pact in the peuplade phase of social 12

13

Baker has underlined Turgot’s influence over Condorcet with regard to the latter’s understanding of the relevance of sensationalist psychology to the moral and political sciences: ‘Like many others in the eighteenth century, Condorcet sought the first principles of the moral and political sciences in the facts of sensationalist psychology’ (Condorcet, p. 215). In his notes for the Kehl Voltaire, Condorcet thought that metaphysical methodology was like that of any other science, except for its objectives: ‘One could say of each [science]: this was what the human mind can hope to achieve in the current stage of enlightenment’ (iv: 285). Analysis of pain and pleasure could reveal the origin of moral ideas (vi: 183–4). On this point about harmonisation, rather than confrontation, of personal and common interest, see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 173–6. Dippel sees Condorcet as the most important exponent of the theory of the harmony of interests in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. One of the purposes of a reformed constitution, and of a reformed educational system, would be precisely to persuade the citizen of the need to locate true self-interest in the common interest. Condorcet’s views on the harmonisation of individual and communal interest in the form of a concept of collective freedom have been seen by some commentators to be evidence of an authoritarian streak in his thought.

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evolution, however, no longer pertained in the context of modern despotisms, in which the imperatives of public need were largely discounted, and the original terms of the social pact betrayed. Condorcet saw the historic convocation of the Estates-General in May 1789 as an opportunity for a public acknowledgement of that betrayal in the form of a critical diagnosis of the failings of despotic constitutions in the modern age. the d iagnosis of despot ism Condorcet set about his own diagnosis of despotism and the reasons for its intrusion in the post-peuplade civil order in the 1789 Id´ees sur le despotisme: ‘Despotism exists whenever men have masters, that is to say whenever they are subjected to the arbitrary will of other men . . ., and there are two causes of this: the ease with which a small number of men can unite, and their wealth which enables them to buy force’ (ix: 147). Despotic rule could be direct or indirect, or a combination of both, direct despotism occurring where representatives did not have the complete right of veto, or the capacity to reform irrational or unjust legislation. Indirect despotism arose as a consequence of unequal or ineffective representation, or of executive power not founded on law. Both types of despotism usually coincided in the same constitution, and here Condorcet cited the example of England. The English suffered under direct despotism ‘because the right of veto of the King and the House of Lords leaves the nation with no legal means to revoke a bad law, and because the people’s representatives have only indirect means to make that reform, all of which offends reason, the dignity of the nation and public order equally’. Indirect despotism flourished also in England ‘because the House of Commons, which should, according to the law, represent the nation, does not represent it at all in reality because it is just an aristocratic body whose decisions are dictated by forty or fifty people, either ministers, peers or members of parliament’ (ix: 148–9).14 Indirect despotism could also be exerted, Condorcet observed significantly, by ‘a body of citizens whose arbitrary will dictates to the rest of the nation; and often, surrounded by so many masters, the nation does not know whom to obey’ (ix: 150). Condorcet dismissed as anarchy the notion of freedom arising from the interplay of interests between rival corps 14

On the other hand, Condorcet did detect some signs of progress in English political structures, such as the jury system, habeas corpus and the checks on the executive, see the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 499–500). In Turkey Condorcet noted that direct despotism was exerted by the Sultan and the ‘body of lawyers who are the real legislators’ (ix: 149).

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or power groups. The checks and balances of the Montesquieu model15 resulted only in political inertia and absurdity: ‘Is a slave with two masters, who often disagree, any less of a slave? Would he be happier with just one master?’ Of the two forms of despotism that could subvert the civil order, Condorcet considered indirect despotism to be the most difficult to dislodge, being less visible even when those imposing it, on the pretext of protecting the people, were exposed to the public gaze. Direct despotism could be prevented by requiring new legislation and amendments to existing legislation to be made subject to the people’s consent through elected representatives. In contrast to the English example, Condorcet offered the more promising model of the American constitution, and Sections 8–23 of the Id´ees are devoted to an exploration of possible ways forward. The armoury of measures with which Condorcet proposed to defend the integrity of the civil order against the despotic aggressions of corps self-interest included radical reform of electoral procedures, independence from the executive with respect to the convocation of assemblies, the levying of a just system of taxation (Section 9), the abolition of inherited privilege with regard to public offices (Section 10), the breaking of the alliance between church and aristocracy (Section 11), particularly offensive to Condorcet at the time of the 1788 Assembly of Notables, the abolition of permanent tribunals of unelected officials, the independence of judicial procedures (Section 12), the reorganisation of the army (Section 13), the ending of arbitrary duties and other restrictions on free trade, the reform of public borrowing procedures, the curbing of the power of bankers (Section 14) and measures to defend public order in the ensuing temporary power-vacuum against the dangers of anarchy and mob-rule (Section 15). The first corps to be confronted in the Id´ees is the aristocracy whose privileges could be curtailed by the immediate abolition of titles and distinctions,16 tax exemptions and rights to inherit or purchase public office: ‘No nation with a legally established genealogist can be a free nation’ (ix: 153–4). The second problematic corps was the priesthood whose despotism rested on ignorance, fear and credulity. This was the corps to which Europe had deferred unquestioningly until the end of the sixteenth century, 15

16

Condorcet had doubts about the constitutional advantages of Montesquieu’s version of the separation of powers theory as applied to England, and was generally sceptical about Montesquieu’s admiration for the 1688 settlement, see the R´eflexions sur la R´evolution de 1688 et sur celle du 10 aoˆut 1792 (xii: 201–2). On 19 June 1792 Condorcet voted in support of Le Chapelier’s bill to suppress titles of nobility. A MS draft of the proposal has on it signs of Condorcet’s annotations relating to articles 4 and 6, and is dated in Condorcet’s hand, BIF Condorcet MS 859, f. 43.

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‘a time when the eyes of the laity began to open’ (ix: 154).17 The despotism of the priestly corps was made more lethal by its dangerous alliance with the aristocracy. Condorcet identified two ways of neutralising the impact of ecclesiastical despotism on the civil order: freedom of the press, and a policy of toleration to encourage the proliferation of sects and ‘doctrinal bodies’ to undermine the hegemony of the catholic clergy.18 The despotism of the third corps, the judiciary, was ‘the most odious of all’ (ix: 155), a charge that Condorcet had already elaborated at length in his support of Voltaire’s campaign against the magistrates officiating at the trials of Calas and La Barre. Judges could turn the law itself against the people, ‘because this despotism weighs on every individual at every moment, and extends to all activities and all interests’. Judicial despotism was cruel and violent, and to counter its excesses Condorcet proposed the election of judges for defined periods of tenure, together with a constitutional obligation on judges to act within the law, and the unrestricted right of self-defence for the accused, ‘when the despotism of courts will no longer be feared’ (ix: 156). The power of the judiciary was guaranteed ultimately by military force, and with regard to the delicate, but crucial, role of the army within the civil order, the Id´ees reflected many contemporary dilemmas. As with the church, Condorcet noted the advantages of fragmentation. With the division of the army into regiments located in widely scattered garrisons, and the removal of groups of regiments from the control of single, permanently appointed commanders, military power was diluted. The control of the military would always remain a delicately balanced issue for governments in any state founded on principles of natural right, and Condorcet’s concerns went well beyond matters of command structure and troop deployment. His views in the Id´ees on the formation of the military mind, for example, in the interests of the civil order are particularly interesting. An understanding of the political implications of the ways in which soldiers were trained was of paramount importance to legislators if the conditions of the social pact were to be safeguarded. That training must include, in Condorcet’s view, 17

18

Condorcet excluded the Swiss republics from this hegemony. He painted a dark picture of the civil order in sixteenth-century Europe in which the ruled were treated like cattle, and income from taxes lined the pockets of tyrants who used the law for their own purposes, see the Eloge de Michel de L’Hˆopital (iii: 464). The argument recalls Voltaire’s comments on the reasons for toleration in England in Letter 6 of the Lettres philosophiques, but unlike Voltaire Condorcet did not see England as a model in this respect: ‘1. In England, the press is not free as far as religion is concerned. 2. Freedom of worship is not assured. 3. In general England is ruled by parties, by associations of persons of repute, and these political parties take care to keep fanaticism as a tool which each hopes to use in turn’ (ix: 154–5).

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equipping soldiers not only with the motivation to follow orders on the battlefield, but also the capacity to resist orders that transgressed natural rights and natural law. On the other hand, while compliance with military orders, like that of the citizen in the face of arbitrary government edicts, should not be passive or automatic, soldiers must always be able to resist the temptation to question the legitimate orders of commanders: ‘Passive obedience is dangerous to public liberty; arbitrary rejection [of authority] would be even more so’ (ix: 157). Carefully drafted legislation to establish the rules of engagement with regard to the maintenance of public order and the enforcement of civilian compliance with the law would have to be enacted to accompany any progressive innovations to training.19 Despotism is approached from numerous angles in the Id´ees. In Section 14 Condorcet extended the range of its effects in ancien r´egime constitutions to include fiscal abuse in the context of unjust taxation, and the inefficient management of the increasing burden of public debt, ‘vicious forms of taxation’ (ix: 160), as calculated infringements of rights arising from the increasing dependence of government on its creditors, whose wishes and prejudices had to be carefully accommodated (ix: 159).20 Financial despotism was becoming in his view more dangerous and intolerable by the day, and Condorcet offered two solutions. With the first he proposed the proscription of all forms of arbitrary taxation, together with the abolition of free trade restrictions in order to minimise the financial advantages accruing to sectional interests. His second measure would reform borrowing procedures to ensure less rapacious, more stable sources of revenue attracting acceptable levels of interest, transparently administered. Condorcet would return to the issue of taxation and free trade as manifestations of despotic aggressions against the civil order in many essays, treatises and addresses, and the fact that in the Id´ees these matters are treated with relative brevity should not mislead the reader with regard to the importance of their place in Condorcet’s hierarchy of legislative priorities.21 19 20

21

This was one point on which Condorcet commended the English example, ‘remembering above all that to imitate is not to copy’ (ix: 158). Condorcet saw the triumph of Pitt over Fox and Stanhope as a good example of the influence over governments that could be wielded by bankers. In France he attributed the arrest and imprisonment of the elder Mirabeau in 1760 on account of the publication of the Th´eorie de l’impˆot to their pressure, ‘and his birth, his fortune and his personal reputation could not protect him from their dark hatred’. He also blamed the bankruptcy of Terray’s administration on bankers. As, for example, in the Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie a` m. N ∗∗∗∗∗ and the R´eflexions sur les corv´ees a` milord ∗∗∗ , both of 1775; Sur l’abolition des corv´ees and the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es, both of 1776. The most detailed of Condorcet’s proposals for reform of ancien r´egime taxation and economic policy, including management of the national debt and the establishment of a national bank, is to be found in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 221–58). In 1790

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By far the longest section in the Id´ees is Section 15 which is devoted to the despotism of mobs, to be particularly feared in countries with large urban centres of population. The despotism of mobs was for Condorcet a symptom of their manipulation by powerful sectional interests, ‘which weighs on the nation’, luring the people into complicity in the enactment of legislation against their true interests (ix: 161). This form of despotism drew its force from irrationality and superstition, and worked only to the advantage of the privileged. Condorcet passionately denounced such a betrayal of the conditions of the social pact by means of which the people’s strength was deployed against the people, exploited by opinion-makers working for corps interests, often to bring about the downfall of enlightened leaders, ‘whom people have known how to render odious’, from whose political vision they might have benefited.22 This blind, malleable force had ensured in England the survival of unjust, outdated, but misguidedly popular legislation, deprived the Dutch of their liberty in 1777 with the restoration of the stadtholder and strengthened tyranny in Denmark. The raw energy of the despotism of mobs in Constantinople had contributed as much to the destruction of Greek civilisation as the swords of barbarians and the disputes of theologians: ‘We know that the absurdity of the projects of this type of despotism is matched only by the barbarity of its methods’ (ix: 162). In an urban setting the acute danger of such despotism was signalled by the ease with which crowds could assemble in large numbers to give vent to their anger and frustrations. Condorcet advocated two solutions. He thought that the dangers could be averted, at least in part, by reform of commercial life. With wiser, more enlightened economic policies, the streets could be emptied of the unemployed, the regulatory grip of the professions and guilds over workers’ employment conditions could be weakened and the hostility of the poor towards the policing of the civil order, arising as a consequence of their economic deprivation, diminished. The second solution lay in the division of large cities into independently administered districts, in which small assemblies of citizens could meet in an orderly and purposeful fashion without distinction of rank or profession, ‘the only just

22

Condorcet issued a closely argued series of essays on the practicalities involved in fiscal reform, see the M´emoire sur la fixation de l’impˆot (xi: 405–70), Sur la constitution du pouvoir charg´e d’administrer le tr´esor national (xi: 541–79), Sur l’impˆot personnel (xi: 473–83), Sur les op´erations n´ecessaires pour r´etablir les finances (xi: 365–85), Sur la proposition d’acquitter la dette exigible des assignats (xi: 487–515), Des lois constitutionnelles sur l’administration des finances (x: 107–17), Nouvelles R´eflexions sur le projet de payer la dette exigible en papier forc´e (xi: 519–27), Des Causes de la disette du num´eraire, de ses effets, et des moyens d’y rem´edier (xi: 531–40). Cf. Vie de m. Turgot (v: 262–3). Condorcet no doubt had the fate of Turgot in mind here.

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way, and at the same time the surest, of preventing unauthorised gatherings from disturbing the peace’ (ix: 163). An unenlightened, uneducated people was defenceless against the depredations and persuasive powers of sectional interests. The chains of ignorance would be lifted only with the advent of a free press and a reformed education system. Until that day arrived, however, the baneful coalition of corps interests would continue to persuade the people that autocratic monarchy served their interests, and that the divine right of kings did not contravene the social pact, particularly with regard to the right to renegotiate the conditions of the civil order. This was the most harmful political consequence of the despotism of mobs. Like Madison, Condorcet differentiated carefully between despotism and tyranny. Tyranny was the legalised repression of rights ‘in the name of the state’ (ix: 164), that could be exercised by any government. He illustrated the point by citing the example of a well-ordered, politically virtuous, republic,23 that could still pass repressive legislation against heresy and blasphemy, and in which industry and commerce could still be shackled by arbitrary legislation. Tyranny did not need a despotic constitution in which to flourish, although tyranny and despotism usually did coincide in modern nation-states to produce a situation in which the necessary compromise between natural freedom and political obligation had been tilted heavily towards the latter in the constitutional equation. the relocation of sovereignt y Condorcet explored the issue of political freedom in a modern despotic context in De la nature des pouvoirs politiques dans une nation libre (On the nature of political powers in a free nation), written in November 1792 when the debate on the future of Louis XVI was well under way and would lead within weeks to the decision by the Convention to put the King on trial, and impose the death penalty on anyone advocating the restoration of the monarchy. In De la nature Condorcet noted that, even as a concept, freedom had all but disappeared in a despotic civil order in which individuals were inured to obedience, and experienced freedom only as the right to submit themselves to the will of others. With the constitution of 3 September 1791, followed on 13 September by Louis XVI’s oath of allegiance, Condorcet thought cautiously that a measure of political freedom might have been achieved with the advent of elections to Assembly 23

In the notes for the Kehl Voltaire Condorcet held Geneva up as an exemplary model of democracy, in which every law was the expression of the general will (iv: 322–3).

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seats, but it was at most a semi-freedom: ‘that is the point at which their feeble feeling of independence stopped’ (x: 589). Semi-liberty produced only instability, or ‘storms’, not only because it was incomplete, but because the pressures on the civil order could be relieved only by the imposition of even more restraints on the individual. In this interesting essay on freedom and the implications of submission to authority, and the relationship between majority will and minority rights, Condorcet identified only one authentic constraint on freedom that was required by nature and reason: that is the necessity and obligation to obey, in the actions that must ensue from a common rule, not one’s own reason but the collective reason of the majority; I say its reason, not its will, for the power of majorities over minorities must never be arbitrary; it does not extend to violation of a single individual’s right; it does not go so far as to compel submission when it obviously goes against reason. (x: 589–90)

Collectively and individually, the citizen must recognise that in a just civil order power is embodied in, and exercised through, the will of the majority. Majorities can exercise tyrannical power too, however, and submission to the will of the majority cannot be required if that will is arbitrary, or if submission is based on obligation to obey per se. Submission can only be justified by the need for, and collective acceptance of, common rule, and the alignment of majority will with common rule could only be assured if rights were equal, and the common interest fully recognised: ‘The man who submits in advance to the majority can reason thus: I know that my actions must be made subject to a rule to which similar actions by my co-citizens are equally subject’ (x: 591). The common rule, dictated by collective rationality, will not always coincide with individual reasoning processes, with their origin in self-interest, which conflict inevitably with those of others. Members of a civil order must therefore decide which rules meet the requirement of collective rationality, a decision best taken in Condorcet’s view on a basis of majority voting. The sources of moral obligation and political necessity lay therefore in a collective act of reasoning exercised by the majority of citizens through their representatives in an elected assembly such as the Constituante (Constituent Assembly). However, the only function of the first legislative corps charged with the establishment or, in the case of France, the renewal of the civil order, was to define what constituted common rule, and to declare it: ‘One step beyond that and tyranny begins’ (x: 594). The transformation of that common rule into law would then occur only in the light of the subsequent tacit or explicit acceptance of the majority of an Assembl´ee

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l´egislative (Legislative Assembly) that would replace the Constituante once that body had completed its work, and function as a collective legislator: ‘This amounts to Solon or Lycurgus being replaced by an assembly’ (x: 595). Minorities which felt that their rights were being ignored by the majority had to choose between on the one hand submission based on enlightened self-interest and faith in the virtues of collective rationality in order to ensure the survival of the social pact, or abrogation of the pact on the other. The test of collective rationality would be its empirically verifiable degree of compliance with the natural rights of all. The transition from legislative proposal to legislative reality marked for Condorcet the dangerous moment of delegation of power to other agencies in the enactment of the syllogism of government.24 The modalities of delegation were of crucial importance in the defence of freedom against despotism, because those modalities opened the doors to real power, ‘a force which acts on the actions of individuals independently of their will or their reason’. This was the force that imposed the general will of the state over passions and self-interest, and compelled compliance of the dissident individual. The model was Socrates, ‘but you cannot expect from every man that level of reason and moral rectitude’ (x: 597). Therein lay the challenge of the syllogism. If civil war was not to ensue from the engagement of the state’s will with that of its opponents, then the public interest required cast-iron guarantees that the law was firmly grounded in public consent, and that the civic obligation to submit to laws with which one disagreed privately was deeply embedded in the public mind. Condorcet feared the consequences of growing public awareness of the fragility of the civil order, and of the laws designed to uphold it. Public disaffection arising from fear, prejudice or conflict of principle was contagious and politically lethal. Any loss of confidence in the civil order threatened the social pact, and the wound had to be cauterised – but preferably by persuasion rather than force: You can see here how necessary it is to persuade the great majority of people of the benevolence of the laws, that they should have confidence in those who draft, implement or execute them, and that every citizen should be deeply conscious of 24

Condorcet explained what he meant by the syllogism of government thus: ‘Between the law and the thing which must be done in accordance with it lies the job of what, in a given circumstance, is the correct application of the law, that is to say the job of making a syllogism of which the law is the major part, a more or less general fact the minor, and the application of the law the conclusion. For example, every citizen will be required to contribute to the necessary cost of public services, in proportion to his income: that is a law; the cost forms part of public services: that is a general fact; each citizen must therefore contribute to this cost: that is the application of the law’ (x: 595–6).

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the feeling that he must offer a provisional obligation to obey even those laws of which he disapproves, as well as their implementation, which he might find unjust. (x: 602)

Restoration of confidence in the essential benevolence of the law was for Condorcet a key requirement of successful political management. At the heart of the problem of public disaffection with the civil order was the incendiary issue of equality, for Condorcet the most potent ingredient in any threat to public order and national unity. The right to equality, ‘this precious right’, fears of its erosion and attempts to disguise or excuse the effects of its denial (‘the main policy of the aristocracy’) lay behind most civic unrest in Condorcet’s view. This had been well illustrated by the fate of Greece and Rome when natural rights had been subordinated to corps interests. The quality of civic life then became dependent on ‘the transitory wisdom of those who govern’,25 with the result that vigilance over the integrity of the civil order was neglected. Inequality could never be entirely eradicated in a free society, but Condorcet was confident that its effects could be mitigated through public education, good legislation, the abolition of hereditary privilege, the decoupling of public office from the claims of rank and wealth, taxation and banking reform, free trade, enlightened poor law policies and progressive public works programmes. The exercise of government was seen by Condorcet essentially in terms of practical problems to be solved, a calculation to be made, a job to be done: ‘a simple task similar to that of making a book, putting a machine together or solving a problem’ (x: 604). The aim was always to make the alienating distance between rulers and the ruled less offensive. That distance could be narrowed above all by an effective electoral system, and a judicious system of representation in which the people could have real choice.26 In the reflections that bring this important essay to a close Condorcet explored further the destabilising effects of the growing distance between rulers and ruled in contemporary France. In the First Republic the conduct and decisions of republican legislators were already in danger of becoming as opaque to the public gaze as those of the ancien r´egime. Citizens were unconvinced that their consent to submit was still required, and that their right to corrective constitutional change was still respected: 25

26

A redeeming feature of ancient Greece was, however, the importance attached to the right of assembly (vi: 412). In the Eloge de Michel de L’Hˆopital Condorcet thought that the management of the civil order was much easier in ancient societies (iii: 534). On this latter point Condorcet noted that problems of electoral procedure and representation had proliferated in the aftermath of the Revolution. In the Id´ees he defined a good electoral system as being quite simply the one that truly delivered the will of the majority, but did not elaborate.

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It is then that, having nothing more to fear, with no threat to his freedom or enduring injustice, [the citizen] can open himself without fear to that sentiment of scrupulous respect for the established laws, of submission to legal authority, which is the necessary basis of that civil tranquillity without which all societies tend towards continual revolution, are always unhappy and unstable, and float uncertainly between disorder and tyranny. (x: 608)

For Condorcet, one revolution was quite enough, and if a second were to be avoided then the government had the crucial responsibility to ensure the re-engagement of a free people with the laws to which it sought to bind them. The problem of how to ensure that re-engagement, and give it constitutional reality in a rapidly evolving political environment, runs through the whole of these remarkable reflections on the transformation of France into a successful modern republic, ordered by the values of an enlightened society.27 The relocation of sovereignty was predicated, for Condorcet, on the establishment of a system of political representation that would transmit the people’s will through elected assemblies. In the post-peuplade stage of socialisation sovereignty had been delegated, though not surrendered, to kings as stewards rather than sources of sovereign authority in their own right: Thus, in a constitution which is truly free, all power emanates only from the people, and is related to the unanimous will to submit to the opinion of the majority . . .; also the power of delegated authorities can be reduced to that of the people themselves, exerted necessarily with the people’s confidence, or rather when the people no longer think that this power is being used merely to protect those authorities. (x: 611)

However, the sovereign will of the people could not be exerted in a direct, unmodulated way, if perpetual insurrection and instability were to be avoided. It had to be managed in accordance with reason and the law, to which it would not be forced to submit, but to which it would wish to submit: ‘In this way liberty and peace, respect for the laws, independence and freedom of action, and the most ardent passion for the public interest and for reason and enthusiasm can exist in the same country, and come together in the same soul’ (x: 612). Among Condorcet’s many concerns about the restoration of sovereignty to the people, and the integrity of the social pact in France in the closing 27

The conditions needed for the successful evolution of the civil order into a modern state are listed in Sur la n´ecessit´e de faire ratifier la constitution par les citoyens, et sur la formation des communaut´es de commune (ix: 413–30), La R´epublique franc¸aise, aux hommes libres (xii: 109–19) and Sur l’institution d’un conseil ´electif (xii: 243–66).

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years of the ancien r´egime, was the question of class divisions. In Que toutes les classes de la soci´et´e n’ont qu’un mˆeme int´erˆet (That all classes in society have the same interest) (8 June 1792), he made a careful distinction between the natural hierarchy of the social structure and the hierarchy that was ‘the work of social institutions, masters and slaves, an hereditary nobility and bourgeoisie’ (xii: 645). The distribution of wealth and property necessarily engendered a class of citizens who were not dependent on others for survival, and a class of citizens that was. Condorcet did not view the relationship between capital and labour per se as a threat to rights or equality, being itself based on the natural right to property and the fruits of ownership: ‘But the distribution of work and wealth, and of population produces inevitably a system in which some can live without having to work and others having only work as a way to survive: farmers, manufacturers and businessmen, entrepreneurs, workers and consumers, financiers and capitalists’ (xii: 645–6). There was no opposition of interest. Class division in this context did not mean class conflict. Progress, including commercial progress, would unite men in the civil order, not divide them, provided that social relationships were in accordance with ‘the sentiments of nature’, and men were aware that their happiness depended on the assurance of happiness for others. The clash of interests between the rich and the poor, town and country, arose as a symptom of unjust laws, corrupt institutions and an alienated people deprived of its sovereign rights. The causes were solvable with enlightened political management on the part of legislators. Good laws, legitimate institutions and progressive social policies would eventually result in a co-ordination of class interests that would protect and sustain employment, provide adequate rates of pay and maximise for all the economic benefits of capital investment in commerce and industry. Condorcet advocated the cohesion rather than the destruction of the class structure, and his policy proposals were directed not only towards the welfare of the poor, but also towards the prosperity and security of the rich. The future happiness of both economic groups was given equal consideration: But if the comforts of life do not accompany hard work, the amount of work done diminishes, and with that the dividends of the rich also diminish. But if the vicious order of society condemns a large class of people to poverty, then either property is threatened or the rich are obliged to sustain the poor, which is a lot more expensive than preventing them from being poor in the first place. (xii: 648)

Condorcet recognised that those who had nothing could not derive much happiness from their proximity to those who had everything:

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It is true that without hope and the possibility of increasing one’s wealth, without the assurance of being able to use it freely, all activity would cease; for the man with very modest means one would thus destroy an important resource, that of being able to increase the reward for his labour significantly by spending a small sum of money to increase productivity; it is also true that one would reduce the number of jobs available and consequently all means of subsistence and welfare. (xii: 648–9)

A class structure, reformed and revitalised along such lines, could be justified as a cementing, harmonising force in civil life; a class structure based on the historical prerogatives of an hereditary aristocracy, which conspired to prevent men knowing their rights,28 was an entirely different matter. In Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire Condorcet noted ironically the old meaning of the term ‘aristocracy’ as government by wise men, who succeeded in bringing prosperity to the peuplades, after which the role of the aristocracy in the civil order had become less beneficial, ‘synonymous with tyranny’ (xii: 623–4).29 the end of monarchy Despite his growing sympathy with the case for a republic, Condorcet tended to defend the merits of reformed monarchical government until 1791 and, prior to the royal flight to Varennes, he tended to minimise contradictions between the sovereignty of the people and that of the King. In the 1789 R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs, one of his longest historical analyses of monarchical power, Condorcet set out the advantages of monarchy, and expressed confidence in its survival: ‘France will stay a monarchy because this form of government is perhaps the only one that is appropriate to its 28

29

In the notes for the Kehl Voltaire, Condorcet observed how in monarchies class distinctions ensured an alliance of the wealthy with the powerful that imposed a veneer of constitutional normality on the unrestrained oppression of the ruled: ‘They will dress up oppression in the clothes of legality; above all they will avoid allowing men to become aware of their rights . . . In a monarchy, where there are many honours and distinctions, these will be used to attach rich men to the government’s cause, and the full weight of its authority and power will fall on the people; the fantasies of pride and arrogance will be accommodated better than the true rights of citizens’ (iv: 323–4). The unpublished MS of a remarkable Dialogue entre un jeune homme et un vieillard contains an interesting analysis of the weaknesses and dangers of this alliance, and its instruments of power in the church and the judiciary (BIF Condorcet MS 862, ff. 455–72). For a definition of modern aristocracy, see the R´eflexions sur les corv´ees (xi: 64). By the autumn of 1791 the French aristocracy was associated in Condorcet’s mind with France’s military adversaries, and he saw the war against France as a war fought on behalf of Europe’s privileged classes: ‘The cause of the French nation is that of the people against the nobility; this is what the whole of Europe is pursuing, and this is why every noble and honest step taken is one step nearer to our society’ (BIF, Condorcet MS 863, f. 4). This MS relates to the Declaration of Pillnitz, and was written in September–October 1791.

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wealth, to the size of its population, to the extent of its territory and to the European political system.’ He even predicted that the French monarchy would remain hereditary rather than elective, ‘to avoid the on-going troubles of elective countries’ (ix: 266). The advantages of hereditary monarchy were extolled further in Sur l’institution d’un conseil ´electif on 23 July 1790 (xii: 245–7). In the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs Condorcet could still see advantages in the renewal of the ancient contract between monarch and people, and he stressed the social cohesion that a modernised monarchy could offer to a new civil order whose laws reflected the common interest: Laws will once again become an expression of the public interest; they will embody the principle of princely power and that of the people’s obedience [Condorcet’s italics]; and all members of society will find themselves united in a contract by which each citizen will undertake with respect to the people, the people with respect to the prince, and the prince with respect to the people as well as to each citizen [Condorcet’s italics] to remain obedient to the rules established for the general good by the general will. Such would be the incalculable advantages resulting from the union of all political bodies and from a return of the monarchy to the first laws by which it was constituted, once those laws are free from the stains of the ignorance of the ancient world and the vices of the modern. (ix: 266)

Reform of the French monarchy rather than its abolition was the path that he hoped representatives at the Estates-General would take. In France the person of the King was sacred, not in any sacerdotal sense but because the King drew his authority from the terms of the social pact, by which his sovereignty was a delegated sovereignty making him the repository of the collective strength and will of the people (ix: 272). Through the King the people expressed their general will; their general will created the law, and the law created monarchs: ‘Such is the authority of royalty, determined by our ancestors for the benefit of the princes who rule over us, and our historical monuments bear witness to the fact that, far from being mean with its power, the nation has still consented to treat the monarch as an integral part of the legislative.’ Condorcet saw the meeting of the Estates-General as an opportunity to restore legitimacy and purpose to the French monarchy, and in 1789 he preferred to attribute its failings to the excesses of ministers, courtiers and parlementaires ‘who, contrary to the King’s intentions and contrary to the purpose of his institution as a royal person, would threaten the life, liberty and property of citizens’ (ix: 273). As he stated at the start of the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs, he was not yet ready to lay responsibility for France’s problems on the shoulders of Louis XVI: ‘Attachment to the forms of monarchy, respect for the royal personage and for the royal prerogative,

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and hatred of arbitrary power: these are the motives which dictate this work’ (ix: 266–7). In a later pamphlet, Sur le choix des ministres (On the choice of ministers), written in April 1790, he examined two distinguishing features of modern monarchies, and their implications for a free constitution and for public accountability, namely royal inviolability and royal hereditary rights to power (x: 49–51). From the neutral, reassuring tone of his opening remarks on the restraints theoretically in place in the form of separation of executive powers, royal consent, ministerial veto and the independence of the Treasury, it is difficult at first to detect signs of any rejection in principle of hereditary monarchy. In fact, however, Condorcet’s position on monarchy in the main body of this text is not as sanguine as it had been in the previous year. Monarchy had its origin not in ‘philosophical meditations on the nature of power, social orders and the interest of peoples’, but in ‘old customs’ and the pressures of historical circumstance, ‘and we could then say: if all is not well, at least all is tolerable’ [Condorcet’s italics] (x: 51). Sly echoes of Panglossian optimism introduce a cautionary note. Monarchy must now be examined in the light of reason, not passion and prejudice. Kings ruled only with the consent of ‘a constituent power’, which was revocable. In Sur le choix des ministres, while Louis XVI’s record was treated with more caution and reservation, the problem was still not that of Kings per se, but of ‘one prince who is the enemy of freedom’, and the criminal intriguers that he might appoint as his ministers (x: 52). Any criticism was directed towards the personal flaws of a specific King. The solution did not yet involve the abolition of the monarchy, but rather a refinement of constitutional control over monarchical power, and in the remaining part of the essay Condorcet advances relatively modest proposals for legislation whereby the King’s prerogative to choose ministers would be retained, but his choice restricted to candidates proposed to him by the nation’s representatives, the tenure of ministerial office being limited by statute (x: 52–5). In 1790 Condorcet was attempting to combine the principle of royal assent to ministerial appointments with an electoral procedure that would safeguard the common interest by the elimination of factional conflict: We retain in this form of appointment the real advantages of the monarchy, that is to say, that unity in the executive can be more easily and more certainly maintained; and, more importantly, avoid the factions emerging in many local situations which would divide a council of independent leaders, and the influence of their private interests which, much more than those of the monarch, might be contrary to the nation’s interests, and spread more virulently and more dangerously than the passions of junior ministers. (x: 57)

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His proposals contain at this stage no hint of a strategy to dispense ultimately with the King, or even to remove his executive powers to choose and dismiss ministers: ‘this is about ensuring his right, or rather giving him a real right instead of a purely imaginary one, which he would enjoy if his choice appeared to be free’ (x: 61). That right would be managed by a representative legislature in ways that would no longer leave it powerless in the matter of ministerial choice. As the people had to have the legal means to change a displeasing constitution, which otherwise they could only change by insurrection, so their representatives had to have the means to dispense with displeasing ministers, if the political well-being of the civil order was at risk.30 Between 1790 and 1791 Condorcet’s position on the role of the monarch in the civil order would change as tensions between monarchists and republicans deepened, and events marking the prelude to the 1791 constitution unfolded. On 19 July 1791 Condorcet presented a discours to the Cercle Social, printed subsequently as De La R´epublique, ou un roi est-il n´ecessaire a` la conservation de la libert´e? (On the Republic, or is a King necessary to the preservation of liberty?). Written in the wake of Condorcet’s sense of betrayal after the arrest of the royal family, and influenced almost certainly by the views of Tom Paine, with whom by 1791 Condorcet had forged a close friendship, De La R´epublique was essentially a defence of the work of the Constituante, but it also reflected a new urgency on Condorcet’s part to re-examine the case for monarchy in the new order. Reviewing the conditions in which monarchies could function without infringing the rights of the people, he now openly doubted that those conditions still existed in France. The crucial question was now posed: did France need ‘this corrupting and dangerous institution’ (xii: 228)? The question was rhetorical, and its very formulation confirms Condorcet’s conversion to republicanism, a conversion whose origins some modern commentators are inclined to think pre-dates De La R´epublique.31 Hereditary monarchy was no longer needed to shield the people from the predatory aggressions of powerful individuals, or from arbitrary government. Royal assent was no longer needed to give authority to government 30

31

In this respect Condorcet criticised the way in which the political process in England had been ‘degraded and debased’ by the party system, ‘to such a degree that there is no serious difference of opinion between politicians’ (x: 61). See Introduction, p. 33 nn. 78 and 79. The carefully constructed Lettre d’un jeune m´ecanicien, for example, came out at the same time as De La R´epublique, but the issue of when this important antimonarchical satire, one of the most savage to come from Condorcet’s pen, was actually composed is unresolved. Rather than being rushed out as a post-Varennes piece, it might have been written earlier, see Baker, Condorcet, pp. 304–5. Note, however, the letter Condorcet wrote to Louis XVI in 1791, see below p. 259, n. 19.

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policies, and was now seen as being both shameful and harmful, ‘only that of corruption’ (xii: 233). The sovereignty of Kings was no longer perceived to have honourable origins in ancient republics, and the case made by the ‘friends of royalty’ was no longer sustainable. Condorcet reversed almost word for word compromises made only a year earlier, his tone now reflecting a powerfully demotic irreverence. The voice of Paine can clearly be heard: We no longer live in times when this impious superstition which made a man into some sort of God can still be counted among the ways of reinforcing the authority of the law. Without any doubt, we no longer believe that in order to rule men it is necessary to strike their imagination with a puerile display, and that the people will be tempted to scorn the law if their supreme ruler did not have a Grand-Master of the Wardrobe.32

Any justification for the retention of the hereditary principle is now deemed ‘inappropriate for the contemporary French state’ (x: 234), and the clear duty of the Constituante was to create a new constitution that excluded the crown. The Varennes betrayal had released the people from its pact with Louis XVI, and responsibility for the new modalities of the civil order now reverted to them, and to their representatives in the Constituante. The King’s constitutional position was nullified, and the Dauphin must be educated accordingly: ‘at the present time, educating [the Dauphin] to be a king is less important than teaching him how not to be one, and how to wish not to be one’ (x: 237). Condorcet’s disenchantment with Louis XVI was further reflected in a hostile account of royal corruption and profligacy in De l’influence d’un monarque et d’une cour sur les mœurs d’un peuple libre (On the influence of a monarch and a court on the morals of a free people), and in the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (Review of the work of the first legislature), both appearing in September 1792.33 Few of the redeeming features of monarchy that Condorcet had accepted earlier could survive 32

33

See also the unpublished fragment, dated 9 March 1792: ‘The absurdity of this idea was understood, and a contract between monarch and people was set up; the commitment of the Prince to the terms of this contract became the condition of obedience to him’ (BIF Condorcet MS 862, f. 75). This fragment offers incidentally more interesting evidence of Condorcet’s change of rhetorical tone. See also the Chronique de Paris (23–4 September 1792). ‘The declaration abolishing royalty and announcing that France was to form a single republic prompted the first fears of the National Convention. These two great issues have been decided without any discussion. A deep feeling of resentment against kings and the feeling that we needed to unite closely in our common defence permitted no deliberations or delay. These feelings were felt by the nation as a whole . . . And as, moreover, neither heredity, inviolability, the right to reject or suspend a law, the enormity of the royal income, nor even the existence of a single head of state were needed in order for us to act together as one, then obviously the issue between royalists and republicans boils down to this: in a

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the impact of historical events as the machine of Revolution gathered pace, and its liberal, more constitutionally accommodating phase drew to a close: The despotism of one man is illusory, apart from that of a conqueror at the head of his army. In every other case what is called despotism is just the rule of an anarchic aristocracy. The self-interest of the rich, of nobles and priests etc., can keep it going; but is it not obvious that it is in the interest of absolute monarchs to give their people liberty so that they will not reclaim it by force, to establish a representative constitution so that such a constitution is not forced upon them, and to replace that part of their authority that they cannot hope to retain for much longer with recognition of the people as citizens? (x: 436)

Condorcet’s earlier hopes for a smooth transition to constitutional monarchy faded quickly as Louis XVI’s collusion with the Revolution’s internal and external enemies became increasingly apparent,34 and as the conditions legitimising the social pact were undermined. By the end of 1792 Condorcet accepted that consent of the people to the pact was suspended, pending the construction of a new constitution, and the advent of a renewed civil order to be re-legitimised in their name.

34

well-constituted state do we need any power to implement the law, other than the law itself?’ (BIF Condorcet MS 864, ff. 396–7). Significant moves against Louis XVI, in which Condorcet was involved, are marked by two reports that appeared on 9 August 1792: the Rapport fait au nom d’une commission extraordinaire a` l’Assembl´ee nationale sur une p´etition de la commune de Paris tendant a` la d´ech´eance du roi and the Instruction sur l’exercice du droit de souverainet´e.

chap t e r 4

Managing enlightenment

the epistemological revolution In a seminal text delivered to the Acad´emie Franc¸aise on 21 February 1782 upon his admission to the company of immortals, Condorcet set out his faith in the mission of the Enlightenment.1 He characterised his century as the age in which ‘the general system of the principles of our knowledge has been developed, in which the method of discovering the truth has been reduced to an art and, if you like, to formulae; in which reason has at last recognised the path it must follow, and has grasped the thread which will stop it from losing its way’ (i: 390). The vision that he unveiled in his Discours de r´eception was one in which the human race would no longer accept the inevitability of the triumph of darkness over light, and in which the torch of genius and reason would be from now on inextinguishable. A determined and tenacious confidence in the cumulative dynamics of progress is the familiar hallmark of Condorcet’s world-view: ‘Truth has triumphed; the human race is saved. Each century will add new knowledge to that of the previous century, and this progress, which from now on nothing can stop or hold up, will have no limit other than the lifespan of the universe’ (i: 390–1). The rhetorical flourish of a public speech often heralds a crushing banality of content, then as now, but this was not to be the case on this occasion, and any academician present anticipating superficiality was to be pleasantly surprised. That Condorcet’s confidence in man’s future well-being and increasing prosperity would remain unshaken by events is clear from the evidence of that extraordinary last work, the Esquisse d’un tableau historique 1

On the legacy of the Enlightenment and the tenacity of Enlightenment values in Condorcet’s political thought, see Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 13–48, 94–5; M. Crampe-Casnabet, Condorcet lecteur des Lumi`eres (Paris: PUF, 1985); Williams, ‘Condorcet and the English Enlightenment’. The reaffirmation of Enlightenment principles in the debate on constitutional change in 1789 was the main purpose behind Condorcet’s foundation of the Soci´et´e de 1789, see the Lettre a` m.∗∗∗ sur la Soci´et´e de 1789 (x: 69–76). Cf. B. Groethuysen, Philosophie de la R´evolution franc¸aise (Paris: Gonthier, 1956), p. 96.

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des progr`es de l’esprit humain. However, even in the Esquisse Condorcet was by no means sanguine. Outside Europe, prior to the American Revolution, the rest of the world was still in darkness (vi: 237–8), and Condorcet was not indifferent to the wounds that still bled, as his Academy speech made clear: ‘Do not accuse me of being insensitive to humanity’s woes; I know that its wounds still bleed, that everywhere it is still burdened with the yoke of ignorance, that wherever a good man might look crimes and suffering bring tears to his eyes and break his heart’ (i: 394). Philosophes could still be revolted by the human spectacle (vi: 244); but in the struggle between error and truth, superstition and reason, light and darkness, the damage done to the cause of anti-philosophie was already sufficient to ensure that the triumph of light was probable: ‘It is true that ignorance and error still breathe, but these monsters, the most formidable enemies of man’s happiness, bear the mark of mortality with which they have been struck, and even their cries, which frighten you, only prove how sure and terrible are the blows they have received’ (i: 395). As an obvious example of the continuing threat posed by the enemies of humanity he reminded readers of the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es (Reflections on the grain trade) how vested economic interests still sought protection in the people’s ignorance, shame and poverty, spreading the darkness of prejudice in the fearful knowledge that enlightenment would lead to the victory of rights over inequality and usurpation (xi: 159–61, 162–4). The historical stages of that victory, in the course of which the chains of intellectual and political oppression were to be finally broken, were set out in graphic detail in the ninth ´epoque of the Esquisse. Here Condorcet surveyed the implications of the advent of enlightened values that had taken place between the Cartesian Revolution and that other Revolution which had culminated in the death of the ancien r´egime and the establishment of the First Republic. The progress of man’s mind and that of man’s liberty were always for Condorcet closely interlinked processes, and one of the main purposes of the Esquisse was to show how one by one the things which seem to us today to be optimistic fantasies gradually become possible, easy even; how, in spite of the success which prejudice has had, with the support of corrupt governments and peoples, only truth is to enjoy lasting victory; and how nature has bound together the progress of enlightenment with that of liberty, virtue and respect for man’s natural rights. (vi: 20)

Rousseau’s dystopic prophecies were discarded by Condorcet without compromise or concession, the progress of the sciences and the arts offering no reason to fear for man’s happiness, virtue and freedom. Although

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he rarely mentioned Rousseau by name, Condorcet confronted Rousseau’s pessimism frequently – as, for example, in his commentary on Voltaire’s Le Mondain in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 233–7). That pessimism, itself grounded in despair at the dark consequences, as Rousseau had preceived them, of the scientific enterprise, was challenged with empirical evidence drawn from the benefits that had accrued over the centuries as a result of the forces which Rousseau deplored most. The achievements of science, and in particular contemporary, post-Cartesian science, were for Condorcet real and beyond dispute. Their demonstrably tangible fruits were central to his notion of progress, and to his uncompromising acceptance of the perfectibility of man’s nature, and of that better world to which the beneficence of scientific endeavour would give birth.2 In his Academy speech he affirmed this credo in the following terms: Every scientific discovery benefits humanity; no system of truthful enquiry is sterile. We have harvested the fruits of our ancestors’ labour; let us beware of thinking that the labour of our contemporaries might be useless, and let us savour in advance the happiness that one day they will give to our descendants just as a father takes pleasure in watching the tree, whose branches will shade the next generation, grow and flourish. It would be easy for me to confirm this truth. Of necessity a witness to scientific progress, every year, every month, every day, if you like, are to my eyes all notable for a new discovery or a useful invention. This sublime and consoling pageant has become a regular part of my life and of my happiness. (i: 391–2)

Much of what Condorcet had to say about scientific progress related to the dramatic discoveries emanating from great mathematical minds. In his notes for the Kehl Voltaire he catalogued the achievement of Bradley in the field of celestial mathematics, d’Alembert who had advanced significantly the calculus of fluid mechanics and solved the problem of equinoctial precession bequeathed by Newton, Bouguer who had elaborated the laws relating to the gradation of light waves, Euler, Rochon, Linnaeus, Franklin, Rouelle, Aubenton, Bernoulli, Lagrange and others. Condorcet’s view of science was inspired by the Baconian model: the focus of its activity and 2

It was on the issue of perfectibility that Condorcet admired particularly the work of Richard Price: ‘In his own country Dr Price is one of the leading and most zealous advocates of the notion that the human race is indefinitely perfectible, in a physical as well as moral sense’ (BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 283–4). In another very interesting unpublished autograph fragment Price is described as ‘an old man respected for a life devoted entirely to the service of humanity . . . His treatise on civil liberty rewarded him with the fear of tyrants and the insults of writers in their pay’ (BIF Condorcet MS 860, ff. 215). See also J. Lough, ‘Condorcet et Richard Price’, Revue de litt´erature compar´ee 24 (1950), 87–93; Baker, Condorcet, pp. 164–7; D. O. Thomas (ed.), Price: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. xii. The question of Price’s influence on Condorcet deserves further attention.

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application was man; its purpose was man’s happiness and welfare; its operative principle the empirical path of rational enquiry based on the close observation of nature; its vision of the scientific endeavour universalist. In another speech to the Acad´emie Franc¸aise, on 26 February 1784, in response to an address given by the comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, he reflected in distinctly Baconian terms on the interconnections and interdependence of the sciences (i: 439).3 His debt to Bacon was fully acknowledged in the Fragment sur l’Atlantide, ou efforts combin´es de l’esp`ece humaine pour le progr`es des sciences (Fragment on Atlantis, or joint efforts of the human race to make progress in the sciences) (vi: 598–9). On 4 September 1784, this time speaking to the Acad´emie des Sciences, Condorcet would again extol Bacon’s achievement in having taken the first hesitant steps towards a methodology of truth (vi: 186). Together with Galileo and Descartes, Bacon formed part of that trio of colossi bestriding the old and the modern worlds to which Condorcet paid generous tribute in the eighth ´epoque of the Esquisse. Descartes deserved homage, ‘in spite of his mistakes’, for having encouraged thinkers to throw off the yoke of authority and tradition, but it was Bacon who had first unveiled the ‘true method’ of studying nature and penetrating its secrets: ‘observation, experiment and calculation’ (vi: 168). The power of Baconian science and its Newtonian legacy as the driving force behind the astonishing progress made since the sixteenth century in physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, botany, medicine and other ‘hard’ sciences were well understood by Condorcet. It was an understanding that was shared by many contemporaries, but Condorcet’s distinctive contribution to midand late eighteenth-century interpretations of the English empirical legacy was his insight into its political implications, not only for the theoretical bases of the nascent social and political sciences, but also for the strategy and pragmatics of day-to-day government. This was underlined in the 1782 Academy speech. Moral, social and political areas of enquiry could advance only by being harnessed to the observation of facts, and to the mathematical analysis of their implications: ‘In fact, by meditating on the nature of the moral sciences you cannot help seeing that, just like the physical sciences depend on the observation of facts, the moral sciences must follow the 3

On the unity of knowledge, Condorcet was also of course reflecting the ideology to which d’Alembert had given expression in the Discours pr´eliminaire to the Encyclop´edie, as the terms of the 26 February 1784 Discours to the Academy indicate: ‘The sciences are held together by a chain which links each one to all the others, and where they make contact they help each other on a mutual basis’ (i: 439). In the Eloge de m. Bucquet Condorcet wrote that chemistry complemented natural history ‘just as the science of man complements and carries the torch for moral history’ (ii: 413).

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same approach, acquire an accurate and precise language, and achieve the same degree of certainty’ (i: 392). In the moral and political extensions of an empirically based methodology lay the only sure and authentic key to progress. The marriage of science, and particularly mathematics, to the analysis and management of social and political phenomena led in Condorcet’s thought to the consideration of a universal theory of knowledge and a universal language, and he speculated at length on these matters in the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 270–2). Universal language, appropriately formulated, was to be the main tool of the new methodology for ordering society, for rationally analysing responses to its ever-increasing complexities, and for ultimately guaranteeing the effective management of modernity: But, as the facts proliferate, and as man learns to classify them, and reduce them to more general facts, as the tools and techniques used to observe and measure them accurately acquire at the same time even higher degrees of precision, as our understanding of the multifarious relationships between a larger number of objects grows, we manage to reduce them to wider-ranging relationships, contain them within a simpler terminology, and present them in forms which allow us to understand a greater number of them, it is not long before truths are developed and proved in ways that are not beyond the comprehension of the average man. (vi: 252–3)

The mission of science was being given an emphatically humane4 orientation in Condorcet’s hands, and this expressed itself as a central article of faith in his 1782 Academy speech. Progress in the physical sciences gave momentum to progress in the moral and social sciences, and minimised the risk of defeat in the face of unceasing assault by the enemies of humanity. The union of the physical and the moral sciences5 would give to the latter an extended, and above all useful, field of enquiry that would have practical impact on people’s lives, on the political and social institutions that 4

5

The term is used here in the sense of a science linked to human need. Models that Condorcet extolled in his Academy obituaries from this point of view included medical scientists in particular such as Pierre-Joseph Macquer (iii: 125–38) and of course the English surgeon William Hunter (ii: 667–8). See Williams, ‘Condorcet and the art of eulogy’, 375. Condorcet commented on the issues facing the moral scientist in the Eloge de m. Bucquet: ‘you can reduce them to principles which are as simple and certain as those in the physical sciences; but these principles are hidden, or at least obscured, by the clouds which ignorance and corrruption have gathered around them. The truths, whose chain provides the basic system for these sciences, are presented for judgement to the masses who think that they can understand them, and have a right to an opinion on them; at the same time they are bound to all the petty issues which stir men up; thus truth cannot make progress without a struggle against prejudice and passion, and experience has shown that, instead of seeking out the truth, and honouring those who discover it, or try to spread it, men reject the light, and persecute whoever persists in trying to show it to them’ (ii: 411).

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shaped those lives and even on human nature itself. ‘Social mathematics’ would forge a unique partnership between the elite world of scientifically enlightened minds and the world of ordinary men and women.6 Condorcet’s project was about the transformation of the future as well as the reformation of the present: The project to make all men virtuous is a dream, but one day why should we not see enlightenment and genius create for happier generations an education system and a legal system which would make courageous virtue almost unnecessary? See how, from one end of Europe to the other, enlightened men act together for the good of humanity, and direct all their efforts towards that one purpose with a courage and a solidarity not seen in any other age. (i: 395, 397)

If Bacon had provided the model for empirical enquiry and the first tentative insight into the relationship between the physical and the moral sciences, Condorcet’s model was firmly anchored, not so much to English science, although his admiration for Newton, for example, was unqualified, and the Newtonian influence on his thought is clearly discernible,7 but to Bacon’s successors, Locke and Hume.8 For Condorcet, the astonishing achievements of the modern age could be directly attributed to the decline of faith in ‘systems’. His abhorrence of irrelevant philosophising constitutes a sustained leit-motif in his thinking, whether on the subject of science, politics, economics, legislative codes, canals, the civil status of women, the abolition of the slave trade or the rights of man. Locke had cured Voltaire of ‘the mania for systems’ (iv: 283); Franklin had demonstrated the need to link the world of abstract knowledge to ‘the realities of life’ (iii: 417). Cartesianism, which in so many ways had kindled a brilliant beacon on the route to enlightenment, now had to be replaced by ‘a truer philosophy’ if the century’s vision of progress was to acquire credibility in the eyes of ordinary men and women, and have real impact on their lives. It was to Locke that Condorcet turned in the quest for this ‘truer philosophy’. Locke had shown the English ‘the path in metaphysics which must be followed if we are not to get lost’ (iv: 19). In the Esquisse Condorcet elaborated on the qualities of Lockean procedures that appealed to him. The precision of Locke’s analysis of the origin of ideas in sensation, with its associated concentration on the relationship between ideas and words (‘the great instruments of knowledge’), provided the key to the resolution of 6 7 8

This was the aspect of Franklin’s career that Condorcet admired particularly, see the Eloge de m. Franklin (iii: 417). See Williams, ‘Condorcet and the English Enlightenment’, 159–62. Baker notes that Condorcet used many of Hume’s ideas in the reception speech to the Acad´emie Franc¸aise (Condorcet, pp. 180–5). See also Popkin, ‘Condorcet and Hume and Turgot’, 53–62.

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the problems posed by the incoherence and indeterminacy of the phenomena of human experience. Locke had defined the link between inchoate perception and the operation of the mind on sensation, and in so doing had provided the means to guard against the danger of ‘getting lost’ that constantly haunted Condorcet: that perception is limited to just one part of each of these composite sensations. We must see that by attaching one word to each idea, after having analysed that idea and circumscribed it, we always manage to recall the same idea, that is to say, one made up of the same simpler component ideas, always contained within the same boundaries, and consequently we always manage to use it in a sequential process of reasoning without ever running the risk of losing ourselves. (vi: 182–3)

Locke’s emphasis on ‘epistemological modesty’ was shared by Condorcet to the extent that he accepted that reason was a powerful tool of enlightenment, but useless when applied to the unanswerable questions of metaphysics. In the Eloge de m. Duclos the folly of Cartesianism had been defined precisely as ‘the craze of having to rationalise all phenomena, well or badly’ (ii: 33). Above all, it was Locke’s precept, set out in the 1690 Essay concerning human understanding, that ‘our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct’,9 which enabled Condorcet to define the real business of philosophe science, and the necessarily delimited nature of its mission, without undermining his own optimism and faith in the possibility of progress.10 Locke had been the first to map the frontiers of human knowledge with rigour and precision, and to determine the nature of the truths that they encompassed. Locke had argued, moreover, that scientific and philosophical enquiry should take on board the moral and political sciences. This was a dazzlingly illuminating concept for Condorcet: It is by applying them to morality, to politics, to political economy, that men have been able to make advancements in these areas almost as certain as those made in the natural sciences, to accept only proven truths, to distance those truths from anything that might still be dubious or uncertain, to be able to accept that in the 9 10

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894), vol. i, p. 31. Condorcet did not allow Locke’s views on the limits of human knowledge to impose limits on human potential, and he made this clear in his notes for the Kehl Voltaire: ‘It would even be a little unphilosophical to regard the limits which Locke has placed on the human mind as being invariable. It is the same for metaphysics as for other sciences, from which it differs only in terms of its objectives, and not in terms of its certainty or its methods. You could say of every science: this is what the human mind can hope to achieve in the current stage of enlightenment; if it digs deeper, it risks getting lost, but it would be rash to put limits on what will be possible one day’ (iv: 285–6). Neither the power of the human mind nor the uncertainty of knowledge must be underestimated, as was the case with Bayle and Pascal (iv: 293).

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end we still do not know everything, and that it will always be impossible for us to know everything. (vi: 183)

Locke’s method provided for Condorcet the ‘universal instrument’ to be applied to the discovery of truth across a whole range of human experience and enquiry. The influence of Lockean epistemological procedures on Condorcet is incontrovertible although, while it is known that Condorcet could read English texts in the original, what he actually read of Locke’s works is still a matter for speculation and, at best, informed assumption. What can be said is that his writings evoke Lockean precepts and formulations in ways that suggest an easy familiarity with the Essay concerning human understanding. In the light of that text, any appreciation of the impact on Condorcet of Lockean views on language as an instrument of analysis, on sensationalist theory and above all on probability, must take us back to Condorcet’s notes for his 1782 Academy speech. It was in the Discours de r´eception that he paid public tribute to Locke’s role in resetting the methodological foundations of the moral and political sciences within new parameters of sensationalist psychology. The epistemological themes of the Discours de r´eception were to re-emerge in the Esquisse, where Condorcet plotted the course of the Enlightenment, and spelled out the far-reaching implications of the potential power of the ‘philosophical calculus’ for man’s social and moral constitution: Thus the analysis of our sentiments enables us to discover, in the development of our faculty for experiencing pleasure and pain, the origin of our moral ideas, the basis for the general truths which, arising from those ideas, determine the necessary, immutable laws of justice and injustice, and in the end [provide] the motivations to make our behaviour conform to them, motivations ingrained in the very nature of our sensibility, in what could be called, in a way, our moral constitution.11 (vi: 183–4)

References to Locke abound in Condorcet’s writings, but in addition to the Discours de r´eception there is one further text that deserves attention for the evidence it provides of Condorcet’s understanding of Locke, and that is the obituary which he wrote for Condillac soon after the latter’s death on 2/3 August 1780. Most of the philosophes owed their knowledge of Lockean principles to Condillac’s 1754 Trait´e des sensations, widely taught in the colleges in the second half of the eighteenth century. Condorcet’s Notice historique et critique sur Condillac appeared in the Journal de Paris on 11

In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet praised Turgot’s insight into the ways in which the progressive evolution of the civil order brought with it a corresponding evolution of the moral order that enabled men to see how their happiness was closely linked to the happiness of others (v: 222–3).

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25 September 1780,12 and it offered readers a tribute to Condillac’s achievements that is at best luke-warm. However, one aspect of Condillac’s work recommended itself to Condorcet, namely Condillac’s adherence to procedures that recalled Locke’s ‘plain, historical method’, and the pioneering analytical methodology that had been instrumental in crystallising the link between ideas and their origins in sensation. Reviewing Condillac’s life and work, therefore, Condorcet was reminded of how much Locke had achieved in fulfilling the promise of the original Baconian vision (Notice, p. 237). To set Condorcet’s epistemological views within an English empirical, and essentially Lockean, tradition is not to deny the existence of other powerful formative influences, and recent scholarship has rightly drawn attention to the importance of Hume’s thought, for example.13 Certainly Condorcet’s application of probability reasoning suggests an interesting link with the Treatise on human nature, and especially with the third chapter, ‘Of knowledge and probability’. Berkeley, Collins, Bolingbroke and Adam Smith also contributed to that unique blend of empiricism and intuitivism which marks Condorcet’s notion of ‘social mathematics’.14 It is the authority of Locke’s name, however, that predominates in Condorcet’s thinking on the role and nature of enlightenment within a broad spectrum of political and social contexts. It was through the application of Lockean insight that Newtonian science had been brought down to earth,15 that Cartesian methodical doubt had been extended to the social arena of profane humanity, that the transcendental terms of the Pascalian wager had been rejected.16 The challenge to secure man’s salvation would now be met in a world whose values and aspirations were irreversibly secular in nature. Condorcet’s application of the revolutionary ‘social mathematics’ to the new complexities of that world reflected a crucial, essentially Lockean, preoccupation: ‘The point of it is man’ (i: 543). Condorcet returned to the management of the processes whereby enlightenment would be humanised, democratised and disseminated in a number of contexts, and enlightenment as a public policy would become central to his radically framed blueprint for a national education system. 12 13 14

15 16

Reference is to the text of this work edited by K. M. Baker, ‘Un e´loge officieux de Condorcet: sa notice historique et critique sur Condillac’, Revue de synth`ese 3 (1967), 236–51. See n. 8. In the Esquisse Condorcet listed these names along with those of Bayle, Fontenelle, Voltaire and Montesquieu as model soldiers in the battle for truth whose cris de guerre were reason, tolerance and humanity (vi: 187–8). See G.-G. Granger, La Math´ematique sociale du marquis de Condorcet (Paris: PUF, 1956), p. 38. Condorcet published his edition of Pascal’s Pens´ees in 1776. It was reprinted as the Eloge et pens´ees de Pascal (Paris, 1778).

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The enlightened mind was for Condorcet a free mind in the political, as well as intellectual, sense.17 The liberation of the mind and the liberation of the citizen were complementary processes. That essential link would be made into the political cornerstone of his proposals for education published in 1791 as the Cinq m´emoires sur l’instruction publique: ‘A constitution which is really free, in which all social classes enjoy the same rights, cannot exist if the ignorance of some citizens prevents them from understanding its nature and limitations’ (iii: 80). The political link would be further consolidated in the following year in the Rapport sur l’instruction publique.18 In the Eloge de m. d’Alembert Condorcet again stressed, in pragmatic terms very similar to those he used in constitutional contexts, the importance of a strategy of gradualism. Enlightenment, like all other catalysts of change arising from enlightened rational processes, had to be controlled and directed with caution. Philosophes owed society the truth, but handled in such a way that those people who are wounded by truth are not forewarned to unite and rise up against it. Instead of making a frontal assault on dangerous prejudices, it is often better to present truth indirectly by inference so that the error of these views can be easily deduced; instead of striking out openly at error, it is enough to gradually get people accustomed to using their reason correctly so that, once they have got into this happy habit, they themselves can have the pleasure and glory of breaking the chains oppressing their reason, and tearing down the idols before which they have grown weary of bending the knee. (iii: 80–1)

In the Eloge de m. Turgot he observed that minds had to be introduced slowly to enlightened values like eyes adjusting to a bright light after a long darkness (iii: 455). The triumph of truth would not be accomplished overnight, as Turgot understood only too well: ‘It is good to accustom minds slowly to the truth, and to treat those minds like eyes which must be adjusted gradually to the light.’19 The political process was always for Condorcet a deeply educational enterprise for the citizen, and the ideal of the legislator as public tutor as well as political leader crystallised with particular clarity in his portrait of Franklin whose political career had been that of a man with faith in the power of reason and in the reality of human 17

18 19

On the guidance of scientific research in the service of society and the enlightened public mind, see the Eloge de m. Duhamel (ii: 641–2). Condorcet thought that one of the more successful public administrators in this respect, apart from Turgot, was Etienne Mignol de Montigni: ‘a good man . . . who left nobody behind he had made unhappy’, Eloge de m. de Montigni (ii: 597). See Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 5–8. Condorcet reiterates the point in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire: ‘When it is a question of fighting against received ideas, the truth with which those ideas are confronted, if they are wrong, does not dissipate error immediately’ (iv: 290).

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virtue, ‘and who had wanted to be the tutor of his fellow-citizens before they called on him to become their legislator’ (iii: 420). Condorcet was always aware of the fragility of the Enlightenment enterprise. The first steps taken towards the adoption of enlightened values by the Greeks had been easily reversed in the Dark Ages, but in the sixth ´epoque of the Esquisse, dealing with the negation of those values at the time of the crusades, he observed that men’s proclivity to hesitate on their journey towards modernity did not justify the abandonment of the enterprise altogether. The future was not to be overshadowed by the sobering lessons of history. Examples of the decline and failure of earlier civilisations provided only a warning, not a counsel of despair. Their message was to encourage men ‘to neglect nothing in the cause of protecting and extending enlightenment if they want to become or stay free, and to maintain their freedom if they do not wish to lose the avantages given to them by enlightenment’ (vi: 123). The connection between enlightenment and liberty in the civil order is stressed frequently, enlightenment being equated with a victory over the servitude of the mind that was in turn analogous to the triumph of a revolution in the civil order which freed the citizen from the chains of political servitude. True and lasting political freedom could only be achieved when all men were released from their prejudices. Thus, for Condorcet, political progress could only take place meaningfully in conditions established by a corresponding moral and intellectual revolution. Referring in the Vie de Voltaire to premature, ill-fated attempts to reform the civil order, Condorcet questioned the futility of blood shed unnecessarily in the cause of freedom at a time when the prevailing social, political and cultural order would not permit the achievement of benefits that were real and permanent. For revolutions to succeed, timing was everything: Why risk everything by purchasing with torrents of blood and inevitable upheavals what time must surely bring about without any bloodshed? It is in order to be free, and permanently free, that we must await the moment when men, liberated from their prejudices and guided by reason, will finally be worthy of their freedom, because they will know what the true rights of freedom are. (iv: 179–80)

Enlightenment facilitated political and social renewal, and was indispensable to the constitutional vitality of the civil order. In the Vie de m. Turgot the revered Controller-General was reported as having regarded the general acquisition of enlightenment in the operations of government, and the protection and monitoring of the civil order ‘as the only cure for its ills and as its true justification; [the civil order] might be imperfect in our eyes, but it always tends to perfect itself’ (v: 225). For this reason enlightenment,

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like rights, had to be extended to all. In the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales Condorcet set out the consequences if the democratisation of enlightenment did not take place. Intellectual privilege and exclusivity were as harmful to the social pact as intolerance, inequality and the privileges of birth, for it must not be thought that the rich can continue to be enlightened for very long if the poor remain condemned to eternal stupidity. It is when enlightenment is widely shared, not confined, that it can increase; the more it is restricted to a small number of people, the more it is to be feared that error and pseudo-science will dim its brightness. (viii: 477)

Condorcet’s view of the scientific and philosophical Enlightenment as a facilitating, liberating force illuminates the 1790 Eloge de m. Franklin, the career of Benjamin Franklin exemplifying perfectly the ways in which the quest of the scientist for truth could interlock fruitfully with that of the politically engaged warrior in the front line of the battle against tyranny and its ally, ignorance20 (iii: 379–80, 421–2). In that war revolutionary politics and revolutionary science are joined in a natural alliance against tyranny: Who can still be unaware that nations do not have to choose between cultivating the sciences or debasement under the yoke of prejudice? For, in the natural order of things, political enlightenment either follows in the footsteps of the sciences, and is supported by their progress or, as in the case of the ancients, its glow is uncertain, ephemeral and obscured by storms. Let us beware of those envious detractors who dare to accuse the ancients of complacency under despotism; they certainly felt instinctively that nations deprived of enlightenment are easier to deceive or to lead, and that the more enlightened a nation is, the more difficult it is to abolish the vote . . . Even in a freer constitution, an ignorant people is always an enslaved one. (iii: 423)

The more educated, and therefore enlightened, a nation was, the less likely it was to be oppressed. With enlightenment thus recast in its role as a civic necessity, a national system of education followed on naturally as an essential extension of civic virtue and patriotic obligation. social mathematics and the public good In the Tableau g´en´eral de la science qui a pour objet l’application du calcul aux sciences politiques et morales (General survey of science concerning the application of the calculus of probabilities to the political and moral 20

The war imagery describing the process of enlightenment occurs frequently in Condorcet’s ´eloges, see for example the Eloge de m. de Buffon (iii: 362).

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sciences)21 Condorcet offered a shrewd assessment of the conditions in which mathematical advancements, freedom, peace and enlightenment first started to coalesce in seventeenth-century Holland and England to make the application of the calculus of probabilities feasible as an instrument for the management of the moral and political sciences.22 An understanding of the applications of the calculus of probabilities as an instrument of prediction that would facilitate the development of a science of political management is the hallmark of Condorcet’s originality and genius. The calculus of probabilities was the bridge joining the principles of empirical science to those of social and political planning, and the promise it held out of a rationally controlled future is described in the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse with remarkable clarity and eloquence: If man can predict, with almost complete confidence, phenomena whose laws he understands, if even when those laws are unknown to him he can, in the light of past experience, foresee with a great degree of probability events in the future, why should the project to extrapolate from the lessons of history a fairly accurate picture of the future of the human race be considered a dream? The only basis for belief in the natural sciences is the notion that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate phenomena in the universe are necessary and constant; so for what reason should this principle be less true for the development of man’s intellectual and moral faculties than it is for other natural processes? Finally, since opinions formed on the basis of past experience with regard to objects of the same order are the only rule of behaviour for the wisest of men, why should the philosopher be forbidden from using the same basis to support his own conjectures, provided he does not attribute to them a higher certainty than that arising from the number, constancy and accuracy of his observations? (vi: 236–7)

In the Tableau Condorcet replaced the earlier term, ‘moral arithmetic’, with a new formulation to describe the social application of the calculus: I thought that the name social mathematics [Condorcet’s italics] was better suited to this science . . . This demonstration will illustrate the usefulness of this science in its entirety; you will see that none of our private or public interests will be 21

22

Calcul is a difficult term to translate, and can also be rendered in English as ‘calculus’ or ‘calculation’. Condorcet does not use it to mean ‘differential calculus’ or ‘integral calculus’. Sommerlad and McLean observe that sometimes the context indicates ‘the mathematical spirit’ (The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), p. xii). In addition to the magisterial 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix, Condorcet offers a succinct description of the operations of probability theory in his notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 267–8). Cf. the 1787 Discours sur l’astronomie et le calcul des probabilit´es. He cites as pioneers of the new science of social mathematics Jean de Witt (‘Descartes’s disciple’) and William Petty (i: 539–40). Their work on the calculus of probability coincided chronologically with that of Fermat and Pascal.

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inappropriate to it, that it will be able to give us more precise and more certain knowledge of all of them; you will see how this science could contribute to the happiness and perfection of the human race, if it were to be more widely used and cultivated. (i: 540–1)23

The change of direction in Condorcet’s mathematical enquiries can be traced back to the end of the Turgot administration in 1776. Before 1776 his interests had focussed exclusively on the applications of integral calculus. His post-Turgot disillusionment with government marked the end of one ‘beautiful dream’ and the start of another with his dawning perception of the calculus of probabilities as a mechanism for the management of enlightened social planning. The first manifestations of the new dream are to be found in a lecture given to a Lyc´ee in 1783, and also in letters that he wrote to Garat in 1784–5.24 However, the most systematic elaboration of the new orientation to his mathematical thinking is to be found in the context of voting procedures in the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix (Essay on the application of probability theory to decision-making by majority vote) in which he gives close attention to the problem of guaranteeing that deliberative bodies like juries, tribunals and legislative assemblies would always deliver the right collective decision in the determination of guilt or innocence or in the framing of just laws. The view of probability and its applications to be found in the Tableau, and later in the Esquisse, were in fact already in place in the 1785 Essai. Condorcet believed that social policies and political decisions had been based so far on evaluations which depended on ‘a vague, almost instinctive feeling, or on crude, uncertain insights’ (i: 541). The public servant who used the calculus, on the other hand, had all the advantages of the gambler whose wager was informed by reason and mathematical insight over the gambler who wagered on the basis of instinct, superstition or habit. The gambling analogy is extended in the second half of the Tableau where the reader is taken through the mathematical steps involved in the application of calculus predictions to the casting of dice (i: 552–3), throws of the dice providing a readily understandable illustration of probability theory in action. 23 24

The most comprehensive account of Condorcet’s theory of social mathematics is still that of Granger, La Math´ematique sociale. See particularly pp. 45–163. McLean and Hewitt usefully reproduce relevant extracts from the Lyc´ee lectures and the Garat correspondence (p. 11). See also Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et Madame Suard, ed. Badinter, pp. 220–1; Sommerlad and McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), pp. 1–6.

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Condorcet linked the model of calculation involved to warnings about the false conclusions which ensue from analyses fatally flawed as a consequence of the paucity of statistical evidence available to policy-makers and the general inadequacy of public record-keeping. In the second half of the Tableau he returned to the vexing problem of deficient public recordkeeping, stressing that the success of the science of social mathematics would be conditional upon improvements in that area. Equally deficient were analyses based on reason alone, into which the intrusion of error and prejudice could not be prevented. With characteristic prescience, Condorcet stressed the particular usefulness of the calculus to the management of the inevitable damage to the social fabric caused by disruptive events, ‘stormy times’. In times of uncertainty and chaos the pressing need to restore harmony and stability could only be met effectively by the rational application of the calculus: ‘How reason is further strengthened by this rigour, this precision accompanying all the operations of the calculus! How much would this not contribute to ensuring a smooth crossing of this rubbish-strewn terrain, whose bowels are still in upheaval and which has been shaken by earthquakes for so long’ (i: 542–3). Condorcet believed the calculus of probability to be the key to enlightened public administration, and probability theory is central to the science of social mathematics in the Tableau. Here the foundation-stones of modern statistical and actuarial sciences in commerce, insurance, demography, voting procedures, economics, health, taxation and other areas of social planning and provision are laid out with remarkable prescience. Believing that moral truths were as objectively measurable as scientific truths, he felt that human conflict arose from ignorance and misperceptions which would be corrected by the process of enlightenment. He was confident, perhaps naively over-confident, that the more enlightened the nation became, the more enlightened its collective decisions would be under the laws of probability science.25 The more philosophical aspects of Condorcet’s thinking on the potential of probabilism owed much to the Newtonian and Lockean debates of the seventeenth century relating to the degree of certainty provided by the natural sciences. English empiricism, and in particular Lockean ‘epistemological modesty’, established that in the physical sciences, as in all other areas of knowledge, man is limited to what he knows, and what he knows comes to him only through the data of sense experience. The nature and extent of his knowledge was, however, measurable using the precise and certain language of mathematics. The limitation of human knowledge did 25

See Sommerlad and McLean (eds. and trans.), The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), p. 7.

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not mean that there was no sure rule upon which to found an opinion, as Condorcet pointed out in his notes on Pascal.26 Condorcet accepted that in spite of the so far unfailing regularity of the rising of the sun each day, it could not be predicted with absolute certainty that the sun would rise tomorrow morning. Past performance was no guarantee of future performance in any aspect of the human condition, and science was full of uncertainties. Hume had set out the conditions under which we can accept probabilities in A Treatise of Human Nature,27 where he defined the presuppositions upon which probabilism was predicated, namely ‘ignorance of the essential causes of events; the equal phenomenological weight of events; the determined order of events’.28 Because of the fact that the human mind can never fully grasp the essential nature of things, the causes that might bring about one event rather than another can never be demonstrated. Rational belief must, therefore, take account of the equal phenomenological weighting of each event and the regularity and constant configurations as determined by experience and by a methodical analysis of the pattern of similar events in the past. Causality might not be demonstrable, but it did not follow necessarily that causality did not exist. The philosophical door to mathematical probability theory had now been opened, and Hume’s impact on Condorcet would be considerable. Eighteenth-century probability theory in France, developed initially as a response to the challenge posed by the doctrine of chance,29 is derived from the mathematical research undertaken in the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth.30 In his correspondence with Fermat and in the Trait´e du triangle arithm´etique of 1665, Pascal laid out the founding principles of the mathematical attack on chance,31 and Descartes took the challenge to radical uncertainty further in the Discours de la m´ethode (1637). 26 27

28 29

30 31

The genesis of philosophical thinking on the question of knowledge and probability from Newton to Hume has been examined in some detail by Baker, Condorcet, pp. 130–55. Isaac Todhunter’s account of the historical development of probability theory is still authoritative, although almost a hundred and fifty years have passed since it was first published (A History of the Mathematical Theory of Probability from the Time of Pascal to that of Laplace (London: Macmillan, 1865). A more recent account can be found in F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling. The Origins and History of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era (London: Griffin, 1962). Baker, Condorcet, p. 154. The English term ‘chance’ is problematic and does not convey all of the connotations of the French term ‘hasard’, see T. M. Kavanagh, ‘Chance and probability in the Enlightenment’, French Forum 5 (1990), 6–9. See Baker, Condorcet, pp. 155–71. On the mathematical basis to the famous passage on the wager in Pascal’s Pens´ees, see I. Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 63–72. Cf. Kavanagh, ‘Chance and probability’, 9–11. For Condorcet’s views on what he considered to be Pascal’s misuse of probabilism, see the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 513–16).

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The potential power of the ‘algebraic art’ was then described in more visionary terms by Huygens in De ratiociniis in aleae ludo (1657). Thanks to their achievements, as well as that of others who followed in their footsteps like Montmort, Moivre, Bernoulli, Bayes, Lagrange and La Place, the theoretical basis for the calculus of probabilities was established, although until the second half of the eighteenth century the new mathematics remained confined largely to the original Pascalian context of gambling. That contextual limitation would end with Condorcet’s determination to apply the mathematical work of his friend La Place to political and social questions. These earlier scientists had established the rules for predicting outcomes from causes of known frequency, and their work laid the basis for the application to outcomes of ‘forward-looking’ probability, i.e. the computation of the values of outcomes from the known frequency of causes. To forward-looking probability theory Bernoulli added inverse probability theory which seeks to calculate the probability of unknown causes given observed outcomes. The application of this is ascribed outside France to Bayes and known as Bayes’s Theorem, into which La Place, Price and Condorcet also had some input.32 Ironically, the only mathematician to have any doubts (based on an elementary miscalculation) about the validity of the mathematics involved in the assessment of ‘expected value’ was Condorcet’s patron, d’Alembert. The most influential of this constellation of distinguished mathematicians, as far as Condorcet is concerned, was probably La Place, closely followed by Bernoulli and Bayes. La Place’s seminal paper on the calculation of the probability of drawing at random a black or a white ball from an urn containing black and white balls either in a given proportion or in an unknown proportion moved Condorcet to develop further his own views on probability and its applications which he had already started to formulate in an unfinished paper in 1772 in connection with Bernoulli’s work. La Place’s Recherches sur l’int´egration des ´equations diff´erentielles aux diff´erences finies, et sur leur usage dans la th´eorie des hasards was published in 1773, to be followed by the M´emoire sur la probabilit´e des causes par les ´ev´enements in 1774. Condorcet who, as assistant secretary in the Acad´emie des Sciences, had the responsibility of editing La Place’s papers for the transactions of the Academy, was profoundly influenced by both papers, and he commented on the significance of La Place’s research on the probability of the occurrence of an event and its significance for the calculus of probabilities in the preface to the sixth volume of the M´emoires des 32

For a succinct explanation of Bernoulli’s theorem of inverse probability and the Bayes application, see McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 12–14.

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savants ´etrangers in 1774.33 For Condorcet the debate on probability, so far confined to gambling and lotteries, could now be extended to other, more useful areas. A third paper by La Place, the M´emoire sur les probabilit´es, was published in 1781, and Condorcet discussed its conclusions, particularly with regard to the application of the calculus to predictions of population growth, in his official summary in the 1778 M´emoires des savants ´etrangers. The calculus of probabilities drives the concept of social science as it was to evolve in Condorcet’s mind over the next twenty years, and it is important not to lose sight of the crucial linkage between his mathematical researches on probability theory and his non-mathematical essays and treatises on political, social, constitutional and economic issues. To understand Condorcet fully, the mental universes of Condorcet the probability theorist and Condorcet the author of treatises on taxation and other aspects of public finance, jury reform, elections and voting procedures, social insurance, annuities and other applications of actuarial science, canalbuilding, contraception and demographic issues, and even on the nature of progress itself, all need to be envisaged as a seamless intellectual continuity whose strands stretch from the early essays on the calculus right through to the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse. The interpenetration of these apparently separate mental universes crystallised dramatically in the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix, Condorcet’s revolutionary demonstration in the context of a theory of voting of the existence of a degree of certainty and precision in the moral and political sciences comparable to that of the physical sciences. In the introduction to the Tableau Condorcet offered a summative, diagrammatic representation of the new world of social mathematics,34 taking into account the order of nature, including climate, the nature of the soil, food supplies, as well as social institutions, political and social stability, standards of living, employment patterns in calculating projections of life expectancy, gender balance, birth and mortality rates, marriages and demographic projections by age, marital status and class.35 The building blocks of the human edifice were accessible to analysis and forward-planning from 33

34

35

In addition to Baker’s analysis, see also C. Gillespie, ‘Probability and politics: Laplace, Condorcet and Turgot’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972), 14; R. Mauzi, ‘Ecrivains et moralistes du XVIIIe si`ecle devant les jeux de hasard’, Revue des sciences humaines 26 (1958), 219–56. Condorcet lists here some specific applications central to efficient social planning: prediction of mortality rates, assessment of electoral systems, lottery rules, insurance and annuity rates, life expectancy (i: 543–4). In the second half of the Tableau he has much to say also on the importance of the calculus to theories of trade and commerce (i: 564–5). On the application of ‘moral arithmetic’ to life expectancy calculations, see also the Eloge de m. de Buffon (iii: 344–5). On the factors affecting population growth, see also Condorcet’s commentary on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique entry on ‘Homme’ in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 427).

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various angles, as well as to an assessment of their influence on each other. The non-measurable now became measurable, including factors affecting human belief and motivation, of paramount importance to a government engaged in the process of enlightening, as well as governing, a people: The application of the calculus to these latter issues will have the advantage of shining the light of reason on matters which have been abandoned to the seductive influence of the imagination, of self-interest or of the passions for too long . . . It is [the calculus] which will enable us to recognise the real difference between the instinctive judgements which imperiously control our everyday actions, and the results of reason which determine our important actions, or which regulate our speculative thinking. (i: 555, 556)

The management of enlightenment had practical implications for policymakers relating to historical documentation, the compilation and interpretation of statistics, public records, registers, the use of arithmetical machines, decision-making processes, electoral procedures and projections.36 It concerned, above all, a radical reassessment of the nature of evidence in the determination and evaluation of theories and alleged facts, in the interests of competent public administration and wise legislation.37 The Tableau avoids the distractions and obfuscations of abstract argument to a remarkable degree, even in the more technically complex passages dealing with the theory of combinations, the differentiation between ‘real’ and ‘hypothetical facts’, the importance of a theory of mean values to valid interpretations of general patterns of isolated ‘real facts’, and the operational aspects of social mathematics relating to the factors involved in the ordering and classification of data to produce statistical tables of use to policy-makers.38 In all this, Condorcet’s priority was the elaboration of a transparent methodology that would facilitate the recognition of patterns and trends, together with an accurate evaluation of the issues affecting the interpretation of those patterns and the detection of error: ‘The determination of this single fact, which represents a large number of other facts 36

37

38

Condorcet returned frequently to the role of mathematics in electoral contexts. Apart from his great mathematical essay on the calculus, see also, for example, the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven (ix: 25–6), and the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 178). Condorcet identified three particular features of the methodology of social mathematics on this point: the determination of facts, the evaluation of facts and the consequences of facts. Facts are divided into two categories: faits r´eels, with their origins in empirical observation (e.g. mortality statistics), and faits hypoth´etiques, that depended on an assessment of ‘possible combinations’, to be determined by the application of a general theory of combinations. With regard to the rules of arithmetical progression applicable to mortality rates, for example, Condorcet was familiar with the work of Moivre, Lambert and Duvillard whose work receives generous acknowledgement in the Tableau (i: 547 n. 1).

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which could be substituted in the operations of reason and calculation, is a kind of appreciation of facts which are observed facts, or regarded as having an equivalent degree of possibility; this is what is called a mean value’ (i: 548). In the second half of the Tableau Condorcet explored the theory of mean values, and the concept of value, central to the applications of social mathematics. Every object that an individual felt a need for, that was useful to him, that gave him pleasure or enabled him to avoid pain, had a value assigned to it embodying a measure of desire for that object, and reflecting a system of values common to all men. The theory of mean values was not a game for mathematicians, but had use as a device to establish a rational market for goods and services, to regulate the economy. In advanced societies value symbols in the form of metal-based currencies would be used in the application of the theory of mean values to food supplies, consumption and productivity ratios, the evaluation of national wealth, forward-planning with regard to the efficient management of shortages and surpluses and the understanding of factors determining population growth (i: 563–4). In all this, Condorcet was concerned to present the theory of mean values as a practical, beneficial tool for the optimisation of wealth and its distribution, private and public investment of capital, organisation of labour, deployment of national resources, international trade and the balance of payments. The fact that the five mathematical procedures constituting the composite science of social mathematics (quantitive theory, combination theory, deductive theory, probability theory and the theory of mean values) were in no way arcane or opaque meant that they were immediately accessible to non-mathematical policy-makers and social planners. Their great merit was to be above all at the ready disposal of the enlightened mind: Thus it is not a question here of an occult science, whose secret is restricted to a few practitioners, but of an everyday, common science; it is about accelerating the progress of a theory upon which depends the progress of those sciences most important to public happiness, and of extending the light of general practicality and usefulness to several areas of those same sciences. (i: 550)

In demonstrating the usefulness of social mathematics as an instrument of enlightened public administration encompassing a theory of knowledge, a theory of human behaviour, a theory of voting as well as establishing new theoretical bases for economics and actuarial science, Condorcet sought to expose at the same time the errors and false assumptions of earlier methods adopted for the direction of public policy. In summarising the advantages

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of the new science in the closing pages of the Tableau, he injected a crucial ingredient into his theory of government, namely his collectivist view of the primacy of the state as a collective moral entity: ‘So far we have considered nations only as collections of men preoccupied with their own interests and work. We have yet to consider them as a body which the social pact has in a way made into one moral individual’ (i: 567). Man in the civil order is not a self-sufficient unit, but a politically and morally integrated being with needs that can only be met through the exercise of the collective will on matters relating for example to defence, security, public works, roads, hospitals, schools and welfare. In the Tableau Condorcet had much to say about the requirements of the public good and the implications for government policies of the nature of the state as a moral being. Central to the advancement of the public good arising from the moral nature and purpose of political association was the management of the public purse. Here Condorcet foresaw a particularly valuable application of the calculus with regard to the judicious determination of the balance of the tax burden, and policies relating to government borrowing, lotteries, the national debt, public services, interest rates and contracts (i: 567–72). The application of the calculus to the public purse was perhaps for Condorcet one of the most important contributions that social mathematics could make to public happiness, with repercussions that went well beyond the world of finance: ‘One could examine, for example, from this standpoint the effect of destroying the privileged orders, feudal rights, [the right to] an equal share in things, the right to make a will; above all one could examine how quickly the last two acts of legislation would encourage a fairer distribution of property’ (i: 571). One of the key emphases of the Tableau was Condorcet’s insistence that in the area of public finance the tangible consequences of error and prejudice were as harmful to the well-being and security of the individual and to the stability of the civil order as any of the injustices of the criminal code and the excesses of the privileged classes. The public purse, like the public conscience, was in urgent need of the services of the enlightened mind if the public good was to be advanced effectively, and the art of government to be perfected: ‘Let us dare to hope that, driven by reason and mathematics, we will no longer fear sudden insurrections, those moments of hesitation between truth and error’ (i: 573). The application of the five constituent features of social mathematics, and in particular the calculus of probabilities and the theory of combinations, would be seen in the Esquisse as the only guarantee of precision in the art of government, and as the only way in which to ensure that rights would become the lynchpin of a reformed constitution (vi: 259).

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the republic of minds In the 1793–4 Fragment sur l’Atlantide, ou efforts combin´es de l’esp`ece humaine pour le progr`es des sciences (Fragment on Atlantis, or the joint efforts of the human race to make progress in the sciences), usually printed as an appendix to the Esquisse, Condorcet returned to the Baconian vision, conceived in a century of darkness and superstitious ignorance, of a mobilisation of enlightened minds, ‘the idea of a society of men, exclusively devoted to the quest for truth’ (vi: 597). The establishment of a Universal Republic of Sciences, ‘the only republic whose practical realisation and usefulness are not childish illusions’ (vi: 603), that Condorcet proposed in the Fragment reflected his confidence in the benefits to be gained from an alliance between government and science in which the free pursuit of knowledge and the free pursuit of public happiness were envisaged as an integrated enterprise. The enterprise to achieve public happiness would embody a set of Enlightenment values to which Condorcet adhered consistently in his political thought. Together they constitute a key organising principle whose component elements are equality, reason, freedom, secularisation, desacralisation, consent, accountability and unity. Speaking on behalf of the Acad´emie des Sciences in a speech to the National Assembly on 12 June 1790, Condorcet had celebrated the support given by ‘the wise representatives of an enlightened nation’ to the work of scientists in the advancement of that enterprise (i: 508).39 Three years later, despite his increasingly desperate personal circumstances, he could still praise France for having established a form of government in which enlightened science and enlightened politics interacted positively in the pursuit of public happiness and constitutional virtue: I have located myself in a country where general enlightenment and knowledge of man’s rights eliminate the fear that someone might wish to base public happiness on equality of ignorance and foolishness. Thus in this country nobody could ever present the limitations of his own mind as being those of human reason in general; here he could not have prejudices taught as the only truths worth knowing. (vi: 604)

The obstacles that continued to frustrate the advent of Atlantis, and the Republic of Minds that would underpin it, including those arising from the human failings of the representatives of enlightenment themselves, are given their due weight in this visionary, eleventh-hour essay, in which the 39

On science and government, see the comment on the ‘sages r´epublicains’ of Bˆale in the Eloge de m. Bernoulli (ii: 577–8).

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prospects for success remained for Condorcet undiminished by the daunting challenge that those obstacles presented. The interlocking phenomena of perfectibility, rationality and collegiality that Condorcet perceived in human nature were ineradicable guarantees of the ultimate triumph of the human enteprise.40 In the Fragment Condorcet set out a strategy for the co-ordination of scientific research on an international scale, including detailed proposals for selection procedures to engage the best scientists, mechanisms for recruiting technical staff and resources, procedures for the approval and prioritisation of projects and the establishment of objectives for each specialism, together with a set of auxiliary proposals relating to finance and logistics. This Projet d’association was elaborated in the last part of the essay, together with a reminder that the project was predicated on the hypothesis of a nation that had been liberated politically as well as intellectually, that is to say, of a nation where not only the whole people have retained [their] sovereignty, where citizens exert the full range of their political rights, where the whole system of laws respects the natural rights of the individual, where he can be forbidden nothing except for what harms the particular rights of another, or where a right, common to all, and belonging to each person as a member of society, a right which cannot be violated with respect to one individual without being violated with respect to all, is regarded as a right of society itself. (vi: 651–2)

This Projet d’association relating to the constitution of the Republic of Minds mirrored in many ways Condorcet’s project for a new political constitution. The modalities would be provisional and revocable. All scientists expressing an interest in the project would be formally registered as members, who would elect, in strict accordance with formally agreed procedures, a small Constituante to define the terms of association. The electoral process, ‘managed by enlightenment and not the passions’, would be designed to ensure equality of participation, and procedures would reflect many of the safeguards relating to corps self-interest that Condorcet sought elsewhere to embody in his proposals for political elections. Financial support would come, in the first instance at least, from the subscriptions of participating members and external voluntary donations. Accountability was ensured by the provision of regular reports, the regular publication of research reports receiving a particular priority. Major, long-term projects41 would be presented to the government for state support at the government’s 40 41

See Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 32–6. Condorcet was particularly concerned to ensure that pure research, which offered few benefits in the short term, should be supported. Its practical significance would, he thought, clarify in due course, see the Eloge de m. de Fouchy (iii: 314–15).

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discretion: ‘Let us not give up hope that a time will come when this division of responsibility can be made in a purely rational way, without the hand of pride pressing down too heavily on one side of the scales’ (vi: 657).42 The state would provide an infrastructure of administrative support, secretarial help, travel expenses43 and equipment. A policy, as opposed to isolated acts, of patronage and public encouragement would bring government and scientists together in ways that would combine scientific progress with the advancement of the public good. Here Condorcet was almost certainly recalling the halcyon days of the Turgot administration when scientists like ‘the illustrious Euler’ had been appropriately recognised and rewarded: ‘It would be for the association alone to judge independently what must be done in its view to accelerate the progress of science. It is for the government to judge with equal independence what, among all the projects presented, appears to deserve either its collaboration or its generosity’ (vi: 657). While the Republic of Minds would work under the aegis of benevolent state patronage, its mission would remain different from that of the state. The duties of a political republic related to the advancement of rights, those of a scientific republic to the advancement of knowledge: ‘It would be too dangerous for any arbitrary authority to intervene in an empire where truth must reign exclusively, and where outside opinions, even useful ones, might cloud the purity of that worship of truth which a free act of will wished it to pursue’ (vi: 656). The Fragment offers ample testimony to the depth and subtlety of Condorcet’s understanding of the problems emerging from the interface between science and government,44 whose patronage was indispensable, but whose interference would be fatal. His proposals reflect his conviction that the solution lay in a mechanism for the effective collaborative resolution of those problems, for which the Republic of Minds served as a resonant metaphor. A managed mobilisation of scientific talent would diminish the risk of a sterile dissipation of the fruits of research, and ensure 42

43 44

In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet raised the question of state patronage of the arts and the sciences, stressing that this should be proportionate to their usefulness (v: 84–5). Condorcet was one of three scientific advisors appointed by Turgot (the other two being d’Alembert and Bossut). For further comments on the relationship between science and the public good, see especially the Eloge de Camper, paticularly interesting as Condorcet, while treating Camper as sympathetically as he could, was aware that Camper was not an ally of Enlightenment (iii: 430–1). In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet noted Turgot’s support for Dombei’s botanical research which had necessitated an expensive voyage to Peru in 1776 (v: 49 n. 1). Condorcet praised the engineer Jacques de Vaucanson as a model scientist who could successfully negotiate the problems involved in working at this interface, see the Eloge de Vaucanson (ii: 654–5). Engineering was a science for which governments had particular need, see the Eloge de m. de Montigni (ii: 585).

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the application of that research to the enhancement of the public good,45 the eradication of unnecessary duplication of effort and resources and the maximisation of benefits. Condorcet offered many examples in the Fragment of how this mobilisation would work in a wide range of contexts, of which astronomy, climatology, natural history, public hygiene and prevention of disease, meteorology and rural economy are just a few.46 The Fragment anticipates the future shape of state policy with regard to science and scientists, though not the military direction it would take under the Directorate and the Empire, as the war in Europe intensified, and France’s need for modernised weaponry and a technologically enhanced defensive strategy became ever more urgent.47 That the mobilisation of enlightened scientific minds in the service of the state, envisaged by Condorcet with such humane idealism in the Fragment, should be first realised in the new France in the context of war provides a poignantly ironic postscript to his proposals to harness the Enlightenment to the welfare and happiness of man. 45 46

47

Enjoyment of the benefits of science was not always risk-free, see the comments on inoculation in the Eloge de m. Bernoulli (ii: 563). In addition to the obvious example of medical research (vi: 252–4), for further justification of his faith in the benefits of Enlightenment science, Condorcet drew particular attention in the ninth ´epoque of the Esquisse to the life-saving science of navigation, navigation technology being also a good example of the historical continuity and cumulative benefits of progress over the centuries: ‘The sailor, who is saved from being shipwrecked by an exact observation of the lines of latitude, owes his life to a theory which, through a chain of truths, can be traced back to discoveries made by Plato’s school, and buried for twenty centuries in a grave marked useless’ (vi: 235). In the Eloge de m. de Praslin Condorcet commented further on the contributions of science in the naval context with regard to improvements made in the technical education of naval officers (iii: 208–9). On the tightening of links and the increasing state direction of science in this period, see P. Bret, ‘From mobilisation to normalisation: scientific networks and practices for war (1792–1824)’, in M. F. Cross and D. Williams (eds.), The French Experience from Republic to Monarchy, 1792–1824. New Dawns in Politics, Knowledge and Culture (London: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 172–95.

chap t e r 5

Reform and the moral order

authorit y and the church For Condorcet the political organisation of society was without purpose unless it was closely identified with the pursuit of human happiness, and embedded in a well-understood moral order of a strictly secular nature. Reference to the moral dimensions of human sociability provides one of the continuities that run through all aspects of Condorcet’s thought on the management of public affairs, and characteristically consideration of morality in the modern polity is not confined to abstractions, but anchored to practicalities. Like equality and freedom, happiness was a concept with tangible, and therefore manageable, extensions in the real world of ordinary people’s lives. Much of Condorcet’s achievement as a political thinker and legislator derives from his understanding of the responsibilities of governments with regard to the moral implications and consequences of political decision-making: By bringing men closer together, society increases the influence of each over the happiness of others, and while, strictly speaking, [civil] duties can be boiled down to justice, and namely to respect for the natural rights of others, duties of a different order must have arisen from that influence directing our conduct in ways that contribute to the happiness of others. (v: 194)

In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet expressed his admiration for a statesman familiar with the delicate balance between the moral and the political orders, and with the threat posed to that balance by a fanatical church which, fired by speculative dogma, makes man’s salvation dependent on his faith, treats the free use of reason as audacious impudence, and sets its priests up as tutors of nations and judges of morality. [Turgot] was quite aware that if the governments of Europe ceased to be enlightened, if they forgot just for one moment to monitor the activities of the clergy, if all educated, enlightened men . . ., in a word, all those whose opinions really govern the world, ceased to be united in a spirit of tolerance and reason, then the same causes would soon produce the same effects. (v: 12–13) 117

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Turgot had believed that sufficient progress had been made to ensure that any restoration of the clerical grip on state affairs, so evident in the last decades of Louis XIV’s reign, was unlikely. Condorcet tended to be less sanguine on this point than Turgot, and always urged vigilance over a church whose historical vested interest in having access to control of policies that had direct impact on the moral life of the nation was incompatible with ‘good order in society’ (v: 206). The objectives of the moral order were not coterminous with those of religious doctrines. The defining feature of humanity was its capacity for a moral life, a capacity arising from the nature of man as a sentient being. The problem of translating moral capacity into social and political conditions that ensured stability and harmony was addressed frequently by Condorcet in a number of different contexts. Common to all those contexts was the crucial importance attached to the establishment of rights through just and equitable laws as the key to individual and collective happiness. In his commentary on Turgot’s philosophical system in the Vie, moral perfectibility was referred to in the traditional language of human spirituality, but was divorced from its traditional religious connotations: ‘Thus the spirituality of the soul is not a thesis in need of proof, but the simple and natural result of an accurate analysis of our ideas and faculties’ (v: 172). The sensualist perception of the nature of moral government was made explicit at the end of the long note to one of Pascal’s Pens´ees1 appended to the Eloge de Blaise Pascal: This proves, in my view, that in order to give men a well-based, useful morality, they must be inspired with an automatic horror, so to speak, of everything which harms their fellow-men; their minds must be formed so that the pleasure of doing good is the most important of all pleasures, and the feeling of having done their duty sufficient compensation for what it has cost them to fulfil that duty. (iii: 655)

It was on this point that Condorcet rejected the claims of the church to be the source of moral authority in political affairs and public administration. Rather than nurturing and guiding moral life, Condorcet thought that the church had deflected man from his true moral destiny, thereby subverting the moral basis of the civil order itself. The view of the historical role of the church that emerges from the pages of the Vie de m. Turgot had been to transform the human race into a herd of ravening beasts, arming tyrants 1

‘Jamais on ne fait le mal si pleinement et si gaiment que quand on le fait par un faux principe de conscience (Never is evil committed to such an extent and so cheerfully than when committed on the basis of a false principle of conscience)’, Pens´ees, ed. M. L. Le Guern, Œuvres compl`etes de Pascal (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), p. 817.

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with false justifications for atrocities, sharpening in its own interests the daggers of fanatical intolerance and the axes of executioners: The blood of millions of men, massacred in the name of God, still steams around us. Everywhere the ground beneath us covers the bones of the victims of barbaric intolerance. Can any tender, sensitive soul fail to be revolted by these terrible sights? Can any pure and noble soul not be angered when he contemplates these centuries of degradation of the human spirit by shameful superstitions, by corrupt morality, by the distortion or violation of all the principles of civil duty, and by a brazen hypocrisy which has accepted the art of deceiving men and turning them into animals as the only way to rule and lead them? For all of these outrages, elevated to the level of sacred duties in the eyes of the ignorant, were presented to politicians as crimes essential to the peace of nations or to the ambition of sovereigns. (v: 11–12)

Christianity and oppression were inextricably linked in Condorcet’s thought, institutionalised religion manipulating the prejudices and ignorance of the masses in the cause of its own venal interests.2 Religion, ‘the art of deceiving men by robbing them of everything’ (vi: 35), was thus perceived as a perpetual source of social tension and dislocation that distorted the interface between the moral and the civil order.3 In the rich tapestry of human affairs woven in the Esquisse the triumphant, and triumphalist, deceptions of a predatory church feature prominently. The notes for the Kehl Voltaire also provide, unsurprisingly, a forum for the exposure of the baleful influence of the church on French political life, even in the age of the Enlightenment. Under the rubric Puissance eccl´esiastique, for example, Condorcet’s review of the history of religious intolerance stresses the relative ease with which, prior to the invention of printing, the church had been able to crush heresy, and translate its contempt for science into legislation. After the sixteenth century, however, the old barbaric techniques of suppression and censorship failed as the technology of printing prevented dangerous ideas from being isolated and contained. Under the rubric Religion he noted that while anarchy represented a lethal threat to the civil order, in religion anarchy was to be welcomed as a safeguard against the abuse of power. Mirroring Voltaire’s argument in the Lettres philosophiques on the political and social advantages of state 2

3

On the various ways in which the people’s fears are exploited by error elevated to the level of dogma, see Condorcet’s commentary on miracles, statues, oracles, death and the promise of Heaven to fallen warriors, and the comparison with the stupefying effects of alcohol, see the 1790 essay, Dissertation philosophique et politique, ou R´eflexions sur cette question: S’il est utile aux hommes d’ˆetre tromp´es? (v: 369–70). With regard to the harmful effects of superstition generally on political institutions, see the fourth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 72).

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toleration of a multiplicity of sects, Condorcet argued strongly against the abolition of non-conformism: anarchy in religion is . . . almost essential to public peace. It is difficult for two rival sects to exist without causing problems, and almost impossible for two hundred sects ever to cause any. The only way to ensure peace is through absolute tolerance, the destruction of all ecclesiastical legal powers, and of all clerical influence over civil legislation.4 (iv: 549)

Condorcet had few political objections to religious faith per se, and his commentaries on religious matters tend to subordinate theological debate to considerations of the social and political impact of sectarian dogma and clerical arrogance. In fact, in the Eloge de Michel de l’Hˆopital he differentiated carefully between religious faith and religious politics in assigning reponsibility for fanaticism: ‘I shall speak of the atrocities inspired by fanaticism without any fear that those who love religion will accuse me of thereby committing a crime. If religion was established for men’s happiness by a God who is their common father, that is certainly not the same religion which burns people at the stake, and orders massacres’ (iii: 467). If Pascal personified those extremes of mystical obscurantism hostile to science, reason, humanity and tolerance, his Pens´ees being simply ‘a plea against the human race’ (iv: 292), the balance was redressed by ‘natural’ Christians like Benjamin Franklin: Humanity and honesty were at the root of his morality . . . He recognised a morality based on the nature of man, free of all speculation, and predating all conventions. He believed that our souls were rewarded for their virtue and punished for their faults in another life. He believed in the existence of a benevolent and just God, to whom, in the innermost sanctum of his conscience, he gave free and pure homage. He did not despise the external formalities of religion, even believing them to be useful for morality, but he rarely followed them. All religions seemed to him to be equally valid, provided that their central principle was tolerance, and that they did not deprive those who practised virtue of the rewards of virtue if they belonged to another faith, or had no faith at all. (iii: 415, 416)

In the Vie de Voltaire Condorcet referred frequently to the social and political consequences of the intrusion of the church into government, and 4

Condorcet would sustain his position on this point throughout the Revolution. In the preface to the Eloge de Blaise Pascal he saw deism and atheism as useful brakes on the excesses of religious orthodoxy. The morality of atheists attracted Condorcet because he considered atheistic moral codes to be based on the principle of utility, and that atheists were motivated to be virtuous through enlightened selfinterest and a natural aversion to harming others (iii: 373–4). Unlike deism, however, atheism was in fact less dangerous to orthodoxy because many atheists saw political advantage in the retention of religious belief as a useful (‘bonne politiquement’) mechanism of government.

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of the constitutional formalisation of its role. The church’s arrogation of temporal powers, accompanied by its need to reinforce those powers with a policy of intolerance, had been dramatically exemplified in France with the crushing of the Cathars. Error and ignorance continued to provide fertile conditions in which religious fervour could still legitimise the spilling of blood: ‘Error and ignorance are the sole cause of the ills of the human race, and superstitious errors are the most lethal because they corrupt all sources of reason, and because their fatal enthusiasm instructs others to commit crimes without feeling any remorse’ (iv: 177). The church’s unwillingness to abandon its position on the criminalisation of heresy and blasphemy5 placed the moral order, and in consequence the political stability of the state, at risk, and recognition of the responsibilities of legislators to enact policies that would minimise that risk was crucial, a point that Condorcet reiterated in his notes for the Kehl Voltaire relating to Voltaire’s Trait´e sur la tol´erance: Tolerance in large countries is essential to stability. In fact, the government, having a police force at its disposal, has nothing to fear, as long as individuals seeking to disturb the peace are unable to assemble enough people to form a resistance capable of matching the strength of that police force, and as long as they cannot take that police force over. Now, it is easy to see that religious views, concentrated, as a result of intolerance, in small parts of the population, can alone give that dangerous power to individuals. Tolerance, on the other hand, cannot cause any disturbance, and removes all pretexts for it . . . In a country shared by a large number of sects none can claim to be the dominant one, and as a result all are tranquil. (iv: 258)

As with many other aspects of his proposals for reform, Condorcet’s engagement with the issue of religious fanaticism and intolerance was shaped not only by abstract considerations, but was informed by events, and in particular by his involvement in contemporary cases of injustice arising precisely from the surviving actuality of ecclesiastical power in modern states. His association with Voltaire’s causes had alerted him to the urgency of the issues at stake in the battle against the infamous that Voltaire was waging in the 1760s and 1770s on behalf of the families of Calas, La Barre, Sirven and others. In the case of d’Etallonde, one of the surviving associates of the ill-fated La Barre, he had acted as Voltaire’s trompette in 1774 in the 5

In an undated autograph MS fragment, Condorcet defined blasphemy in strictly political terms: ‘Generally speaking, blasphemy is a word, written or spoken, which is insulting to the Supreme Being . . . As those surrounding the King include among the crimes of l`ese-majest´e conspiracies and insults of which they themselves are the target, it is from this angle that blasphemy was viewed in the law passed by Louis XIV, the only one to be followed on this issue, and one which will be the only subject of my remarks.’ A commentary on the persecution of the Huguenots then follows (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 16–17).

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campaign for a royal pardon for the young man, and for the public exposure of the judicial irregularities that inevitably accompanied the interference of the church in the business of the state.6 Condorcet’s anti-clericalism was even more radical than Voltaire’s, more comparable in fact to that of d’Holbach than to that of the patriarch of Ferney. This had become particularly apparent in the summer of 1774 with the publication of Condorcet’s inflammatory Lettres d’un th´eologien a` l’auteur du Dictionnaire des trois si`ecles (Letters from a theologian to the author of the Dictionary of three centuries), in which he had denounced in bitterly outspoken terms the hostile sentiments expressed by abb´e Sabatier in Les Trois Si`ecles de notre litt´erature (see above p. 17), itself a hard-hitting satirical onslaught on the whole philosophe movement with its encouragement, in his view, of blasphemy, atheism and anti-clericalism.7 The Lettres d’un th´eologien represented a forthright political defence of the Republic of Letters against the claims of the church to political authority (v: 537–8), and can be seen as Condorcet’s first serious challenge to its political and moral position. the problem of the protestants Condorcet’s concerns about the role of the church in the corruption of the moral and political orders focussed primarily, although by no means exclusively, on the plight of the French protestants.8 Prior to the dissolution of the first Assembly of Notables on 25 May 1787, La Fayette had already formally registered with the Bureau de Monsieur the urgent need for change in the civil status of French protestants, and had proposed specifically the reform of the 1670 criminal code in this context. Lauriol reminds us of these contextual circumstances in which Condorcet’s 1778 and later interventions on behalf of the protestants should be seen.9 Condorcet had worked closely with Turgot to persuade Louis XV to liberalise the laws on heresy, and with regard to the marriage laws affecting protestants he had collaborated with 6

7

8 9

See the M´emoire a` consulter in the Almanach anti-superstitieux et autres textes, ed. Chouillet et al., pp. 157–63. For an account of this episode, see Williams, ‘The Voltaire–Condorcet relationship and the defence of d’Etallonde’; C. V. Michael, ‘Voltaire, Condorcet et la r´ehabilitation du Chevalier de La Barre’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1987), 141–54; A.-M. Chouillet, ‘Le Combat de Condorcet contre l’infˆame’, in Hemming et al. (eds.), The Secular City, pp. 170–8. Published in 1772. Writing to Franc¸ois Marin on 16 August 1774 Voltaire praised Condorcet’s Lettre as the work of a Hercules who amuses himself by bludgeoning a scorpion to death (D19082), but he was alarmed that the work was being attributed to him. See also above p. 17, n. 25. According to Condorcet, protestants constituted around 5 per cent of the population, rising to 10 per cent in Paris and other large commercial centres (v: 477). C. Lauriol, ‘Condorcet et les protestants’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1987), 41–4.

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Malesherbes on the drafting of enlightened bills. After the fall of Turgot Condorcet’s concern to salvage these initiatives continued, in spite of the setback to the prospects for success that he felt Turgot’s fall from power posed. He does not declare in any of his writings a personal interest in the fate of the reformed religion in France. In seeking to explain his engagement with the issue it is pertinent to recall, therefore, that even before the passing of the Edict (or Pacification) of Nantes in 1598 the Condorcet family had been among the first aristocrats to adopt the protestant faith, and that after the revocation of the Edict in 1685, another example of church powerpolitics on a par with the handling of the Cathars, the family had been obliged to abjure and reconvert to catholicism.10 His family history might explain the sharp edge to his tone in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire on the cruel laws enacted against protestants by Louis XIV in the previous century, and perpetuated in the eighteenth:11 These laws, which violate both the basic rights of man and all human feelings, were demanded by the clergy, and presented to their penitent by the jesuits as being the only way to make up for the sins committed with his mistresses . . . His ministers, the slaves of the nation’s priestly tyrants, never dared tell him of the uselessness and cruel consequences of those laws. The nation itself helped to deceive him, and in the midst of the cries of his innocent subjects dying on the wheel or at the stake, it boasted of his justice and even of his mercy . . . Such is the unhappy fate of a prince who puts his confidence in priests, and who, deluded by priests, leaves his nation to groan under the yoke of superstition. (iv: 470, 471)

The years following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes bore witness to the social and economic damage caused by the implementation, under the guise of protecting the moral order against the perceived dangers of heresy, of policies leading only to insurrection and the diaspora of valuable citizens, whose wealth and skills were then placed at the disposal of foreign powers. Under Louis XV protestants had been treated more leniently, but their civil and religious rights were still not assured in constitutional terms (iv: 474–5). Condorcet’s impassioned humanitarian objections to this festering subversion of the moral order were overladen with a cool, but equally 10

11

On the history of the Caritat-Condorcet family at the time of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre and during the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, see Chamoux, ‘L’Ascendance dauphinoise de Condorcet’. Cf. J. T. Janssen, G´en´ealogie de la maison de Caritat (Heerlen, 1975); Lauriol, ‘Condorcet et les protestants’, 32. Condorcet had reservations about the limitations of the Edict of Nantes: ‘In truth, this Edict of Nantes is more like an agreement between two parties than a law given to his subjects by a prince’ (iv: 472). Regarding his views on the Reformation generally, see the Esquisse (vi: 146–57), R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, ed. D. Williams, p. 42 n. 1. Eloge de Tronchin (ii: 499–500), Eloge de Michel de L’Hˆopital (iii: 491, 508–9), and Vie de Voltaire (iv: 80). Cf. G. Adams, ‘Monarchistes ou r´epublicains?’, Dix-huiti`eme Si`ecle 17 (1985), 83–95; Lauriol, ‘Condorcet et les protestants’, 35–8.

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excoriating, assessment of the moral and economic price that France had paid for its concession of legislative authority to a predatory church. Sensing that the times might be more favourable to the reception of proposals for reform, Condorcet issued anonymously in 1781 a collection of four essays under the title, Recueil de pi`eces sur l’´etat des protestants en France (Collection of writings on the condition of the protestants in France).12 Two had been written in 1778, not long after Voltaire’s death, namely the R´ecit de ce qui s’est pass´e le 15 d´ecembre 1778 a` l’assembl´ee des chambres du Parlement de Paris (An account of what happened on 15 December 1778 at a meeting of the houses of the Paris Parlement) and the R´eflexions d’un citoyen catholique sur les lois de France relatives aux protestants (Reflections of a catholic citizen on the laws of France relating to protestants).13 The third, supposedly written by a professor of law, contained proposals for new legislation, Sur les moyens de traiter les protestants franc¸ais comme des hommes sans nuire a` la religion catholique, Par M ∗∗∗ , docteur en droit canon de la Facult´e de Cahors en Quercy (On the ways to treat French protestants as men without harming the catholic religion), to which the fourth essay, the Lettre de M ∗∗∗ , avocat au parlement de Pau, a` M ∗∗∗ , professeur de droit canon a` Cahors (Letter from Mr ∗∗∗ , a lawyer in the Pau Parlement, to Mr ∗∗∗ , a professor of canonical law in Cahors), purported to serve as a response. The publication of this collection coincided with the decline of Necker’s ministry under which, to Condorcet’s disappointment, the protestant cause had not been advanced, despite the fact that Necker was himself a protestant. In the first of these inter-related essays Condorcet cites an extract from the address given to the Paris Parlement on 15 December 1778 by a ‘M. de Bretigni`eres’ on the civil status of the protestants and the need to repeal anti-protestant decrees enacted in the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV. This is followed by two paragraphs of commentary explaining the ‘reasons of prudence’ behind the decision to take no action (v: 399–403), a decision not to be interpreted as a rejection in principle of the Bretigni`eres appeal. The second essay, the R´eflexions d’un citoyen catholique sur les lois de France relatives aux protestants, is a more substantial analysis of the reasons for depriving protestants of their rights, and of the legal framework which consolidated deprivation and intolerance, legislation that had survived the 12 13

The place of publication on the title page is London but, as Lauriol points out, this collection of essays poses a number of bibliographical problems. The R´eflexions went through two editions in 1778, of which the second was printed under Voltaire’s name. The work was subsequently revised by Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, and republished in 1779 under a new title, Justice et n´ecessit´e d’assurer en France un ´etat l´egal aux protestants, ou La tol´erance aux pieds du trˆone. See Lauriol, ‘Condorcet et les protestants’, 33 n. 7.

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passing of the Sun King into history. Protestants still suffered under a cruel penal code, and the prosperity of the nation continued to suffer with them as a result. Tracing the origins of protestant persecution in France, Condorcet employed a technique of ironic juxtaposition of trivial causes and momentous effects, honed by Bayle in the Pens´ees sur la com`ete, by Fontenelle in the Histoire des oracles and perfected by Voltaire. Under Louis XIV the denial of civil rights to protestants had been legalised ‘because the jesuit Layn´es proved at a colloquium in Poissy, held in the reign of Charles IX, that they were foxes and wolves’ (v: 405). The royal decree of 14 May 1724 had reinforced the injustice of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by denying protestants freedom of association and assembly, the right to bear arms and restricting their property rights. After the revocation, protestant homes had been requisitioned by dragoons, wives and daughters offered a choice between rape or conversion, and protestant ministers put to the sword. In 1685 this legalised brutality had been motivated in part by fear of insurrection fuelled by the military threat posed by England and Holland. No such circumstances prevailed in 1724, and the extension of the terms of the revocation in the 1724 decree to include limitations on travel, emigration, inheritance rights, the punishment of relatives and children of dying protestants who refused to recant, the forcible conversion of children and their education in catholic establishments,14 the building of catholic schools in protestant communities at protestant expense and the proscription of marriages according to protestant ritual, were inexcusable. Condorcet’s attack on Cardinal de Fleury’s decree was uncompromising: The 1724 edict seems to assume that no more protestants exist in France; it treats a million useful, oppressed subjects as if they were nothing; the laws relating to the protection of property and to the civil status of citizens do not apply to them. They are defended only by their nature, honour and integrity; and this law might well have filled France with half a million brigands if the unfortunates which the country oppresses had not been virtuous citizens.15 (v: 423)

Extensive notes are then devoted to specific cases illustrating the impact on the individual lives of protestants by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and by the perpetuation of its iniquities in successive post-revocation 14

15

Condorcet reminds the reader in a note here of the case of Sirven’s daughter who drowned herself in a well after escaping from the convent in which she had been confined, leading to the accusation of murder being levelled against her father (v: 419 n. 1). See also Condorcet’s comments on the 1724 decree in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 474–5), the Eloge de Charras (ii: 73), the Eloge d’Huyghens (iii: 70) and the R´eponse au plaidoyer de m. d’Espr´emesnil (vii: 58).

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decrees, exemplified by the treatment of women and children refusing to convert,16 the exclusion of protestants from public office, as well as from professions and trades for which certificats de catholicit´e were a prerequisite for entry (v: 425–36). These obstacles could be surmounted, but only if protestants were prepared to discard their conscience and integrity by consenting to ‘oaths of catholicity, witnessed by people with few scruples, and a cheap and easily obtained certificate’ (v: 426). Thus was the moral order subverted in the illusory cause of national religious unity as protestants were obliged to sacrifice their principles in order to survive, resulting in a situation in which the state rewarded liars, and punished honest men. Religious persecution, represented in France by the plight of protestants, exemplified for Condorcet the fragility of the moral order and the consequences for political (and religious) life when that order was not sustained by enlightened legislation.17 France had nothing to fear from reform of its draconian, outdated laws: The morality of protestants is the same as that of catholics: it is Christian morality; it prescribes obedience to the law, it forbids any interference with the government under which they live, and orders people to accept persecution without protest. Under a prince who persecutes protestants, and in a republic, protestant writers are republicans; under a prince who tolerates them, and under a monarchist government, protestant writers have a monarchist spirit. It is the same thing with catholic writers: let us remember those preachers at the time of the [Catholic] League; let us just think about the impact of their preachings, and say no more that protestants are the enemies of kings. (v: 444)

Insurrection, instability and republicanism could not be ruled out, however, if reform did not take place, as the historic example of Holland under the rule of Philip II demonstrated only too clearly.18 A moral, peace-loving minority could all too easily be transformed by retrogressive legislation into 16

17

18

For example, the flogging of eight protestant girls at Uz`es: ‘Protestant women were forced to attend acts of religious worship they regarded as being idolatrous. They were subjected to holy floggings which they could only regard, in the light of their faith, as the ultimate refinement in monkish debauchery and cruelty. In Uz`es eight girls, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, had their skirts raised to their waists, and were whipped by nuns doing the job of executioners in the most edifyingly zealous way before the local judge and the major commanding the Vivonne regiment’ (v: 420 n. 1). Forced marriages with catholics in Alsace form the subject of a further substantial note, see v: 423 n. 2. On the crimes committed during the Counter-Reformation, and in France particularly at the time of the Saint Bartholemew Massacre, see the Lettre d’un th´eologien a` l’auteur du Dictionnaire des trois si`ecles (v: 315). In the notes for the Kehl Voltaire Condorcet intercalated an acerbic commentary on the religious policies of Louis XIV (iv: 400–1). ‘Philip II’s persecutions were the direct cause of the establishment of a republic in Holland’ (v: 443).

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a disruptive, politically dissident force in which the fanaticism of religious intolerance would engender an equally brutal counter-fanaticism. The danger to public order, and ultimately to the security of the state, arising from the political radicalisation of the protestants provides the ominous subtext to a raft of carefully formulated rhetorical questions highlighting the advantages of liberating French law from the historical legacy of religious prejudice and persecution: Would these same men who, groaning under the yoke of cruel legislation, and surrounded by children whom the law refuses to recognise, excluded from public office, and still loving a country which has rejected them, love it less if it were to become their homeland? They pray for their king when the laws oppress them. Would they stop loving him because he has become their benefactor? . . . France’s enemies are the ones who should fear the revocation of these laws. The impossibility of causing disturbances in France by stirring up protestant fanaticism; or of reducing France’s population by enticing [protestants] away; France’s population increased by a crowd of rich, industrious foreigners, if in fact the name of foreigners can be given to them; the acquisition of all of those secrets our neighbours’ industry still hides from us; all the ills arising from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes cured in an instant; a million happy citizens with a renewed zeal for their country: these will be the effects of happy change, and that is what superstition, dressed up in the name of politics, would like us to fear. (v: 445, 446)

Condorcet analysed the case for reform systematically, but with characteristic caution, in the remaining pages of this powerfully persuasive essay. Arguments relating to the need for new legislation to protect religious minorities are balanced by the need not to confront the church directly on the issue of its right to condemn heresy. Tolerance of heretical sects did not imply surrender to the theological position of the protestants, but merely an end to their persecution. His eloquent plea for tolerance was about equality of civil rights, not parity of dogmatic status: We are not asking for protestants to have an established religion and state-appointed ministers; we ask that they be allowed to have children. We are not talking here about two state religions, although freedom of worship has not caused any upsets in those states which have adopted it; but we are saying that all men who live in the same country, pay their taxes and obey the law, should enjoy the rights of men and citizens. (v: 447–8)

Like plantation slaves in another context, protestants were human beings, and if they were to be denied salvation in the next world, this did not mean that their happiness had to be denied in this one: ‘Let us stop persecuting [Condorcet’s italics].’

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With the decriminalisation of heresy and blasphemy, protestant assemblies would be less secretive, and less threatening. Protestant ministers would cease to have the politically inflammatory status of martyrs if they were no longer threatened with execution; changes to the laws relating to freedom of movement and association, and also property rights, would facilitate the integration of protestants into the mainstream of civil life. If enforced death-bed conversions were to end, protestants would no longer have cause to treat priests as their enemies, and inter-denominational relations would improve. While Condorcet conceded that allowing protestants to hold public office might still be a step too far, given the reservations that still held sway in the public mind, he made no concession to the case for retaining professional restrictions: ‘A man of good heart can consent without any difficulty to live under laws depriving him of any hope of becoming a powerful man, but he cannot tolerate laws depriving him of the means to obtain and deserve public esteem’ (v: 451–2). Adminstrative procedures relating to the registration of births, marriages and deaths, all associated with offending catholic sacraments, posed particularly difficult issues of faith, and Condorcet sought to defuse potentially bitter conflict on issues of often fanatically held principle by treating births, marriages and deaths as secular matters. Registration was simply an administrative procedure which could be carried out in accordance with civil law. He thus proposed a formula for the official separation of the civil and religious aspects of marriage by means of a reinstatement of a 1685 law, predating the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, allowing protestants to marry before a minister nominated by the local intendant at a designated time in an ecclesiastically neutral location. The civil validation of protestant marriage contracts would have further beneficial repercussions on issues such as inheritance rights: ‘This form of contract would have all the civil implications of marriage without being a sacrament, just like marriages in all other countries, whether between infidels or idolators, are not sacraments either’ (v: 453). Resistance to these proposed reforms was, in Condorcet’s view, based on contradictory lines of argument, those defending the status quo maintaining either that the case for change was insufficiently important to warrant the urgency with which the friends of humanity were pursuing it, or that reform relating to protestant civil rights would be the thin end of a wedge leading to a serious moral and political debilitation of the civil order. Condorcet’s counter-argument focussed, not on the moral or humanitarian aspects, but rather on the principle of mutual self-interest at the heart of the pact of association itself, injecting cost-benefit implications into arguments that could all too readily degenerate into prejudice and

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irrationality: ‘So it must be shown that we are getting to the point where abrogation of the laws against the protestants can more surely procure for us greater advantages, and where the retention of those laws could be most dangerous to public prosperity’ (v: 454). To this was added a further socio-economic argument for toleration. The public purse needed to be replenished. Restoring happiness and good will to more than a million industrious, productive citizens, and bringing back to France a hundred thousand refugees, together with their wealth and skills, would offer a more effective cure for the nation’s economic malaise than the games that had been played with paper money.19 Policies that militated against reconciliation with the protestants, at a time when a fresh haemorrhage of citizens to a free and tolerant America was a distinct possibility, would be self-destructive. France must turn away from the sophisms that justified intolerance, and take the path of reason and humanity if its future was to be secured (v: 457). More formalised recommendations for new legislation to manage the problem of the protestants is to be found in Sur les moyens de traiter les protestants franc¸ais comme des hommes sans nuire a` la religion catholique containing forty-two draft proposals for legislation, each followed by a substantial, and often heavily annotated, commentary. The articles are preceded by a brief pr´eambule and introductory comments (articles 1–3), setting the proposals in a context of civil rights, mutual self-interest in the preservation of public order and the general danger to the freedom of all citizens arising from acts of religious intolerance. The first three articles address the delicate problem of balancing the decriminalisation of heresy with protection of the status of an official church deprived of its historic prerogatives to persecute minority ‘cultes publics’.20 Protestants would have rights of free association, and would no longer be subject to police surveillance (articles 4–6). Article 7 is particularly interesting for the way it reflects Condorcet’s insight into the psychology of intolerance and fanaticism, and the importance that he attached to making legislators aware of the need to take account of the processes at work in the public mind that allowed ordinary people to shed the blood of their fellow citizens without offending their own, or the public, conscience. 19

20

Condorcet uses the term agiotage here, meaning technically the inflated value of paper money over the value of silver and gold, and he had in mind the experiments of John Law and their dismal impact on the French economy in 1720, see v: 455 n. 1. An officially established state religion is defined by Condorcet as the sect whose clergy is paid from the public purse, with authority only over its own adherents. A ‘culte public’, on the other hand, is a lawfully authorised sect practised in temples designated for the purpose, and open to all. A public cult would not be subject to discriminatory legislation.

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Condorcet was trying to ensure that rights for all citizens were guaranteed (the primary condition for good legislation, here as elsewhere), and he takes care in this respect not to sacrifice the legitimate interests of the catholic church to those of the protestant. While Condorcet, for tactical reasons, proposed no openly hostile move against the dogmatic status of the catholic church, or against catholic privileges in the context of education or the preaching of public sermons, ironic undertones can be detected hinting at the more overtly aggressive position on clerical privileges to be taken up in later years. In the commentary on article 6 of Sur les moyens Condorcet acknowledged the fears that the prospect of liberalising the laws against protestants still aroused in most French people, but noted that public hostility was gradually weakening. Intolerance would eventually retreat if it was no longer useful, and if no corps advantage was to be gained from it: ‘This instinctive hatred of the catholic population for the protestants is weakening, moreover, every day; and the destruction of the laws of intolerance would soon destroy it altogether. From the moment it became known that there was no prospect of advancement or profit from an excess of zeal, there would be no more excess of zeal’ (v: 479). Articles 8–19, comprising the main body of the proposals, address the infringements of the moral order in anti-protestant legislation that Condorcet had identified in the R´eflexions d’un citoyen catholique, and set out new regulatory mechanisms and procedures for the registration of civil marriages, the publication of banns, the rules on consanguinity, the witnessing of legal documents, the payment of dowries, the conditions for annulment and the civil status of children. To cut through the confusions, obfuscations and illogicalities, Condorcet appealed to his bed-rock principle of natural rights. Of these one of the most crucial was the right to own and inherit property, of which Condorcet saw the legal recognition as a condition of the pact of association: ‘A man’s property thus becomes the property of his children and his wife, and in societies just coming into existence this must be a condition of the act of association; this right has existed in all nations for all free men’ (v: 495). The moral order would be debased by any law that denied to any citizen recognition of his children, nullified the validity of solemn commitments and vows and enforced conversion as a condition of authorisation to marry:21 ‘We could have invoked humanity, 21

On the issue of children born outside marriage, Condorcet questioned whether the severity of the law, as it affected the children of ‘free unions’, might be contrary to natural justice: ‘if those laws, motivated almost everywhere by vanity or the pretext of protecting morality, were not used more to corrupt morality than to purify it, and if the excessive severity of the laws relating to morality did not lead necessarily to hypocrisy and licentiousness’ (v: 497 n. 1).

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public honesty, sane politics, religion; but we wished only to speak of justice’ (v: 499). Articles 21–30 move the treatise on from general principles to the minutiae of administrative detail, and cover divorce procedures and settlements, the legal and financial entitlements of children born before or after divorce, welfare and educational arrangements and inheritance rights, with particular attention being paid to the position of wives declaring pregnancies after the death of their husbands.22 Divorce was for Condorcet another secular issue, a matter for civil law codes alone, and it needed to be separated from ecclesiastical traditions that aligned it with other arbitrary interdictions relating to celibacy, dietary laws and the use of a dead language to celebrate mass. The criteria for reform were justice and usefulness, the key prerequisites for all good legislation. On the specific question of protestant rights in the area of divorce, Condorcet insisted that protestants, whose religion did not condemn divorce on theological grounds, should be allowed to exercise a right that would be theirs in a protestant country.23 He then broadened the divorce argument into an examination of gender relations generally, and the more urgent issue of women’s rights surfaced quickly. Condorcet’s commentaries make clear that the purpose behind his proposals is to alleviate the harm done, not only to a particular religious minority, but to the state itself: ‘The purpose of these different articles is to remedy, as far as this is possible, the harm which the laws against the protestants have done to France’ (v: 514). For the moral order to be repaired specific reforms must, moreover, be accompanied by retroactive, compensatory legislation involving, for example, the immediate commutation of all death sentences and committals to galley service, and the rescinding of orders of exile. Condorcet even proposed that, in the interests of reconciliation, steps be taken to rehabilitate the memory of protestant lives lost in the brutal aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Here, as in other contexts, he was concerned not only with the technical overhaul of unjust legislation, but also with the cleansing of the public conscience. The reintegration of ‘all who do not profess the catholic religion’ into public life would also require the eradication of any residual adherence 22

23

The level of detail to which Condorcet commits himself in these proposals regarding the legitimacy of children is well illustrated here in article 30: ‘If the birth takes place, the child will only be regarded as legitimate as long as the time elapsing between its birth and the mother’s declaration of pregnancy does not exceed 280 days, unless the husband recognises the child born after this period as being his’ (v: 503). In the commentary to this article he returned to the 280-day limit (v: 508–9). Interestingly, Condorcet saw the protestant community in France as a guest community with an identity that transcended frontiers, like that of Jews. He refers here, for example, to the rights of protestants ‘who would like to adopt France as their homeland’ (v: 505).

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to prejudicial employment restrictions. In Condorcet’s view, the interests of the state, as well as those of natural justice, made it imperative for the exclusivity of post-1685 legislation to be replaced by the inclusivity of a new code designed to open rather than close doors with regard to professional life, the universities and schools. Protestants should be able to hold civic office, and their services made eligible for public recognition through the honours system. The natural right of all citizens to profit from the exercise of their talents and energies is invoked with particular reference to those professions having a direct impact on public health, the economy and education. In these key areas, in which the public interest was crucial, Condorcet’s concern was for the right of all citizens to benefit from the services of the state’s reservoir of human talent and energy, irrespective of religious considerations. Employment regulations would thus be confined to, and justified by, public interest considerations and the test of utility rather than that of religious affiliation: ‘Religious faith cannot therefore influence the laws governing different professions, and every law by which the exercise of a profession was made dependent on the profession of a particular faith, would be contrary to justice’ (v: 516–17). If the first priority was to remove discriminatory regulations affecting employment, professional access and advancement, the second was to address the problem of discriminatory educational provision, and this raised the controversial issue of independent protestant schools, to be fully authorised, under Condorcet’s proposals, by the state, and made eligible for support from the public purse. The case is argued in article 42 of Sur les moyens, again from the standpoint of natural rights, in this case the rights of fathers over the education of their children, ‘a natural right which predates society’ (v: 519). Fathers could be legitimately deprived of that right for reasons of criminality or insanity, ‘but if it is a legal duty to leave the education of children to fathers, it is a political duty to provide fathers . . . with the means to obtain for their children an education appropriate to the formation of honest, enlightened, courageous citizens’. This devoir de justice was denied to protestants by the fact of their legal obligation to entrust their children to catholic teachers, ‘less concerned with educating them than converting them’. It was in Condorcet’s view a right that could only be restored by authorising the establishment of public protestant schools, although he accepted that such a proposal was not without drawbacks. Protestant children could still be pressured indirectly to convert, and the formal segregation of protestant and catholic children risked the creation of a ghetto mentality that Condorcet understood only too well, and which he considered vital to eradicate if harmony and stability were to be

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achieved: ‘Because these children do not participate in the same activities as catholic children, the result is that either the catholic children will envy their lot, or that they will detest them as heretics . . . It will thus be impossible to stop these children developing a kind of instinctive hatred which is then turned on society’ (v: 520). The issue behind all the proposals in articles 41–2 was the constitutional recognition of rights in the face of the legalised intolerance that continued to disfigure the moral order in France, and to fragment, and thereby weaken, the nation. The remaining pages of Sur les moyens, separated from the commentary to article 42 by a textual marker, Fin du Professeur en droit, contain a series of justificatory reflections on the changes advocated. Here Condorcet introduced other issues relating to procedures for legislative reform that were to reappear in his writings eight years later in the context of the convocation of the Estates-General, and the immediate post-1789 debate on the ways to bring about constitutional change that would take for the first time full account of the public will. Beyond the practicalities of progressive legislation loomed the most crucial aspect of the battle to restore the integrity of the moral order to French laws and institutions. Condorcet, in all aspects of his constitutional thinking, was always aware that reformist measures were futile if not accompanied by a corresponding strategy to secure the support of public opinion and public consent. Ascertaining the public will in a country without representative government was difficult, and in these circumstances legislators had recourse only to the partial, often elusive, evidence of public opinion, ‘the only interpreter of the will of nations when the constitution has established neither a general convention of the people, nor a general assembly of its representatives’ (v: 521). A seachange in public opinion was a necessary precondition for the introduction of enlightened legislation, but public opinion needed to be well informed by having the means to participate in open political dialogue, facilitated by a free press. Until such conditions prevailed, the church’s power to influence public opinion remained a fact that could not be ignored, and Condorcet was particularly anxious to present his proposals to end the persecution of the protestants as being actually advantageous to orthodoxy, and not open to the accusation that their true purpose was to sacrifice the interests of the French church to those of the state (v: 522). In the light of this anxiety, Condorcet felt that it would be tactically unwise to end the defence of his proposals for the toleration of protestant heresy in Sur les moyens without a formal denial of impiety, and a conciliatory discussion of ways of converting protestants to the true faith. The errors of the violent policies of conversion adopted since the Reformation were again

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pilloried, but conversion as a legitimate policy per se is not quite rejected, retention of a proselytising role for the official church being absorbed skilfully into the defence of protestant rights as a policy that would serve the interests of ‘good religion’ as well as ‘good politics’. Tolerance of heresy and acceptance of reform are transformed into a litmus test of genuine piety and presented, not as a defeat for the church, but rather as a milestone on the road to Christian renewal and unity, thus offering the orthodox both a challenge and a promise: Every catholic who is convinced of the truth of his religion must therefore wish for protestants to be tolerated, since persecution is just a way of attaching men as indifferently to error as to truth; [every catholic] must demand at the same time that clerical abuses be reformed, and that the behaviour and maxims of the clergy no longer contradict perpetually the precepts and maxims of the Scriptures, for these abuses, this contradiction, are the sole cause of opposition to the truth and to the unity of all Christians in the same faith and in the church. (v: 535–6)

The problem of persuading hearts and minds was further examined in the Lettre de M ∗∗∗ , dated 1780, which Condorcet presented as a response to the putative author of Sur les moyens. The interlocutor in the Lettre, supposedly a lawyer in the Pau Parlement posing questions to a professor of law in the University of Cahors, approves the principles behind the proposed reform of anti-protestant legislation, but recommends a policy of caution with regard to their promulgation. Through the interlocutor device Condorcet made the point that tolerance was still associated with the question of atheism, and noted that few countries had so far fully succeeded in treating tolerance as being primarily a secular issue. Even in America tolerance was still theological rather than secular territory, the Americans perpetuating slavishly the faults of the English constitution in this respect. England’s reputation for tolerance was still deeply stained by discriminatory legislation against catholics and non-conformists.24 The general prospects for public acceptance of policies of religious toleration were not bright. Even in Sweden freedom of worship had been extended only to foreigners, and harsh laws had been enacted to punish any foreigner attempting to convert a Swede: ‘This amounts to setting up the Inquisition in the name of tolerance’ (v: 538). In the Enlightenment religious tolerance did not have the support of every political thinker, as in the case of Rousseau’s ‘strange words’ on the exclusion of atheists, and on the sovereign’s right to require all citizens to profess under oath their belief in God and in the 24

With regard to the English situation, Condorcet anticipated that governmental self-interest and public opinion would soon accomplish ‘what justice was not able to do’ (v: 538).

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immortality of the soul on the grounds that without such a public profession of faith the duties of citizenship could not be properly fulfilled. In Condorcet’s view, Rousseau had not understood that atheists believed in virtue as a political necessity, and as an indispensable secular ingredient in the maintenance of the moral order. Rousseau had failed to follow through the dangerous logic of his argument.25 Condorcet in fact rejected Rousseau’s doctrines on political morality as being incoherent and extremist, apart from ‘a few passages in Emile and a few chapters in Du Contrat Social ’ (v: 543). He saw in Rousseauist doctrines a cautionary example of intolerance masquerading as philosophie. In the Lettre de M ∗∗∗ Condorcet’s thinking reflects yet again the pragmatic gradualism and strategic flexibility which he brought to the science of politics and to its tactical applications in general. Tolerance of protestants should be advocated without actually mentioning the provocative word ‘protestant’, and without drafting legislation exclusively confined to the protestant problem, in order to avoid direct confrontation with the clergy. He never envisaged a new Jerusalem that could be built in a day, and in the Lettre he reiterated his warning against a precipitate implementation of the proposals set out in Sur les moyens. Reform for Condorcet was less about the defence of principle than the achievement of lasting and beneficial results, and for that the ground had to be prepared carefully. It was never enough simply to enunciate the legal and moral virtues of new legislation. The restoration of the moral order in the political arena required time and judiciously calculated momentum, rather than adversarial confrontation. Condorcet understood the paradox that the successful management of reform necessarily involved policies of continuity: ‘So let us seek to do what little good we can all the time, without waiting until it is possible to do everything we would like to do before starting to do anything’ (v: 548). A stone bridge offered a grander and safer prospect of crossing a river than a ferryboat, but if the river was flowing too fast, or was too deep to permit the foundations of the bridge to be laid, and if brave and skilled engineers were not yet available to design and construct it, then it was wise to be satisfied for the time being with the immediate, though less ambitious’ prospect of the ferryboat. Following Condorcet’s striking analogy, the R´eflexions can be said to contain the plan for a bridge, and the Lettre the plan for a boat ‘which can at least be of some use in the meantime’. 25

Condorcet was particularly concerned with Rousseau’s advocation of the death penalty for those who reneged on the oath of belief in God: ‘The death penalty will be a little hard, and this passage from Mr Rousseau is more worthy of an inquisitor than a philosopher’ (v: 542 n. 1).

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Accordingly, in the Lettre Condorcet does not openly denounce the French church as an implacable opponent of reform and progress, whose policies promoted religious factionalism at the expense of the true interests of the state. The view of the church that predominates in this text is of an institution fearful of Rome’s long arm, of change, and above all of the consequences of abandoning its centuries-long stance on the dangers of heresy. The very use of the word ‘protestant’ in any bill risked automatic hostility to the reform, whatever its intrinsic merit. Condorcet understood that even with a more enlightened clergy the resolution of the problem of culturally conditioned resistance to progressive, but controversial, policies lay partly in a persuasive, disarming presentation, and the emollient effects of what would today be called ‘spin’: Any law in which the word protestant appears will therefore be odious to the clergy. Unless it is a law of intolerance; they will feel obliged to oppose it, and however enlightened they might now be, however courageous they are in the face of superstitions and prejudices, the time when they can speak the language of reason and charity on questions of tolerance is still a long way off; but if you could get the same desired outcome by means of laws in which the word protestant did not even appear, in which the established religion did not seem to be the issue, they would have neither the right nor the desire to complain. (v: 549)

Thus in framing new legislation to safeguard protestant rights and to end the burden of their status as an alien community, Condorcet preferred to revisit the proposals first formulated in the R´eflexions, and recast them in ways that would enable legislators to associate the cause of the protestants with the universal cause of the rights of all citizens, with a view to allaying catholic reservations, and thereby removing one of the main justificatory causes of intolerance. The legitimacy of protestant citizenship was absorbed into the legitimacy of a universal citizenship that drew its authority from the pact of civil association. If protestants had once been guilty of armed resistance, this was the consequence of their treatment by a fanatical church exercising undue political influence over a king. The French protestant problem was therefore presented by Condorcet as part of a shared problem of unconstitutional clerical abuse of power affecting the whole of Europe in a number of contexts. In this way Condorcet deflected attention from the specific threat allegedly posed by the French protestants to the general dangers of ecclesiastical ministerial rule affecting the lives of all French citizens. In Condorcet’s hands, the defence of the protestants was in this way transformed from a theological issue confined to France into a secularised,

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Europeanised cause advanced in the name of enlightenment, progress and modernity.26 The triumph of that cause would be a triumph over the darkness of the past, with the burden of responsibility laid on figures from another age, rather than a triumph over the contemporary church: So there is every hope of a happy revolution in the fate of French protestants; everything indicates that tolerance will spread in Europe, and just as we saw that bull, whereby kings and nations were reviled every year by Rome, disappear along with the jesuits, we will also see the laws of intolerance disappear along with the reign of the Le Telliers and the Guignards. (v: 573)

The results achieved by Condorcet’s closely argued campaign for the reform of anti-protestant legislation, of which the opening shots had been fired in 1780, were disappointing in the short term. The Edict of Toleration that was approved, with limitations, by Louis XVI in November 1787, was largely engineered by Rabaut de Saint-Etienne,27 a protestant minister who was to become the leader of the French protestants during the Revolution. The edict conceded to protestants freedom of conscience, but not the degree of religious and civil equality envisaged in Condorcet’s proposals. Saint-Etienne’s programme of reform echoed some of Condorcet’s draft bills28 but the 1787 edict contained no reference to the status of protestant schools, access to the professions or even to the termination of existing discriminatory legislation. As was the case with so many of Condorcet’s proposals to reform the moral order, religious toleration was to be another aspect of the modernity he advocated, but would never live to see. After the Revolution, ironically, Condorcet was apprehensive about the moves made in 1790 in the Constituante against the French clergy. He approved of the nationalisation of church property and of the neutralisation of the church’s political power, but he resisted other moves that in his view involved injustice, and even an infringement of rights, as can be seen in the 1790 R´eflexions sur l’usufruit des b´en´eficiers and in Sur le d´ecret du 13 avril 1790. He participated in the debates of 29 May–12 July 1790 leading up 26 27

28

Surprisingly, prior to the work of Lauriol, historians of French protestantism make little reference to Condorcet’s contributions to this debate. Jean-Paul Rabaut de Saint-Etienne (1743–93) was a member of the Estates-General, becoming subsequently a deputy in the National Assembly and later in the Convention. He was elected President of the Constituante in March 1790, despite being a protestant minister. Despite his rhetorical skills, he failed to convince fellow deputies to guarantee freedom of worship for protestants in the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. He was also a well-known journalist, and contributed to the Chronique de Paris. See J.-A. Dartigue, Rabaut de Saint-Etienne a` l’Assembl´ee Constituante de 1789 (Nantes: F. Sali`ere, 1930); A. Dupont, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, 1743–1793 (Strasbourg: Editions Oberlin, 1946); R. Mirabaud, Un pr´esident de la Constituante et de la Convention. Rabaud Saint-Etienne (Paris: Fischbacher, 1930).

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to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, reluctantly accepting the 13 April decree which in his view addressed the problem of the church’s abuse of political power, but left the question of its civil status open.29 The church’s authority over education (a key issue in the protestant problem), and its dogmatic authority were not addressed in the decree. In these, and other omissions, the Constituante, in Condorcet’s view, was ignoring the lessons to be drawn from the mistakes that had been made in the matter of France’s historic persecution of the protestants, and of the damage that had been done to the moral integrity of the civil order. 29

See Sur la constitution civile du clerg´e (x: 3). A year later, after the papal condemnation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Condorcet would defend strongly the decree requiring the clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the constitution (BIF Condorcet MS 854, f. 436).

chap t e r 6

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the emancipation of sl aves During the decade before the Revolution, and especially after the publication in 1781 of the first edition of Condorcet’s R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, public debate in France with regard to the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of plantation slaves in the French colonies assumed unprecedented levels of intensity. The rise in the moral and political temperature of the debate owed much to the victory of the American insurgents in 1776 and to the triumph of notions of liberty, equality and human rights that the outcome of the War of American Independence came to represent in Europe. Condorcet was well attuned to revolutionary events in America, thanks in particular to his friendship with Franklin and Jefferson,1 although the earliest evidence of any interest on his part in the slavery question really goes back to 1773.2 After 1776 the French abolitionist movement was much encouraged by the American example. A clause in the Declaration of Independence abolishing the slave trade in principle had been given more concrete form in 1780 with the interdictions on slavery passed in the Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New England assemblies.3 Ever since the 1751–7 uprisings in Saint-Domingue, known today as the Republic of Ha¨ıti,4 the plantation-owners had been only too aware of the possibility of a major insurrection of their slave workforce. In consequence, 1 2 3 4

In 1788 Jefferson bought two copies of the R´eflexions. His translation of the text into English, which he started in 1789, was to remain unfinished. Condorcet wrote to Jefferson on 2 December 1773 inquiring about the effects of slavery on the negro character (cit. Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 175 n. 1). See J. Jurt, ‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es et l’opposition a` l’esclavage’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, p. 389. In the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue formed part of Hispaniola, and was ceded to France by Spain under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. This territory was known in France throughout the eighteenth century as Saint-Domingue, assuming its modern name of Ha¨ıti in 1804 when it became an independent republic. Under the terms of the same treaty, Spain retained control of the remaining two-thirds of the island, territory which would eventually gain its own independence as the Dominican Republic.

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many were deeply suspicious of the abolitionist movement that was gaining momentum in Paris. They feared the possible dangers to the system that might emerge from the meeting of the Estates-General, and were suspicious of the motives of the richer and more powerful planters who were insisting loudly on their right to be represented at the meeting, and subsequently in the Assembly. The latter were apprehensive about the logical outcome for the colonies of a constitutional process which might involve a new order founded on the dangerous principles of liberty and equality. In 1788, in collaboration with traders and businessmen associated with the great slaving ports of Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseille, La Rochelle and Le Havre, a powerful lobby of planters was organised in Paris, known after 1789 as the Club Massiac (named after the Marquis de Massiac who owned sugar plantations in Saint-Marc, and whose Paris house was used as a location for meetings). Well before the plantation-owners and their representatives in Paris set up their defences in the Club Massiac, Condorcet confronted the slave trade problem for the first time in the Remarques sur les Pens´ees de Pascal printed in his edition of the Pens´ees in 1776 (iii: 635–52). He reiterated his views a year later in two articles in the Journal de Paris (n. 160 and n. 173, 7 June and 22 June 1777), and came back to the issue in his biography of Turgot. In his reception speech to the Academy of 21 February 1782 he welcomed the American and Portuguese decrees against slavery, affirming optimistically that ‘everything seems to indicate that black servitude, this ugly remnant of the barbaric politics of the sixteenth century, will soon stop dishonouring our country’ (i: 398). The longest of his essays on this subject is the 1781 R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres (Reflections on black slavery), partly translated into English by Jefferson.5 This was then followed by the Pr´eambule (1788) to the rules for the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, Au corps ´electoral contre l’esclavage des noirs (To the electoral body against black slavery) – an address circulated on 3 February 1789 to electors in all bailiwicks preparing to choose their representatives for the Estates-General6 and his provocative tract on the rights of representation of the Saint-Domingue plantation-owners in the Assembly, Sur l’admission des d´eput´es des planteurs de Saint-Domingue a` l’Assembl´ee Nationale (On the admission of deputies representing the planters of Saint-Domingue to the National Assembly) (1789). This essay marked a crucial confrontation in the National Assembly 5 6

See n. 1 and also McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 62; Boyd et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. xiv, pp. 494–8. In his capacity as an elector for the noble deputies of Mantes, Condorcet succeeded in inserting a recommendation to abolish the slave trade and slavery. See Cahen, Condorcet, p. 112.

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between the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs and self-appointed delegates representing the planters who were demanding rights of representation. It was after this episode that the hostilities between the members of the Club Massiac and the abolitionists intensified.7 In addition, there are a number of other, less well-known abolitionist writings by Condorcet, many of which relate to the activities of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, not all of which have been published, together with a draft of a letter subsequently printed in the Journal de Paris on 14 December 1789.8 He also referred briefly to the slavery issue in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (4: 625–6), and he wrote numerous articles and letters for the Paris press. His 1791 address on behalf of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, entitled A L’Assembl´ee nationale, a` toutes les villes de commerce, a` toutes les manufactures, aux colonies, a` tous les amis de la constitution de 1791 (To the National Assembly, to all commercial cities, to all centres of industry, to the colonies, to all friends of the 1791 constitution) should also be noted.9 As a deputy he would draft several bills to make the traffic illegal,10 and after the SaintDomingue plantation-owners refused to accept the decree of 15 May 1791 giving equality of rights to mulattos born of free parents, Condorcet pursued his campaign in a more specifically economic context in an article printed in the 10 July 1790 issue of the Journal de la Soci´et´e de 1789, in the 1 March, 11 March and 25 March 1792 issues of the Chronique de Paris, in the 7 8

9

10

On the circumstances of publication, see the introduction to my edition of the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres et autres textes abolitionnistes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), pp. xxv–xxvi. See L. Cahen, ‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs et Condorcet’, La R´evolution franc¸aise 50 (1906), 481–511; K. M. Baker, ‘Condorcet’s notes for a revised edition of his reception speech to the Acad´emie franc¸aise’, SVEC 169 (1977), 7–68. See also the undated Fragment sur les esclaves et membres des confessions opprim´ees (BIF Condorcet MS 859, ff. 148–9). This fragment also addresses the problems of serfs, Jews and Indians; Lettre ´ecrite par la Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs aux ´electeurs des bailliages, BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 278–81 (copy by Cardot with corrections by Condorcet, dated by E. O’Connor 3 February 1789); Adresse de la Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs a` l’Assembl´ee nationale, BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 288–90 (copy by Cardot, with corrections by Condorcet); Autre Lettre a` un marquis, BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 298–306 (copy by Cardot plus the autograph of a partial draft); Dialogue entre un ancien et un moderne sur l’esclavage (BIF Condorcet MS. 857, ff. 338–40, Autograph). A MS copy of the rules of the Society, partly in an unknown hand (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 250–9) and partly in Cardot’s hand (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 260–74), has eight chapters and a total of sixty-four articles. A copy in the hand of the first secretary of the Society, Gramagnac, signed by Condorcet, of the 1789 letter to the Journal de Paris has also survived, dated 25 November 1789 (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 293–5). Mme O’Connor’s copy (signed by Brissot de Warville) of an extract from the register of the Society, minuting the proceedings of a session held on 8 June 1790, offers remarkable evidence of the way in which the Society engaged with the specifics of cases involving individual slaves (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 275–8). See D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Reason, 1720–1823 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 328 n. 73. In this address Condorcet wrote of the emancipation of plantation slaves as being ‘a legislative act confirming an existing truth’. See Cahen, ‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs et Condorcet’.

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context of rights, and in the January and April 1792 issues of the Chronique du mois. The latter contained his account of the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly which had culminated in the 24 March decree establishing political equality for mulattos. The 11 March article in the Chronique de Paris, responding to Pastoret’s motion presented to the Legislative Assembly to abolish the slave trade, is perhaps Condorcet’s most important press statement, and one where he again anticipated imminent success for the abolitionist campaign.11 His later contribution to the Chronique de Paris of 26 November 1792 was concerned mainly with the auxiliary issue of colonial independence, hotly debated in the Convention. Slavery and the colonial issue also constituted a sub-section entitled ‘Troubles des colonies’ in the 1792 R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere L´egislative (x: 418–25). His last major statement on the issue is contained in the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 239–42). In the early and middle years of the eighteenth century information, not always accurate, about colonial chattel slavery and plantation conditions could be gleaned from various sources, literary and non-literary.12 Condorcet’s R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres (Reflections on black slavery) of 1781, reprinted in 1788, stands out in a new phase of informed abolitionist writings that were to proliferate in France in the 1780s13 and is remarkable for its prescience and boldness. According to Mercier and Julien its impact, particularly after the publication of the second edition, was considerable.14 The second edition caused a level of controversy that provoked a number of refutations and defences of the status quo, among which the 1788 M´emoire sur l’esclavage des n`egres, dans lequel on discute les motifs propos´es pour leur 11

12

13

14

For a full analysis of Condorcet’s journalistic contributions to the abolitionist debate between 1790 and 1793, see Y. Benot, ‘Condorcet journaliste et le combat anti-esclavagiste’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 376–84. Benot notes correctly that the total number of press articles written by Condorcet on the slavery issue was far less than those devoted to religious matters, for example, and that from the standpoint of content, in contrast to those of Brissot, his articles tend, surprisingly, to focus on broad issues of principle rather than on issues of immediate urgency, ‘un travail en quelque sorte p´edagogique, e´clairant l’opinion publique moins sur les d´ecisions urgentes que sur la marche de l’histoire dans sa globalit´e’ (p. 383). E. D. Seeber’s account of ancien r´egime thinking on colonial slavery is still authoritative, see AntiSlavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1937), pp. 35–161. A link between the proliferation of anti-slavery sentiment in France in the 1780s and the growth of hostility towards England in the light of developments in America, influenced possibly by Franklin after his arrival in Paris in 1778, has been noted by Jurt, ‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es et l’opposition a` l’esclavage’, p. 388. See also R. Mercier, L’Afrique noire dans la litt´erature franc¸aise. Les premi`eres images (XVIIe-XVIIIe si`ecles) (Dakar: Publications de l’Universit´e de Dakar, 1962), p. 155. Mercier, L’Afrique noire, p. 156. The founding of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs can be ascribed to its influence. As far as the first edition is concerned, reception was more muted (Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 174–5).

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affranchissement, ceux qui s’y opposent, et les moyens praticables pour am´eliorer leur sort by Baron Malouet, a future leading light in the Club Massiac, was typical. By 1789, largely as a result of Condorcet’s leadership on the issue, abolitionism was no longer about ideas and ideals, but about economics, political choice and legislative action.15 Much of the flavour of Condorcet’s treatise is English rather than French, and the text of the Pr´eface des ´editeurs suggests that Condorcet was well aware of the parliamentary debates and reformist moves taking place in London.16 In the Pr´eface reference is made to ‘an English politician who writes pamphlets’ (R´eflexions, p. 5),17 but the Post-Scriptum printed in the 1788 edition contains less elliptical references to Wilberforce’s Society for the Abolition of Slavery and to the influence of the English campaign in the establishment of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs in Paris in the same year.18 The first edition, printed anonymously under the punning pseudonym ‘Joachim Schwartz, Pasteur at Saint-Evangile, in Bienne’,19 was well ahead of its time in France as a set of detailed legislative proposals. Its impassioned, highly personalised tone, unusual in a 15

16

17 18

19

For an informative commentary on the R´eflexions in the American context, and in particular with regard to the divergences between Condorcet and Jefferson on the slavery question, see R. Popkin, ‘Condorcet: abolitionist’, Condorcet Studies 1 (1984), 35–47. Jefferson wrote to Condorcet in 1791 on the subject of black intellectual ability, see W. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 452. Jefferson also sent Condorcet an almanach by Benjamin Banneker to exemplify the link between black ability and black degradation, see on this point McLean and Urken, ‘Did Jefferson and Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’, 447; Boyd et al. (eds.), The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. xxii, p. 99. Condorcet was kept well informed about the vote to abolish slavery taken in the English Parliament by Lord Stanhope who wrote to Condorcet on 3 April 1791 inviting France to follow suit. In the same letter Stanhope warned Condorcet of Burke’s activities and the risks that France would be incurring as a consequence of any interference in English affairs (BIF Condorcet MS 867, ff. 70–2). This letter was subsequently printed in the Chronique de Paris on 8 April 1791. References are to the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, ed. Williams. Interestingly, Jaucourt had also cited ‘un Anglais moderne plein de lumi`eres et d’humanit´e’ in ‘Traite de n`egres (Commerce d’Afrique)’ (in J. Le Rond d’Alembert, D. Diderot et al. (eds.), L’Encyclop´edie ou Dictionnaire raisonn´e des sciences, des arts et des m´etiers, par une soci´et´e de gens de lettres, 33 vols. (Paris: Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand, 1751–80), vol. xvi, p. 32). After expressing his optimism regarding the eventual end to slavery in America, Condorcet observed with equal optimism: ‘We would add that in England a society has been established for the abolition of the trade and black slavery; this society, which counts among its subscribers members of both chambers, and even some ministers, will succeed sooner or later in meeting its objective. It is impossible for bills, dictated by humanity and justice, supported by reason and sane politics, not eventually to carry the vote in both chambers. In truth, in the very first debates on this subject, Europe watched with growing indignation the peers of Great Britain debase themselves by becoming protectors of slave-traders and apologists for their infamous brigandage, though the dignity of a lord and the hereditary wealth which accompanies it, would seem to exclude any kind of link between two such different classes’ (R´eflexions, p. 58). It was not the only time that Condorcet used this pseudonym, see the R´eflexions du docteur Schwartz (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 319–21), and also the 1789 Sentiments v´eritables du ministre Schwartz sur quelques endroits d’une brochure sur l’esclavage des n`egres qu’on lui a faussement attribu´ee (BN(T)

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Condorcet essay, is immediately apparent in the dedicatory epistle, Aux n`egres esclaves, where Condorcet/Schwartz addresses the slaves as brothers, praising them for their courage, their steadfastness in suffering and their moral fortitude. Contradicting the stereotypical projection of the negro, reinforced not only by the traders and their anti-abolitionist supporters, but also by literary stereotypes, the Condorcet/Schwartz persona recognises in the negro an unqualified humanity, and an irrefutable entitlement to human rights. The demonisation of the traders and plantation-owners, sustained in extreme terms throughout the treatise, starts immediately in the ´epˆıtre d´edicatoire (R´eflexions, pp. 3–4). In the fictive Pr´eface des ´editeurs, Condorcet anticipates hostility to the ‘Schwartz’ proposals by making preemptive, pseudo-editorial reference to the views of a certain ‘M. le Pasteur B∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ ’. This provides the pretext for the Condorcet persona to assure the reader that there is no hidden agenda. The author is neither a Parisian ‘bel esprit’, with his eye on a seat in the Academy, nor an English pamphleteer looking for a seat in Parliament. Nor was money the motivation. The author is simply ‘a good man’ (R´eflexions, p. 5), writing with honesty and integrity to expose a crime against humanity.20 Adopting the voice of ‘Pasteur Schwartz’, moreover, enables Condorcet to inject a slight note of protestant evangelicanism into his attack on slavery, a central feature of English abolitionism arising from Quakerism and later from Wilberforce’s influence, but normally entirely absent from the secular, essentially philosophe, polemics of French abolitionism in this period. In the concluding chapter of the treatise Condorcet re-emphasised in slightly sardonic tones the usefulness of Schwartz’s non-philosophe ‘foreign’ voice as a persuasive device particularly suited to a public by now disenchanted, in Condorcet’s view, with the voice of enlightenment dissidence (R´eflexions, pp. 54–6). The tongue-in-cheek style, the Christian/evangelical aura with which Condorcet ironically surrounds Schwartz in his confrontation with

20

36400137). The rationale behind the choice of this transparent pseudonym, and the implications of the distanciation that it produces, have been much discussed. As a rhetorical device, ‘Pasteur Schwartz’ serves among other things to internationalise the issues raised, and to some extent allow them to transcend the narrow issues of partisan Parisian politics, see Jurt, ‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es’, pp. 388–9. Jaucourt had also classed slavery as a crime in ‘Traite des n`egres’ in terms very close to those that Condorcet was to use: ‘mais les hommes ont-ils le droit de s’enrichir par des voies cruelles et criminelles?’ (Encyclop´edie, vol. xvi, p. 532). The ‘Schwartz’ assurances reflect the nature of the accusations mounted against the abolitionists by the colons and their allies. Condorcet’s (and Jaucourt’s) declaration of human solidarity with negroes loses its apparent banality in a cultural context in which the negro was widely seen as belonging to a ‘degraded’ species of humanity. See R. L. Stein, The French Slave Trade. An Old Regime Business (Wisconsin: Wisconsin University Press, 1979), p. 196.

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the less convincingly Christian adversary, M. le Pasteur B∗∗∗∗∗∗∗ , echoes Voltairean techniques of demolition. With Condorcet the velvet glove of irony covers a barely concealed iron fist of radical, angry commitment to the cause of black human rights. Moreover, in describing ‘Schwartz’ on the titlepage as ‘a Member of the Economic Society of B∗∗∗ ’, Condorcet establishes the putative author’s qualifications with regard to the commercial arguments put forward in the text. In the main body of the essay, Condorcet explores in remarkable detail the relationship between planters, slave-traders and slaves, the horrors of transportation, working conditions on the plantations and the crushing human realities behind the legally sanctioned terms relating to the engagement of slave labour, still largely determined by the 1685 Code Noir. He speculates interestingly on alternative ways of assuring the production of colonial goods, on the moral issues involved in the commodification of human beings, on new administrative initiatives that could be taken in order to bring plantation conditions under regulated control, as well as on a number of practical, humanitarian and economic matters arising from abolition, such as compensation for slaves as well as slave-owners. Condorcet’s stance is uncompromising: enslavement is an act of theft by which the slave’s right to ownership of his own person has been removed. Standard justifications for this act of theft are reviewed and summarily rejected. Rationalisations that sought to present black slaves as prisoners of war captured in tribal battles, and destined as such for slaughter if not bought from their victors, are discounted,21 along with the view that slave-traders are in fact benefactors saving negro lives (and souls) from murderous African chieftains. Financial investment in slave ‘welfare’ does not impart rights of ownership. Nor does the need to safeguard colonial economies legitimise slavery: Thus, to ask whether this interest legitimises slavery is to ask whether one should be allowed to keep the wealth obtained through crime. The urgent need I have of my neighbour’s horses to work my fields does not give me the right to steal them; so why should I have the right to force the man himself to work them? This so-called need changes nothing, and does not make slavery less of a criminal act on the part of the master. (R´eflexions, p. 11)

Condorcet was concerned to demonstrate that the ownership of slaves did not derive from a right, and that the act of keeping another human 21

On the complicity of tribal chieftains in the trade, see the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 469). Condorcet counters the argument partly by accusing the traders of causing wars in order to promote the market in slaves in their aftermath.

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being in servitude could not be legitimised by analogy with the right to own property or animals.22 By abolishing the slave trade, therefore, the state would not be undermining property rights. With the criminalisation of slavery, the state would not owe compensation to slave-traders and owners any more than it owed compensation to thieves deprived by the courts of their possession of stolen goods (R´eflexions, p. 22). With the criminality of the act of enslavement established in the light of natural justice and morality, Condorcet then concentrated on issues of public policy, and the accountability of legislators to enact just laws. In the concluding paragraph of the key fifth chapter, ‘De l’injustice de l’esclavage des n`egres par rapport au l´egislateur’, Condorcet emphasised that national prosperity should never be achieved at the expense of justice: ‘The interests of the powerful and the rich must fade before the rights of any one man’ (R´eflexions, p. 15). The economic defence of slavery was for Condorcet bereft of commercial as well as moral credibility. Abolition of slavery would not ruin the colonies but would on the contrary make them more prosperous. Here Condorcet reflected the influence of the physiocrats on his thinking with regard to the calculation of losses and profits arising in the slave trade.23 Commercial interests must give way to individual rights, otherwise there would be little difference between an ordered society and a band of robbers (R´eflexions, p. 13).24 The fifth chapter contains, however, that important, seemingly paradoxical, feature of Condorcet’s policies for the management of progress, namely gradualism. Legislators were morally bound to repeal unjust laws, but in the case of colonial slavery Condorcet does not argue for immediate emancipation. Condorcet was not the only abolitionist of the period to insist on the importance of a policy of gradualism. Lescallier and Gr´egoire shared his view,25 and Brissot de Warville (echoing Wilberforce) also reflected the gradualist approach in his historic speech of 19 February 1788 in which he 22

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Condorcet did concede exceptions (e.g. with regard to conscripted soldiers): ‘One man cannot have the right to sell another, unless he agreed to be sold, and this agreement became a clause in the contract; slavery would then only be legitimate in very rare cases’ (iv: 624). In De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe Condorcet commented further on the thin margins of profit that France derived from territories that were difficult, dangerous and expensive to administer and defend (viii: 24). Economic apologies for slavery, elaborated by philosophers and jurists such as Hobbes, Pufendorf, Grotius, Melon and others, were still widely accepted, and continued to reinforce the case against abolition well after 1789. Condorcet’s stance against colonial slavery addressed the practical issue of the economic efficiency of the slave trade as emphatically as it did issues relating to morality and rights. D. Lescallier, R´eflexions sur le sort des noirs dans nos colonies ([Paris], 1789), pp. 18–19, 52–3; H.-B. Gr´egoire, M´emoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mˆel´es de Saint-Domingue et autres ˆıles franc¸aises de l’Am´erique (Paris: Belin, 1789), pp. 45–50.

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referred specifically to the importance of a phased abolition.26 Condorcet himself restated the case for gradualism in 1791 in the Adresse de la Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs a` l’Assembl´ee Nationale, a` toutes les villes de commerce, a` toutes les manufactures, aux colonies, a` tous les amis de la constitution de 1791. Because of the calculated pragmatism of his emancipatory programme on this point Condorcet’s reputation as an abolitionist has been severely compromised in the eyes of some modern commentators. Jurt attributes Condorcet’s confidence in the liberating effect of market forces on colonial prosperity after emancipation more to ‘un souci de propri´etaire que de justice sociale a` l’´egard des opprim´es’, detecting a stance motivated not just by humanitarian concerns but also by a concern to exploit the economic advantages of a free market. Chalaye is also sceptical, as is Baczko. Antoine sees only the expression of class interest in the proposals, and Benot has drawn attention to Condorcet’s subsequent silence about the colonial problem in the 1793 Projet de constitution.27 The judgement of posterity has been perhaps too harsh on this point. Condorcet’s views reflect the pragmatism of the future deputy/legislator rather than any intention to compromise on a matter of principle with a powerful alliance of vested interests, and they encompass a vision of liberty and equality anchored firmly to the still fragile principle of natural and inalienable human rights.28 While Condorcet insisted that the duty of legislators to repair injustice was absolute, he also insisted that the timing of reforms in any area of legislation was crucial to their successful implementation. The issue of public order, for example, was paramount. Society, for Condorcet, had no purpose more important than the maintenance of the rights of those who constitute it. If, however, an individual citizen had been so brutalised as to be incapable of exercising those rights, or if his right to freedom might be harmful to others, then society could regard him as having lost those rights, or as having never acquired them, as in the case of the need to deny temporarily certain rights 26 27

28

Cit. C. Biondi, ‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs’, SVEC 265 (1989), 1756. Jurt, ‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es’, p. 394; M. Merle, L’Anti-colonialisme europ´een de Las Casas a` Karl Marx (Paris: Colin, 1969), p. 197; B. Baczko, Lumi`eres de l’utopie (Paris: Payot, 1978), pp. 206– 7; S. Chalaye, Du noir au n`egre: l’image du noir au th´eaˆ tre de Marguerite de Navarre a` Jean Genet (1550–1960) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), p. 100; R. Antoine, Les Ecrivains franc¸ais et les Antilles (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 1978), p. 151; Benot, ‘Condorcet journaliste’, 384; Y. Benot ‘Les Lumi`eres, la R´evolution et le probl`eme colonial’, SVEC 265 (1989), 1753–5. On this point Condorcet might have been influenced by English abolitionist strategy, see A. R. Strugnell, ‘Colonialisme et esclavage: une e´tude compar´ee de Diderot et de Wilberforce’, SVEC 265 (1989), 1762. Condorcet’s insistence on gradualism is, however, already present in the first edition of the R´eflexions, published some ten years before the detailed proposals in Wilberforce’s bill came before Parliament (18 April 1791). See R. Furneaux, William Wilberforce (London: Hamilton, 1974), pp. 75–9.

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to children, criminals and the insane: ‘Thus, for example, raising slaves to the status of free men, the law must ensure that in this new capacity they will not threaten the safety of [other] citizens’ (R´eflexions, p. 15). If, because of their years of degradation, brutalising treatment and moral corruption, black slaves had become incapable, like children and madmen, of assuming the responsibilities of free men, then legislators must exercise caution in granting them immediately the rights to which they were theoretically entitled. Condorcet was well aware that freedom came with a price-tag, namely awareness and acceptance of social and political duties and responsibilities, and could not be exercised without those responsibilities being fully understood and accepted. In the case of the colonial slave workforce, he accepted that a policy of gradualism in the implementation of civil rights created a situation of temporary injustice, but he believed that this could be mitigated by immediate legislation to suspend the trade. This suspension would theoretically lead to the better treatment of slaves pending their eventual emancipation, and would ensure that those slaves born after the date of such legislation would at least have the prospect of emancipation. Until the experience of freedom had returned to the slave what slavery had deprived him of, namely the ability to meet the civic challenge of freedom, then the slave should be treated as a person temporarily incapacitated by an accident or a disease (R´eflexions, pp. 14–15). Common humanity required legislators to reconcile the safety and well-being of the slave with his rights. Just as the unskilled serf would be ruined, not liberated, as a consequence of the overnight abolition of feudal serfdom simply because he owned nothing, so the plantation slave, totally dependent on his master for shelter and subsistence, would be engulfed by poverty and hunger as a result of precipitate, unmanaged emancipation. Only the consciences of well-meaning reformers would enjoy the illusory benefits: Thus, in such circumstances, not to allow a man the immediate exercise of his rights does not mean that those rights are violated, or that the violators continue to be protected; it just means applying to the destruction of abuses the prudence necessary to ensure that any justice given to an unfortunate is more certain to make him happy. (R´eflexions, p. 14)

Condorcet returned repeatedly to the paramount issue of public order. One of the basic rights that he had identified for the individual citizen arising from the pact of association was the right to security from violence against his person and property.29 Legislators owed it to society not to make 29

See D. Williams, ‘Condorcet and natural rights’, SVEC 296 (1992), 103–21.

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laws, even laws that might provoke breaches of public order if enacted, unless they could guarantee the means to control those disturbances and punish the perpetrators. Before raising slaves to the status of free men, the law must therefore ensure that with the acquisition of that status the safety of others would not be threatened. Thus in the eighth and ninth chapters (R´eflexions, pp. 23–33) Condorcet elaborated measures to enact legislation in ways that were designed to prevent the anticipated breakdown of public order caused by ‘the fury of slave-owners’ and the reprisals against the slaves themselves that could well be taken in the face of radical change, a problem to which he had already referred in the fifth chapter: ‘for the man accustomed to be surrounded by slaves will find no consolation in having only inferiors’ (R´eflexions, p. 15). Neither commercial objections nor the need for a gradualist approach, however, are allowed to constitute a sophistical defence of the staus quo, and Condorcet explicitly and repeatedly stressed that abolition could not be postponed indefinitely. The issue at stake was timing and an acceptance of the need for a programme of phased legislation whose practical implications had been thought through. There was really no question for Condorcet of stepping back from the principle of abolition.30 The ninth chapter, ‘Des moyens de d´etruire l’esclavage des n`egres par degr´es’, the longest in the treatise, contains one of the earliest and most interesting sets of concrete proposals for abolitionist legislation to come out of the French Enlightenment, revealing Condorcet’s instinctive feel for administrative detail upon which all great reformist legislation ultimately depends if idealism is to be translated into reality. Measures to be adopted in the first phase of his proposed programme include the suspension of the trade within France’s borders, together with an immediate embargo on the importation of slaves; the immediate emancipation of all plantationborn mulatto children; automatic emancipation at the age of thirty-five for plantation-born black children, with on-going responsibilities with regard to subsistence and maintenance for a further period of six months assigned to masters/employers (R´eflexions, pp. 26–33). In Condorcet’s scheme slaves would in effect be redesignated as workers on temporary contracts, with the right to take legal action against employers to enforce the new contractual arrangements. The new workers would be ‘free hands’ whose numbers 30

The humanitarian priorities at the heart of Condorcet’s defence of gradualism in the context of emancipation are set out in the tenth chapter: ‘We have proposed the laws which seemed to us to be the ones most certain to destroy slavery gradually, and ameliorate it while it lasts. You might think that laws like these would be capable, not of legitimising slavery, but of making it less barbarous and more compatible, if not with justice, at least with humanity’ (R´eflexions, p. 34).

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would ensure that wages remain so low that the cost of labour in the new scheme of things would be very little more than that of the former slaves.31 Much of Condorcet’s R´eflexions is devoted to an elaboration of the mechanisms for the day-to-day management of abolition, rather than to matters of abstract principle, a point on which his treatise stands out from the abolitionist writings of many of his contemporaries. It reads in parts like a set of regulations to be embodied in the draft bill that Condorcet no doubt had in mind at the time of composition. Commentary, therefore, tends to be quite narrowly focussed on difficult issues such as the continuing responsibilities of planters towards their enfranchised workforce (R´eflexions, pp. 23–5, 38– 43). Features of Condorcet’s proposed legislation include measures designed to ensure that the children of slaves would gain their freedom at the time of paternal emancipation, whether legitimate issue or not. Slaves older than fifteen when the proposed legislation was enacted would be freed at the age of forty. Those aged less than fifteen at the time of enactment of legislation would be offered at the age of fifty the choice of accommodation in a public institution to be established for this purpose, or continuing residence on the plantation with the intermediary status of servant. Both options would be supplemented with a pension from the former owner, at a level to be determined by government decree. Births and deaths would be officially recorded, slaves with unrecorded births being freed immediately. The disappearance of slaves in unexplained circumstances would result in penalties consisting of the freeing of two young slaves of the same sex as the missing slave. To ensure compliance, Condorcet envisaged the appointment of a public official for each colony, with specified duties relating to the protection of black and mulatto slave interests during the transitional period (R´eflexions, pp. 37–8). He gives details of a tariff ‘to determine the average price of a black slave’, the slave then having the right to offer his master the tariff price for his freedom which would be granted once the sum had been deposited with the inspector. The main body of the treatise is replete with similar micro-managerial detail, and a wider canvas is not in fact drawn until the penultimate chapter, ‘De la culture apr`es la destruction de l’esclavage’, where Condorcet speculates briefly, but interestingly, on the nature of post-abolitionist inter-racial culture and social organisation (R´eflexions, pp. 38–43). Condorcet was anxious to ensure that legislation would not necessarily be to the commercial 31

Antoine notes that it is at this point that the voice of the physiocratic idealist gives way to that of class interest, ‘celle de la bourgeoisie r´evolutionnaire’, Les Ecrivains franc¸ais, p. 151. See also Jurt, ‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es’, pp. 391–2.

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disadvantage of the planters because of the advent of free competition in the market for colonial goods that would regulate costs, rationalise the division of labour and raise levels of productivity that were unrealisable with enslaved workers. The moral benefits of emancipation would thus coincide with economic advantage and the advent of a racially integrated community (R´eflexions, p. 38). The planter would show by his example that the most fertile territory was not the territory farmed by the most wretched, ‘and that man’s true happiness is the happiness which cannot be bought or made to depend on the happiness of his master. The soft and tender sounds of a flute once played on the banks of the Niger will replace the sound of whips and the screams of black slaves’ (R´eflexions, p. 51). The issue of the planters’ continuing responsibilities for their enfranchised charges was central to Condorcet’s proposed legislation, and reflected a realistic concern for the welfare of the colonial workforce during the potentially difficult transition to full emancipation. Condorcet well understood also the need to deal effectively with colon retaliation that could well make plantation life even harsher in the interim. Enlightened legislation in Paris would be meaningless without the means to enforce it in the colonies. In this respect, Condorcet proposed a system of financial penalties and bi-monthly visitations to plantations by government-appointed doctors to check for evidence of mistreatment, particularly of pregnant slaves whose children would have cost implications for plantation-owners. In the twelfth and last chapter, ‘R´eponse a` quelques raisonnements des partisans de l’esclavage’, with its powerful defence of the achievements of the party of humanity in a climate that had now become uncomfortable for the philosophes, Condorcet returned to a consideration of anti-abolitionist arguments, and to a final demonstration of the lack of moral and legal space for the protestations of the slave-traders, and what he called in the PostScriptum ‘the apologists for their infamous brigandage’, within a system of laws based on universal consent and universal applicability, central to which was the acceptance of the universal right to freedom (R´eflexions, p. 44). Every mitigating counter-argument – the comparable misery of Europe’s peasants, conditions in the Bastille, the analogies with the corv´ee, the supposed humanity and enlightened self-interest of the planters – is made to retreat before the indisputable fact of deprivation of the slave’s inalienable right to be a free human being. Gradualism meant in practice that Condorcet’s proposals were designed to introduce reform ‘by degrees’, giving the planters time to adjust to a new order requiring them to replace the exclusive use of blacks with a combined and free racially mixed workforce, as well as to give the slaves themselves time to adjust to the new conditions, and survive

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their emancipation. The carefully managed phasing-in of reform would also give the government itself the time it needed to set up the new regulatory system, and to enact further appropriate legislation, as required. The time-scale that Condorcet envisaged for the abolition of slavery (‘almost abolished’) in the French colonies by means of such measures was thirty-five to forty years (R´eflexions, p. 33). In the event, his calculation would prove to be optimistic, though for different reasons. In the Post-Scriptum to the second edition of the R´eflexions, Condorcet noted the progress made in America towards abolition, and in particular the changes to the regulations governing the importation of slaves agreed at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention (R´eflexions, p. 57).32 He also noted the foundation in England of a Society for the Abolition of Slavery and the establishment in Paris of a corresponding society ‘whose sole purpose is to seek the means to abolish the trade and to end the enslavement of blacks’ (R´eflexions, p. 58). The allusion is to the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, founded in 1788 when, on his return from London, Brissot de Warville presented to an informal meeting of friends, or of what his biographer calls ‘onze pionniers’,33 his Discours sur la n´ecessit´e d’´etablir a` Paris une Soci´et´e pour concourir, avec celle de Londres, a` l’abolition de la traite et de l’esclavage des n`egres.34 The founding meeting of the new pressure-group was followed by the publication of forty-six pages of rules (eight chapters and sixtyfour articles), much of the text drafted by Condorcet and reflecting his obsession with the mathematics of voting procedures, together with a long Pr´eambule.35 From the outset, as Brissot’s Discours (though not the rules) makes clear, the new Society disclaimed any subversive intent. Its purpose was to produce a draft bill for abolition, based on facts in which the interests 32

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Condorcet never allowed Jefferson’s or Washington’s ownership of slaves to compromise his admiration for the American cause. In De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe, he noted the on-going tolerance of slavery in America after the achievement of independence, but consoled himself with the thought that all enlightened men were ashamed of its perpetuation, and that it would not stain the American civil code for much longer (viii: 11–12). J.-L. Franc¸ois-Primo, La Jeunesse de J.-P. Brissot (Paris: Grasset, 1932), p. 219. On important documentation relating to the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs, see vols. vi–ix of La R´evolution franc¸aise et l’abolition de l’esclavage: textes et documents, 13 vols. (Paris: Editions d’histoire sociale, 1968). These four volumes reproduce thirty-two brochures published between 1788 and 1799. The rules were to be reviewed annually by a special committee, composed partly of members of the Society and partly of members of the Assembly. Procedures mirrored the pattern proposed for constitutional amendments in the Assembly itself. The first review was scheduled for March 1790. The cost of membership was expensive (2 louis per year). General meetings took place on the first Tuesday of each month, and reciprocal membership rights extended to the British and American societies. Detailed attention is paid in the rules to voting procedures, agendas, minutes, order of speaking, duties of officers and conduct of members. There is no specific reference to the aims of the Society. See BIF Condorcet MS 859, ff. 148–9, 250–9, 260–74.

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of all parties would be dispassionately weighed. The Club Massiac, alarmed by the progress being made in England towards abolition, and represented by powerful advocates such as Louis-Marthe Gouy, who did everything they could to discredit the Society, including an (unsuccessful) attempt to obtain the King’s disapproval of its activities. The economic and political power of the traders and colons was considerable, and their opposition to the activities of the new Society was implacable. Despite the hostility, by February 1788 the Society had acquired a formal existence and, according to the Tableau des membres, had attracted ninety-four subscribing members by January 1789.36 In Au corps ´electoral contre l’esclavage des noirs, a short, impassioned address written on behalf of the Society, Condorcet evoked graphically the suffering of four hundred thousand men, delivered into slavery by violence and treachery, condemned to a life of hopeless, unrelenting labour along with their families, exposed to the harsh whims of their masters, deprived of all natural and social rights, and reduced to the level of animals in the sense that, like animals, their life and happiness are guaranteed only by the self-interest of others. (ix: 473)

The cause of abolition was now directly linked to the American prise de conscience concerning the perpetuation of slavery in the light of a Revolution fought in the cause of rights and freedom. In Condorcet’s view, the defence of rights was unsustainable unless it was conducted on behalf of all men, whether in America or in France. How could France honourably defend the rights of man against entrenched inequality if it condoned, even by its silence, an abuse so contrary to reason and natural law as the servitude of blacks (ix: 473)? Au corps ´electoral contre l’esclavage des noirs was directed at the forthcoming meeting of the Estates-General, and in it Condorcet suggested that a proposal for the establishment of a special commission to examine ways to end the slave trade be inserted in the cahiers de dol´eance in preparation for the destruction of the slave trade, 36

Tableau des membres de la Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs in La R´evolution franc¸aise et l’abolition de l’esclavage, vol. vi, p. 4; cf. Biondi, ‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs’, 1757; A. J. Cooper, L’Attitude de la France a` l’´egard de l’esclavage pendant la Revolution frangaise (Paris: Imprimerie de la Cour Royale, 1925), p. 17. According to Mme O’Connor’s copy, signed by Brissot de Warville, of an extract from the minutes of the first meeting of the Society, dated 19 February 1788, held in the rue Franchise, Clavi`ere was elected President unanimously. In addition to Clavi`ere and Brissot, five other names are listed as being present, including Mirabeau’s. Condorcet was presented for membership by La Fayette on 8 April. He rose very rapidly to prominence and was nominated on 22 April to the Executive Committee, and also to the Commission charged with drafting the rules. He became President on 13 January 1789, chairing nine general meetings between 27 January and 31 March 1789. He chaired intermittently further meetings between 7 July and 4 December. Brissot is recorded as presiding over the 15 March 1790 meeting, but Condorcet was still listed as President in a manuscript extract from the register of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 275–8).

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for it would be too shameful for the human race to think that such abuses might be necessary to the political life and prosperity of a great nation, that the well-being of twenty-four million French people must necessarily be bought with the misery and enslavement of four hundred thousand Africans, and that nature has only shown men fountains of happiness poisoned by tears, and contaminated with the blood of their fellow-men. (ix: 473)

An infringement of the rights of one part of humanity threatened those of all. While denying that the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs was the enemy of the plantation-owners, Condorcet’s principle that no man could be the property of another remained intact. The Society had no wish to destroy the planters’ wealth, but it did wish to legitimise its provenance. In June 1789, coinciding closely with the publication of Gr´egoire’s M´emoire en faveur des gens de couleur ou sang-mˆel´es de Saint-Domingue et autres ˆıles franc¸aises de l’Am´erique,37 Condorcet presented his third important and hard-hitting statement on the slave trade, Sur l’admission des d´eput´es des planteurs de Saint-Domingue dans l’Assembl´ee nationale. This time he addressed the thorny constitutional issue of the disproportionate representation of planter interests in the first National Assembly, formed in the aftermath of the failure to make progress at the meeting of the EstatesGeneral. Here, after juxtaposing in two contiguous columns a Profession de foi du d´eput´e d’une nation libre, listing six propositions relating to freedom, justice, equality and rights, with a Profession de foi d’un planteur on the same propositions, Condorcet pressed for a reduction of the twenty-one white planter-deputies, proposed by the planters’ delegates, to two representatives mandated to speak only for the whites. He rejected outright the view advanced by the planters that the colonies should be bound only by legislation with which their representatives concurred: ‘We will answer that any man who violates one of the rights of humanity at that point loses the right to invoke them in his own favour’ (ix: 483). He confronted accusations of treason levelled against the Society, and rejected the view that abolition of the trade would only be to the economic advantage of France’s enemies. He dismissed theories about the supposed contentment of slaves with their condition, as well as the property rights analogy that opponents of abolition continued to make: ‘In their mouths the sacred word rights is an affront to nature, and a blasphemy against reason’ (ix: 485).38 37 38

BN(R) L. K. 9/70. On the obduracy of the whites with regard to the worsening situation in Saint-Domingue, Condorcet listed the measures to be taken in ‘Troubles des colonies’ in the R´evision des travaux de la Premi`ere L´egislature. He urged the Assembly to dispatch troops to the colony, but only for the purpose of bringing the rising to a peaceful end (x: 421). In fact, the French army did not reach Saint-Domingue

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In the event, the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs published much, but achieved relatively little, although it did send to Necker nominations for three deputies to attend the Estates-General to defend the cause of colonial slaves, the nominees being Condorcet, Brissot de Warville and Bourges.39 Nevertheless, the Liste des ouvrages sur la traite et l’esclavage, issued by the Society in 1790, testifies to a serious attempt to influence public opinion: fifty-nine titles, including many translations of English pamphlets.40 However, the decrees of 5–11 August 1789, embodying the decisions taken on 4 August relating to the abolition of feudal privilege, seigneurial rights, tithes and the corv´ee, did not mention the slave trade, and there was no reference to black rights in the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen.41 On 15 December 1789 Condorcet published a long article in the Journal de Paris condemning the trade in strong language. Colonial sensitivities were inflamed, and the article was denounced by Mosnera de l’Aunay on 28 December in the same journal. Caught between the crossfire, the Constituante prevaricated, and the Club Massiac, acting supposedly on behalf of the Saint-Domingue planters, emerged triumphant in the polemical skirmishes of May 1789. On 24 September the Constituent Assembly conceded to the colonial assemblies all powers relating to the civil status of slaves, free blacks and mulattos. Both Condorcet and Brissot de Warville were violently attacked for their subsequent attempts to reverse the 24 September decree. Condorcet was never to see a successful legislative outcome to his proposals, although he was encouraged by the decree of 24 March 1792, enacted on

39

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to restore order until September 1792, by which time the Jacobins were in the ascendancy in the Convention. The army was accompanied by three Jacobin commissioners to ensure that liberty, equality and fraternity prevailed. See Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 301. Popkin comments: ‘This sad result was partly due to the political ineptness of the Society’s members in the government, and mostly due to genuine French lack of interest in, or antagonism to, abolition’, ‘Condorcet: abolitionist’, 42. For further comment on this output, see Biondi, ‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs’, 1757–8. The abolitionists’ case also found many interesting literary echoes, including Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s little-known philosophical drama Empsa¨el et Zora¨ıde, ou les blancs esclaves des noirs a` Maroc, written in the 1789–92 period. The play represents an ironic reversal of the master–slave relationship and reflects Bernardin’s reactions to the situation in Mauritius, of which he had first-hand knowledge. A modern edition of this play has been edited recently by R. Little (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995). In ‘Troubles des colonies’ Condorcet observed: ‘Does every slave who has heard talk of the Declaration of Rights need books in order to understand that the voice of justice in the nation has spoken, and that it remains only to destroy commercial interests? Doubtless it would be necessary to use every resource of logic and eloquence to prove to a greedy slave-owner that slavery is a violation of natural rights, which no authority and no precedent can legitimise. But do you really think that all this palaver is necessary to persuade slaves of this same truth? And is it not the height of foolishness to assume that, in order to see slavery as unjust oppression, the African colonial needs a philosopher from Europe to make him see the point?’ (x: 420).

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4 April, according equality of natural rights to mulattos and free blacks.42 For the first time, he believed that reason and justice had triumphed, at least in principle, over narrow economic self-interest, and the day on which these decrees had been passed could now be numbered among the most glorious days of the Republic. However, the prospects for black equality and emancipation quickly faded when, on 8 March 1790, the government decreed a policy of non-interference in the slave trade, and placed the colonies under the special protection of the nation, a testimony not only to the lobbying power of the members of the Club Massiac, described with ill-concealed sarcasm as ‘men distinguished by their merits, honoured by the public, and holding the highest offices in the four most important countries of Europe’ (vii: 125–6),43 but also to the surprising impotence of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs itself, which seemed unable to capitalise politically on the subsequent disturbances in Saint-Domingue. These had accelerated in October 1790 with the return of the young, Paris-educated mulatto, Vincent Og´e (a member of the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs) to the island to start the wave of unrest that would come to a head in 1791 and result in severe shortages of sugar and coffee in Paris.44 Pressure on Condorcet and the abolitionists mounted as blame for racial violence was laid at their door by the Club Massiac. Following the events in Saint-Domingue of 22 August 1791, the Constituent Assembly witnessed a sharp confrontation between

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An expeditionary force of 6,000 men was dispatched to the West Indies to enforce this decree. Planter delegates had been sent to the 1789 meeting of the Estates-General, and six were allocated seats (the first time in European history when colonial representatives sat in a metropolitan legislative assembly). A politically active group of wealthy planters living in France, together with their merchant allies, had been active in fact since 1788 in the Club Massiac. See A. Brette, ‘Les gens de couleur libres et leurs d´eput´es en 1789’, La R´evolution franc¸aise 29 (1895), 334–45, 385–407. After the 4 March insurrection at Port-au-Prince, the Assembly conceded on 15 May equality with whites to gens de couleur of free parents, but slavery was maintained. The massive revolt of slaves on 22 August 1791 that witnessed the emergence of Toussaint L’Ouverture inspired stormy debates in the Assembl´ee constituante. One notes the subsequent feebleness of Brissot’s Discours sur un projet de d´ecret relatif a` la r´evolte des noirs, presented to the Assembl´ee nationale on 30 October 1791. Biondi reminds us (‘La Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs’, 1758) that one member of the Society, Bernard Sigismond Frossard, even went so far as to dissociate the Society formally from the abolitionist cause in a speech to the Convention on 12 December 1792, printed as the Observations sur l’abolition de la traite et de l’esclavage des n`egres ([Paris]: Imprimerie de Gueffier, [1793]). Frossard was the author of La Cause des n`egres et les habitants de la Guin´ee . . ., ou Histoire de la traite et de l’esclavage des n`egres, preuves de leur ill´egitimit´e, moyens de les abolir, 2 vols. (Lyon: Imprimerie de La Roche, 1789). The unrest in Saint-Domingue was long-standing, of course. One of the most violent of the slave uprisings prior to the Revolution, led by F. Macandal, had occurred between 1751 and 1757, and there had been a particularly serious and well-reported revolt in 1769 when the Governor, the Prince de Rohan, attempted to impose military rule. Condorcet commented on the reception in Paris of the news of events in Saint-Domingue, and the resulting accusations levelled at the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs in ‘Troubles des colonies’ (x: 419).

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Robespierre and Barnave45 over the issue of abolition. In the event the Assembly accepted the latter’s proposals, and on 24 September it decreed that matters should be left in the hands of the colonial assemblies. In ‘Troubles des colonies’ Condorcet denounced this decree as an encouragement to the whites to continue with black oppression, and bitterly criticised the equivocations of fellow deputies (x: 421). Attempts to restore order in Saint-Domingue failed, and many of the planters despaired of Paris and turned to the British for help. In December 1793 the Assembly freed the slaves of Saint-Domingue who had fought against the British, and in August of the same year L´eger-F´elicit´e Sonthonax was dispatched to the island to enforce legislation freeing all slaves on the island. This historic decree was confirmed at the celebrated s´eances of the Convention of 4–6 February 1794, a decree that owed probably more to panic and expediency caused by the military successes of Toussaint L’Ouverture than to humanitarian concerns.46 Nevertheless, the 1794 s´eances were a signal triumph for the abolitionists in a long and frustrating battle whose promising opening shots had been fired in Condorcet’s 1781 R´eflexions. Condorcet’s precarious position, necessitating his flight from Paris at this crucial moment, prevented him from taking an active part in the debate, although he returned to the issue eloquently in the Esquisse where he predicted that the French constitution would one day extend its principles of freedom, in spite of the resistance of tyrants and priests. At the same time, as several commentators have noted, Condorcet’s liberalism in the Esquisse was tempered by a measure of political paternalism reflected, to his discredit in modern eyes, in his assumption that progress with regard to non-European cultures meant their absorption into European culture, and their conversion to European values, an ideological neo-colonialism in which ‘these banks for brigands will become colonies for citizens, spreading across Africa and Asia the principles and examples of European liberty, enlightenment and reason’ (vi: 241).47 Whatever the reservations, however, 45

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Barnave had already succeeded on 8 March 1790 in persuading the Assembly to approve powers of self-government for the colonies with a franchise based on property and the upholding of slavery. This was soon followed on 28 May by an illegal proclamation of independence from France by the Saint-Domingue planters. There was also a mulatto uprising in Martinique on 3 June. The Og´e-led mulatto rebellion was soon crushed by the planters, and Og´e himself was executed in a particularly barbaric way, but further disturbances, this time among the black slaves, were to recur on 25 November. On the resistance to emancipation, and the tactics used in the Assembly, see ‘Troubles des colonies’ (x: 419–20). Cf. Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 94, 112. See, for example, Jurt (‘Condorcet: l’id´ee de progr`es’, pp. 393–4), who sees in the Esquisse ‘un n´eocolonialisme fond´e non plus sur l’´etatisme mais sur une id´eologie lib´erale tentant de se l´egitimer par l’efficacit´e e´conomique de la mission civilisatrice’. Cf. Merle, L’Anti-colonialisme europ´een, p. 197;

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Condorcet’s courageous record of opposition to powerful vested interests in the name of justice, humanity and reason on the issue of black servitude speaks for itself. By the end of 1794 the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs was marginalised, although it continued to exist under a slightly different name as the Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs et des Colonies, with different aims, under the leadership of Charles-Bernard Waldstrom. The emancipatory measures of 1794 were to prove fragile, moreover. The mantle of abolitionist leadership was assumed by Gr´egoire who would take the campaign on into the nineteenth century, and whose reputation as an abolitionist would eventually overshadow Condorcet’s.48 The slave trade was reinstated in Guadeloupe by Napoleon in 1802, but France’s richest colony of Saint-Domingue, inspired by the charismatic leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, gained its independence as the Republic of Ha¨ıti in 1804, two years after Toussaint’s death in the fortress of Joux. However, it was not until 1848, more than fifty years after Condorcet’s death, that his vision of freedom for all black people on all French colonial territory was finally realised, a liberation ‘by degrees’, as he had recommended in his R´eflexions, but not quite in the way he had envisaged. the emancipation of women The challenge of eighteenth-century philosophes to the rationale of sexual inequality was by no means clear-cut and uncompromising.49 The thirtyeighth letter of the Lettres Persanes is not sufficient to exonerate Montesquieu from charges of ambivalence.50 Entries relevant to women in the Encyclop´edie are surprisingly conservative.51 Voltaire’s article ‘Femme’ in

48

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Baczko, Lumi`eres de l’utopie, p. 204. This reservation is reasonably deduced from the argumentation of the Esquisse, but is challengeable as another unfairly anachronistic application of modern-day perspectives and hindsight. Gr´egoire wrote prolifically on the issue, his defence of racial equality being based, unlike Condorcet’s, on theological rather than political grounds. His major works include De la litt´erature des n`egres (1806) and De la noblesse de la peau (1826). See particularly L. Abensour, La Femme et le f´eminisme avant la R´evolution (Paris: Leroux, 1932), pp. 3– 45; A. Humphreys, ‘The “Rights of Women” in the Age of Reason: 1. John Dunton to Catherine Macaulay’, Modern Language Review 41 (1946), 257; D. Williams, ‘The politics of feminism in the French Enlightenment’, in P. Hughes and D. Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern. Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1971), pp. 333–51; D. Williams, ‘Condorcet, feminism and the egalitarian principle’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 5 (1976), 151–63; B. Brookes, ‘The feminism of Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy’, SVEC 189 (1980), 297–361; R. Niklaus, ‘Condorcet’s feminism: a reappraisal’, Condorcet Studies 2 (1987), 119–40. The case is argued by R. F. O’Reilly, ‘Montesquieu: anti-feminist’, SVEC 102 (1973), 143–56. See, for example, the entries ‘Femme’ and ‘Mariage’.

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the Dictionnaire philosophique has an anthropological rather than a sociopolitical emphasis, and contains few feminist overtones.52 Rousseauist doctrines on female education did little to advance the case for sexual egalitarianism and civil rights,53 and much of the initial momentum for feminist aspiration in the middle years of the century tended to come from the pens of novelists, playwrights, journalists, pamphleteers and minor essayists.54 Prior to Condorcet in the second half of the eighteenth century, key initiatives came from Diderot and d’Holbach among the philosophes of international reputation. Diderot’s essay Sur les femmes (1772) and d’Holbach’s Des Femmes (1773) can be seen in retrospect as two key documents which explored the interplay between political structures, legal codes, social customs and the cultural and physiological factors that conditioned women to their role. Unlike black slaves, whose inequality derived ultimately from the profit and loss imperatives driving the world of international trade, female inequality for Condorcet was related more closely to nature, and in particular to the nature of women, and to the cultural circumstances in which they led their lives.55 In this regard his analysis coincided with that of other Enlightenment thinkers who addressed the issue of sexual inequality. Diderot, for example, had identified specifically some of the problems imposed on women by the deceptions inherent in a monogamous culture, with its peculiarly western notions of love and fidelity, by the harsh legal constraints of marriage, the dangers and burdens of motherhood and the cruel neglect of old age. D’Holbach’s essay, Des Femmes, published in the third volume of Le Syst`eme social, ou Principes naturels de la morale et de 52

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In the entry ‘Homme’, Voltaire saw positive moral advantages accruing to women as a result of their physical and social inferiority, and his initially sympathetic approach to the position of women in the section M´emoire pour les femmes in the entry ‘Adult`ere’ is more than balanced by his comments on female infidelity in the first part of the entry. There are Platonic comments on the wasted political potential of women in the section dealing with salic law in the Essai sur les mœurs and in the Dictionnaire philosophique entry ‘Loi salique’. See also Voltaire’s defence of the rights of women to an intellectual life in the dedicatory epistle to Alzire, dedicated to Mme Du Chˆatelet – in which the case for intellectual parity is not quite stated. Voltaire’s correspondence is very reticent on the whole issue. Nevertheless, Condorcet saw Voltaire as an ally in the matter of women’s rights: ‘one of the men who has shown most justice towards them, and who has understood them best’ (ix: 18). For a comprehensive account of Rousseau’s views on women, see particularly P. Hoffmann, La Femme dans la pens´ee des Lumi`eres (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1977), pp. 359–446. See Williams, ‘The politics of feminism in the French Enlightenment’, pp. 339–43. Feminism was not used as a term in France until 1837, and in England not until 1848, see Niklaus, ‘Condorcet’s feminism: a reappraisal’, 119. ‘La colonisation fait seule le statut des Noirs; tandis que le fait qui prive les femmes de l’activit´e au sein de la cit´e paraˆıt lui, ne pas appartenir a` l’histoire mais bien eˆtre inscrit dans la nature. Ce serait a` la faveur d’un contrat de vente et d’un int´erˆet e´conomique national que les Noirs devraient rester esclaves; c’est parce qu’elles sont femmes que les femmes ne pourraient pr´etendre a` l’autorit´e en aucune communaut´e – politique, savante, domestique’, C. Fricheau, ‘Les Femmes dans la cit´e de l’Atlantide’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, p. 359.

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la politique, avec un examen de l’influence du gouvernement sur les mœurs, advanced the case for female equality on a number of levels. Foreshadowing Condorcet, d’Holbach illuminated the deeply political nature of female inferiority, at the heart of which lay the question of education. Des Femmes presents an impressively penetrating analysis of the pressures to which women were made vulnerable. As with Diderot, the feminist polemic merges with broader issues. The social system, with its legal, moral, political, religious and educational extensions, has poisoned at source the citizen’s happiness. Marriage itself has contributed, through its legal and financial provisions, to the atmosphere of moral decadence. Even with Diderot and d’Holbach, however, the natural law factor, now stripped of some of its mystique and honed down to its biological core arguments, still intruded to the detriment of natural equality and natural rights considerations, particularly with Diderot. However, while the full implications of egalitarian notions continued to cause a measure of intellectual discomfort, the logical political direction of the growing debate on women’s status and rights had been indicated. The next crucial step was to be taken in the following decade by Condorcet, arguably the most outspoken French feminist to defend the principle of absolute equality between the sexes since Poulain de La Barre in the previous century, and author of the first serious essay on the political rights of women prior to the Revolution. Condorcet had first raised the issue of ‘this supposed inequality’ between the sexes in the context of education in the Discours sur les sciences math´ematiques, an address given to the Lyc´ee on 15 February 1786 (i: 478–9), the year of his marriage to Sophie de Grouchy.56 The main substance of his views on the civil status of women is to be found, however, in the second eloquent and compellingly argued letter of the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven a` un citoyen de Virginie sur l’inutilit´e de partager le pouvoir l´egislatif en plusieurs corps (Letters from a freeman of New Haven to a citizen of Virginia on the futility of dividing legislative power among several bodies), in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, both of 1788, Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cit´e, written in June 1790 for the Journal de la Soci´et´e de 1789, the notes for the Kehl Voltaire, Sur l’instruction publique of 1791–2 and the 1795 Esquisse. As in the case of black servitude, in all of these essays Condorcet showed that denunciation of an injustice was not enough. It had to be supplemented by a rational demolition of the arguments propping up the injustice, and above all by a programme of action calculated to remedy the 56

See Lagrave, ‘L’Influence de Sophie de Grouchy’.

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situation.57 It was in the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven, one of his most attractively written essays, that he first formulated detailed proposals for legislation relating to constitutional rights for women, and the essence of these proposals reappeared in Sur l’admission des femmes two years later, both texts anticipating the appearance in England of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. With Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects of January 1792. The issue of equal civil rights for men and women extends over eight substantial paragraphs in the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven, a text that Condorcet almost certainly discussed with Paine.58 In the opening paragraphs of this part of the second letter (ix: 14–20), the argument about women’s rights is framed by proposals of a more general nature relating to the organisation of government, the parameters of executive power and the modalities of decision-making. The second letter also incorporates a comprehensive set of proposals relating to the reorganisation of constituencies, representation in legislative assemblies, the mathematics of voting procedures, taxation, security, foreign relations and war. The over-arching principle informing all aspects of this important text is the prospective establishment of a constitution based exclusively on those natural human rights predating the pact of association and the civil order which gave them formal political reality. From rights that were natural, in that they derived from the nature of man as a morally conscious being, arose the civil right to participate in decisions affecting the common interest, either directly or indirectly through freely elected representatives: ‘Do not men have rights as sensitive beings, capable of reason and having moral ideas? Women must therefore have exactly the same rights, and yet in no constitution that can be called free have women ever enjoyed the rights of citizens’ (ix: 15). Citing the American principle that taxation could only be legitimately imposed on those voting for it, Condorcet argued that women, including unmarried or widowed women, should theoretically have the right to refuse payment of taxes. In the case of married women Condorcet accepted the existence of a just and necessary inequality in the two-person society of marriage that manifested itself on occasions when a married couple needed to speak with one voice. The voice or vote of the married couple, however, need not necessarily be that of the husband: ‘It would appear much more natural to 57

58

Fricheau provides an interesting textual comparison of the sophisms identified by Condorcet in contemporary justifications of black servitude on the one hand, and the condition of women on the other, ‘Les Femmes dans la cit´e de l’Atlantide’, pp. 363–5. E. and R. Badinter take the view that Paine’s influence over the wording of the programme of reform that Condorcet envisaged in the Lettres is quite clear (Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 234).

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share this prerogative, and on specific issues to give the major vote to either husband or wife, depending on which is more likely to allow his will to obey his reason’ (ix: 16). After establishing the injustice of excluding women from full participation in the political process, Condorcet then examined the question of the right of women to hold public office. The exclusion of women from public office raised a double injustice, first with regard to the electorate whose choice was thereby restricted, and secondly with regard to women themselves who were thereby deprived of an advantage enjoyed by others. Condorcet saw no reason to exclude women from public office, and rejected the traditional counterposition: ‘But, you might say, would it not be ridiculous for a woman to command the army or to preside over a court? Well, do you think it necessary to forbid, by means of a specific law, everything that might be an absurd choice or action?’ (ix: 17–18). Women were not perhaps suited to military duties, and pregnancy, birth and the nurturing of children did make it difficult for them to carry out public duties without some interruption, but the only real barrier to public office was their lack of formal education, a deficiency that was manageable. Condorcet dismissed any case made for political exclusion based on assumptions of physical or intellectual inferiority.59 He was particularly concerned to discredit the latter prejudice, often expressed as an observation on the apparent absence of women from the pantheon of great scientists and artists. He noted that Voltaire thought that women possessed many talents, but that invention was not one of them, and he observed drily in response that if public office was open only to men capable of original thinking, then government departments and even academies would empty overnight. Many, if not most, public duties did not require men of genius to carry them out, such men being in any case better employed elsewhere. Condorcet’s position shades at this point into angles of argument about the female condition that link him to a level of feminist polemic to be found in France only in the writings of radicals such as Olympe de Gouges, Th´eroigne de M´ericourt and Etta Palme d’Aelders, whose voices were not to be heard until a decade later. The apparent rarity of female creative genius was not a fact of nature, or of divine ordination, but simply a consequence of social and cultural pressures. The female mind was simply awaiting liberation from ‘opinion’; ‘What is more, the sort of constraints whereby public views on morality grip the minds and souls of women from childhood onwards, and especially at the point where genius starts 59

See also on this point the Fragment sur l’Atlantide (vi: 632).

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to develop, must harm progress in almost every field’ (ix: 19). Moreover, it would be untrue to say that no woman had ever broken free of these socio-cultural and religious constraints, and Condorcet cited the examples of Mme de S´evign´e and Mme de La Fayette, but surprisingly does not refer here (though he does elsewhere) to one of the most distinguished female scientists of the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s mistress and co-Newtonian, Mme Du Chˆatelet.60 The unjustifiable denial of the female franchise remained for Condorcet one of the major charges to be levelled against ancient models of republican government, its acceptance marking a crucial and real difference between a republic and a constitution that is not free. At stake was nothing less than the rights of half of the human race, ‘rights forgotten by every legislator’. His commentary on women’s civil status and rights in the New Haven letters ends on a somewhat wry note in which he anticipated a lack of sympathy for his views on the part of his female readers: I am talking about their right to equality, and not about their influence; people might think that I have a secret desire to diminish this, and ever since Rousseau earned their approbation by saying that they were made only to look after us, but were fit only to torment us, I must not expect them to support me. But it is good to tell the truth, even if one exposes oneself to mockery. (ix: 20)

Many of the points made in the second New Haven letter resurface in a seminal article, written in June for the 3 July 1790 issue of the Journal de la Soci´et´e de 1789, entitled Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cit´e (On giving women the right to citizenship), the society in question being in effect Condorcet’s circle of aristocratic liberal friends. The Admission, foreshadowing in many ways John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women, written some eight decades later, reflects a convergence of French Enlightenment feminist thinking with Condorcet’s main corpus of proposals formulated for the constitutional management of the Revolution. As in the New Haven letters, Condorcet re-established the case for civic equality between men and women first of all at the level of human nature itself, as in the case of human rights generally, thereby colliding squarely with the Panglossian ‘all is for the best’ objections of the conservative camp. He argued that what men and women had in common as defining human characteristics was more relevant to a discussion of their respective rights and roles than their obvious differences, and in the opening paragraphs of the Admission he confronted natural law theorists defending the status quo with the over-riding 60

In fact, Condorcet conceded the hegemony of male genius in the fields of science and philosophy.

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requirements of natural rights. He observed that by invoking natural law slogans in this context legislators and philosophers had calmly violated the natural rights of half the human race by denying them the franchise. Here Condorcet underscored the recent historical irony that had allowed France to have a Revolution in the name of equality for a few hundred men, but to forget the plight of twelve million women (x: 121).61 To justify what must otherwise be called tyranny, legislators had to demonstrate that the natural rights of women were of a fundamentally different order from those of men. To do that, argued Condorcet, it would be necessary to prove that the nature of the two sexes differed in ways that rendered women incapable of exercising their duties and responsibilities as co-equal citizens. Responding to his own rhetorically charged points, Condorcet insisted that men’s rights crystallised in a functional relationship to certain natural qualities inherent in their constitutional make-up as human beings. Since the humanity of women could be identified with precisely the same natural human characteristics, it must necessarily follow that the natural rights accruing to one sex could be legitimately claimed by the other. Either no member of the human race possessed natural rights, or they all did. He who denied the rights of another human being because of religion, race or gender, denied his own rights (x: 122). Having secured the moral high ground, Condorcet then examined and dismantled the principal anti-egalitarian assumptions, re-working arguments already deployed in the New Haven letters, but with extended examples. He now gave much more attention to natural law objections to female equality based on physiological considerations. In the Fragment sur l’Atlantide he would return to this issue, and reiterate his objections to the false logic of a syllogism that linked physical disadvantage to a corresponding intellectual inferority. While pregnancy and child-care might make it more difficult for women to become a Euler or a Voltaire, he noted, somewhat mischievously, that there was nothing to prevent them becoming a Rousseau or a Pascal (vi: 632), and in the Fragment he would comment at some length on the historical evidence supporting a reappraisal of female intellectual energies and achievements (vi: 633–6). Emulating Voltairean methods of attack, Condorcet demonstrated in a style laced with irony and an abrasive faux-na¨ıf candour, already employed 61

In 1791 the flamboyant revolutionary activist, and founder-member of the Club des Citoyennes R´epublicaines R´evolutionnaires, Marie Olympe de Gouges, published the most famous of her political pamphlets, Les Droits de la femme, dedicated to Marie-Antoinette. The pamphlet was issued as an appendix to the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and the text closely echoes Condorcet’s earlier comments on the omission of women from the 1789 D´eclaration.

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effectively in the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres, the hollowness of the premises upon which doctrines of femininity were based.62 Points made in the New Haven letters reappear with enhanced rhetorical flourishes: those human beings susceptible to pregnancy and menstruation were as capable of fulfilling their civic responsibilities as those who were susceptible to gout every winter and to colds throughout the year. If men enjoyed an apparent intellectual advantage, this was not a consequence of nature and the forces of physiological determinism, but of unequal educational opportunities. The argument that no woman had ever made a significant scientific discovery, or ever shown signs of genius in the arts, had logical force and coherence only if full civil rights, including the right to vote, were to be limited to geniuses, since the average male had no more intellectual claim to a privileged civil status than the average female, and in many cases far less (x: 123). In support of women’s claims to intellectual parity, Condorcet reinforced earlier examples of female achievement by pointing in the Admission to the gifts of Elizabeth I, Maria Theresa and the two Catherines, who had all proved that the necessary qualities of leadership and political courage were not lacking in the characters of those women who were able, through the arbitrary privileges of their birth, to escape the normal realities and restrictions that governed women’s lives, and actually wield power. The issue was education, not nature.63 Was it believable that Mrs Macaulay could not have performed better in the House of Commons than many of the elected members? Could she not have defended the Revolution and the cause of freedom more convincingly than Burke had denounced it? Would she not have been able to debate such questions as liberty of conscience more sensibly than Pitt? Would not the rights of French citizens have been better protected at the 1614 meeting of the Estates-General by Montaigne’s adopted daughter than by Courtin, who openly believed in witches and the occult? Was Mme Du Chˆatelet less talented than Rouill´e? Would Mme de Lambert have authorised laws against protestants, thieves, smugglers and blacks as absurd and barbaric as those enacted by the Guardian of the 62 63

For an excellent, comprehensive analysis of theories of femininity in this period, see Hoffmann, La Femme, pp. 289–352. On the physiological arguments, see especially pp. 175–240. In the Fragment sur l’Atlantide, this point is central to the discussion on female genius: ‘Women can thus participate in the most important discoveries, even in those sciences in which those discoveries are the fruit of profound meditation; genius in other sciences, as in the arts, does not presuppose that sort of mental strength which seems to have been denied to them. But who knows whether, when a different education has allowed women to reach their natural potential, that intimate relationship between a mother or a wet-nurse and a child, which does not exist in the case of men, will not become for women a unique way of making discoveries more important and more necessary than one thinks to the growth of the human mind, to the art of perfecting it and to facilitating its progress?’ (vi: 633–4).

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Seals: ‘Looking down the list of those who have ruled over them, we can see that men do not have much right to feel proud’ (x: 123–4). Highlighting the copious evidence to the contrary, Condorcet acknowledged the astonishing tenacity of the stereotypical myth that women were governed by sentiment and impulse rather than by reason and logic, and were therefore unpredictable, unreliable and possibly dangerous if given political power: Women are superior to men in the tender, domestic virtues; like men they love freedom, although they do not share in all of its advantages; and in republics they have often been known to sacrifice themselves for it; in every nation they have even demonstrated the virtues of citizenship whenever chance or unrest has caused them to be brushed aside by men’s arrogance and tyranny. People say that women were never led by what is called reason, in spite of their great wit, wisdom and an analytical ability that rivals that of the most subtle dialectician. This view is wrong; it is true that they are not led by men’s reason, but they are led by their own. (x: 124–5)

If women appeared to reason in a way that was different from that of men, then again this was a contingent consequence of their moral and social training, and symptomatic of their whole cultural and political predicament: It has been said that, while they were better than men, softer, more sensitive, less prone to the vices relating to egotism and callousness, women did not really possess an instinct for justice, that they obeyed their feelings rather than their conscience. This observation is more accurate, but proves nothing. It is not nature that is behind this difference, but education and social life. Neither has accustomed women to the notion of what is just, but rather to the notion of what is honourable. Far removed from the world of business and from all decisions that have to be made in accordance with the strict rules of justice and positive law, the things which preoccupy them, and on which they take action, are precisely those things governed by feelings and a natural sense of honour. It is therefore unjust to persist in refusing women the exercise of their natural rights for reasons whose validity depends only on the fact that they do not enjoy those rights. (x: 125)

In 1792 Condorcet devoted much time to the consideration of ways in which a new educational system could benefit women, and he approached the issue of extending educational opportunities to women in the light of a simple working political principle: ‘Inequality of education is one of the main sources of tyranny’ (vii: 171). In Sur l’instruction publique (On public education) Condorcet made clear that, among other rights which must be granted to women in a free constitution, the right to enlightenment was among the most important, and was in fact the right that held the key to

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political and social equality. It was difficult to see why one sex reserved for itself certain subjects of knowledge, and why subjects that were useful should not be taught to both sexes: Public education, to deserve its name, must be extended to every citizen . . . Moreover, it cannot be established for men only without introducing blatant inequality, not only between husbands and wives, but between brothers and sisters, and even between sons and their mothers. Now, nothing could be more contrary to the purity and well-being of domestic morality. Everywhere, and especially in families, equality is the basis of happiness, peace and virtue. (vii: 218–19)

To substantiate his argument that women could profit from a scientific training, and could themselves make significant contributions to knowledge, Condorcet cited the cases of Professors Bassi and Agnesi who, despite their sex, had occupied respectively the chairs of anatomy and mathematics at the University of Bologna with notable success (vii: 221). It was the female state of conditioned and regulated ignorance that engendered inequality and corrupted the relationship between the sexes (vii: 223). Given the lack of suitable educational facilities for women, and the inequitable laws, with their origin in force and their perpetuation in sophistry, women were compelled to live in a separately ordered socio-political reality. They were confronted with different problems, and their intellectual capacity was directed towards different ends. Condorcet’s educational proposals would make provision for the admission of women to all professions for which they showed talent (vii: 216). Condorcet reduced the problem of male resistance to the granting of civil rights to women in Sur l’admission to that of a prejudice masquerading as the ‘public interest’. It was in his view just another argument of convenience without logical or moral merit, but possessing concrete political force and substance. It was after all in the name of utilit´e that French industry was groaning in chains, that the African negro was enslaved, that the Bastille was full, that books were censored, that torture and secret trials were accepted (x: 126). He did not hesitate to raise the political temperature of the debate over women’s status by grafting on to it the most flagrant aspects of contemporary injustice and cruelty. A transformation of the female condition in France would not, he insisted, be against the true public interest. Women would not be distracted from their domestic responsibilities in order to carry out their duties as deputies. The enfranchised wife would not abandon her husband and children, any more than the enfranchised farmer would abandon his plough, or the enfranchised artisan his workshop (x: 128). On the contrary, the fabric of society would be strengthened

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as women found political and intellectual fulfilment, and lost their sense of injustice. In the case of women, Condorcet was just as concerned with the private as with the public world, and it was with respect to the private world of women especially that his political stance on their behalf generated a coherent set of legislative proposals for the improvement of women’s lives generally. The necessity to protect at all costs the institution of the family, the sanctity of marriage and its associated property and inheritance laws and the primacy of the maternal role: these were all major weapons in the armoury of the conservatives, permitting the invocation of natural law to confirm de facto female dependency. Thus, arguing that marriage should be a civil contract only, Condorcet pressed vigorously the case for divorce. The indissolubility of the marriage laws spawned grave social problems: adultery, prostitution, bastardy and promiscuity. He proposed that divorce should be granted upon the recommendation of an advisory council consisting of relatives of both parties, who would decide questions of alimony and custody of children. Contemporary legal structures, class divisions and economic inequities all underpinned the unhappiness of the citizen. Vicious and hypocritical sexual attitudes were encouraged by that legal structure which, while preventing divorce, upheld the harsh authority of parents to make unsuitable marriages of convenience on behalf of unwilling daughters: ‘I will then observe that family upsets have their roots almost entirely in class distinctions, inequality of wealth, the laws depriving children of the right to determine their own lives without parental consent, and finally the indissolubility of marriage’ (vi: 523). Condorcet was an outspoken advocate of the right of women to plan their pregnancies prudently, illuminating the issue of birth control in a way that took him well beyond the horizons of his age (vi: 256–8).64 Condorcet would return to the issue of birth control in quasi-eugenic terms that relate the implications of unlimited population growth to the prospects for human happiness and even survival in the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse where he anticipates a future in which the primary obligation of men and women towards their offspring is not merely to give them life but happiness, ‘and not the puerile notion of filling the earth with useless, unhappy beings. 64

See A. Chamoux and C. Dauphin, ‘La Contraception avant la R´evolution franc¸aise’, Annales: Economies, Soci´et´es, Civilisations 24 (1969), 662–84. Cf. J. Huxley, ‘A factor overlooked by the philosophes: the population explosion’, SVEC 25 (1963), 861–3. Writing in 1778, Auget de Montyon could report that the use of birth control techniques, other than self-induced abortion (punishable by death), was widespread, even among peasant women, see A.-J.-B. Auget de Montyon, Recherches et consid´erations sur la population de la France (Paris: Mourard, 1778), p. 102.

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There could be a limit to resources and in consequence a need to limit population growth if that premature process of destruction so contrary to nature and to the social prosperity of a proportion of those already living is not to be the result’ (vi: 258). Here the warnings soon to come from Thomas Malthus in his classic statement of the problem in the Essay on Population of 1798 are clearly anticipated.65 Meanwhile, to solve more pressing and immediate problems facing women in this context, Condorcet proposed the establishment of special hospitals for unmarried pregnant girls to which they could go without incurring the usual penalties for their condition, and he was concerned equally with the plight of their illegitimate children (viii: 465–6). Nowhere does he advocate abortion. As with political freedom, women had the right to sexual freedom, and Condorcet saw the manipulation of sexual attitudes and fears historically as one of the root sources of power, and of its abuse. He took the view that women had been penalised for their sexuality by church and state alike yet, as he observed in his notes for the Kehl Voltaire, the confessors of kings had done more damage to the civil order than any royal mistress. Rigidly enforced sexual codes for women were the surface manifestation of an inhumane and decadent alliance between the temporal and the spiritual, producing always repressive political systems (iv: 212–18). No virtue was easier, or appeared easier, to practise than chastity, but chastity was compatible only with the absence of real virtue and the presence of every vice. From the moment that chastity was considered to have moral significance, every scoundrel was assured of obtaining public esteem at little expense. In countries which boasted strict sexual codes, every crime and debauchery were sure to be prevalent (iv: 218). For Condorcet, the relationship between the sexes was a key element in the flowering of a progressive political and moral order, yet because of the fears, prejudices and distortions that existed and were exploited within that relationship, reason had not been allowed to prevail. Behind the abstractions of philosophical argument, Condorcet was able to perceive individual men and women, and their problems, in an honest, human and above all practical way. His feminist sympathies, his view on human nature generally, on mercantilism and free trade, on the slave trade, on religious minorities and on political institutions and processes are all interlinked aspects of a wide-ranging meditation on human progress and a comprehensive vision 65

See M. Baridon, ‘Malthus, Condorcet et le probl`eme de la pauvret´e’, SVEC 311 (1993), 275–85; A. B´ejin, ‘Condorcet pr´ecurseur de l’eug´enisme r´epublicain’, Histoire, ´economie, soci´et´e 7 (1988), 347–54; A. B´ejin, ‘Condorcet pr´ecurseur de l’eug´enisme’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 168–73.

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of modernity.66 To destroy the laws that militated against women’s natural rights was part of a mosaic of argument that attacked simultaneously the commercial doctrines that were strangling France’s trade and economic prosperity, guild regulations that denied the working man the fruits of his labour, censorship that suppressed free thought, sexual attitudes that debased human values,67 all serving in the end only vested interests. In a century which had perfected the use of galanterie and sentimentality to disguise the chains of an uncompromising subjugation, Condorcet was able to see woman as a free personality, an ˆetre sensible no less capable of rational thought and action than man, and with moral, intellectual and political dimensions to her role as a citizen under a free constitution and as an authentic agent of enlightenment (vi: 632–3). Condorcet injected explicitly feminist elements into his dream of human progress and perfectibility, and of man’s potential to order society rationally and justly. Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cit´e made a considerable impact on contemporaries. Political leaders remained silent, however, in the face of a challenge that was too radical. Nevertheless, the fact that the 1791 constitution established marriage as a civil contract, and the fact that divorce was recognised by the Convention on 20 February 1792 with a decree which also allowed women to appear in civil suits, marked small moments of triumph for Condorcet. Surprisingly, however, the Projet de constitution that he presented to the Convention on 15/16 February 1793 is silent on the key constitutional issue of female suffrage.68 The new order of the Revolution was to be resolutely masculine, and after the Revolution the 1804 Civil 66 67

68

‘His feminism . . . is part of a consistent philosophical stance and the logical outcome of his rationalism’, Niklaus, ‘Condorcet’s feminism: a reappraisal’, 121. Condorcet dismissed, for example, the moral argument linking immoral literature to immoral behaviour – the satellites of Cromwell did not have to carry indecent books in their saddlebags to inspire them to commit atrocities (iv: 89). He also argued the case against police harassment of prostitutes (viii: 469–70), and he denounced the barbarous laws against homosexuals (iv: 561). See Schapiro, Condorcet, pp. 192–5. Niklaus explains this lapse as ‘the price [Condorcet] had to pay for participation in political life, along with other men of principle commonly unwilling to compromise. Condorcet’s integrity, however, should not be called into question’ (Niklaus, ‘Condorcet’s feminism: a reappraisal’, 122). With regard to the tactical and pragmatic issues involved, Faur´e draws attention to the relevance of the calculus of probabilities: ‘En l’´etat, les femmes ne poss´edaient pas en nombre les moyens culturels n´ecessaires a` l’exercice de la souverainet´e nationale. Leur situation d’ignorance les exposait aux manipulations politiques les plus grossi`eres. L’´egalitarisme que prˆonait Condorcet supposait une th´eorie reposant sur la loi des grands nombres. Le petit nombre des femmes e´mancip´ees, capables d’exprimer en toute ind´ependance un point de vue, ne pouvait entrer dans ce calcul. De ce fait, la gent f´eminine e´tait priv´ee de jouer sur les causes qui rendaient conjecturellement impossible son admission dans la cit´e rationnelle. L’amoureux du calcul des probabilit´es qu’´etait Condorcet s’opposait a` une logique purement juridique de l’´egalit´e, indiff´erente aux nombres’, C. Faur´e, ‘La Pens´ee probabiliste de Condorcet et le suffrage f´eminin’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 353–4.

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Code would formally deny women the political rights that Condorcet had claimed on their behalf, with the result that his great vision of the common rights of men and women as the building-blocks of a modern constitution was destined to remain yet another vision whose time had not yet come. No legislature in 1790 was open to argument about equal civil rights for women, and even Condorcet could not envisage women exercising the rights of equal civil status until equal educational opportunities had prepared them for it. Almost a hundred and fifty years would have to pass before proposals to admit women fully to membership of the civil order, and in particular to extend to women the right to elect representatives to the National Assembly, would acquire the legislative reality for which Condorcet tirelessly campaigned.

chap t e r 7

Justice and the law

civil l aws and civil rights Condorcet wrote prolifically on the natural origins of justice and the law. Surprisingly, however, he did not in the end bring his thoughts together in a single systematically argued work dedicated exclusively to the subject of legislation and the art of jurisprudence, although from the evidence of manuscript fragments it is clear that he did plan such a work.1 Had he written it, he would certainly have paid some attention to the natural setting against which the evolution of civil and criminal law codes could be envisaged, and the relationship of this natural setting to the authenticating principles of law-making and law-enforcement in modern nation-states. As we have seen, natural communal life originated, in Condorcet’s view, in the interaction of pain and pleasure experienced through the senses by the individual organism with the external world to produce an awareness of communal contexts and needs.2 From this sensation-based awareness of communal need the natural order retained a measure of authority in the process of transition from nature to the civil order. The immutable laws of nature, ‘too often unrecognised by reason and universal law’, were still relevant to the formulation of moral and judicial codes.3 The dispensations of natural law continued to underpin those codes, and conferred ultimate legitimacy on human rights and needs. Only by retaining the crucial link between nature, human nature, rights, needs and the institutions of the civil order could the law continue to embody the ‘immutable laws’ of natural 1

2

3

BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 104–51, 47, 63–4. Cf. Baker, Condorcet, p. 445 n. 88. For Condorcet’s detailed proposals to amend the criminal code, see the Essai sur quelques changements a` faire dans les lois criminelles de France printed by Cahen, Condorcet, Appendix 1, pp. 549–59. On man’s transition from nomadic individualism to the first stages of civil society see the Esquisse (vi: 11–14), and above pp. 46–7, 69–71. Condorcet also reflected on the relationship between justice and laws in primitive times in the commentary to the pr´eambule of Sur les moyens de traiter les protestants franc¸ais comme des hommes sans nuire a` la religion catholique (v: 462–7). See also Condorcet’s commentary on the relationship between nature and social/moral structures in the Exposition et motifs du plan de constitution (xii: 366).

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justice, ensure the creation of an effective and equitable criminal code and deploy the nation’s economic and human resources to maximum advantage.4 Only then could the law also ensure that a society’s political life, the exercise of power, the duties of public office, the role of the police, the business of the courts, were defined and confined within an overarching framework of natural rights: ‘Thus it is not enough for society to be governed by law; that law must be just. It is not enough for individuals to obey the law; the law itself must conform to what is required to maintain the rights of each individual’ (iv: 620).5 While the authority of the law derived from natural needs and rights, this authority had soon been obscured as the early peuplades evolved, and the seeds of error had been sown. The lesson of history in the context of the law was simple for Condorcet: as with the constitution, the law required subjection to constant vigilance if the seeds of error were not to flourish in the modern world as they had so clearly flourished in the old.6 To this end, the role of public opinion in the process of political vigilance in the modern state was crucial. Public opinion was often associated with the General Will in an unmediated form in Condorcet’s thought through which rights and needs could be given legitimate, practical expression in the absence of a rationally and equitably ordered franchise. This could be in the form of protest, dissidence or even insurrection. Free expression of public opinion was the precious channel for public participation in law-making, and above all in law reform, though only when informed and shaped by enlightened leadership and example.7 This last qualification was important, because Condorcet was quite aware of the Janus-like features of the face of the people, and the difference between the positive role to be played by informed public opinion and the hideous tyranny that could be unleashed by mob rule. The voice of the people had to be an authentic expression of natural need and will. 4

5

6

7

This last point regarding the impact of enlightened legislation on government policies is discussed further in the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es in the context of taxation, agriculture, education, road and canal systems, and other aspects of ‘public good’ infrastructure (xi: 193–4). As has been seen, the purpose of the civil order for Condorcet was first and foremost the protection of natural rights. He referred frequently to the danger posed to those rights by a badly defined and inequitably applied legal code, see for example the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais (ix: 100–1). In his treatment of the growth of error in human affairs, Condorcet did not share Rousseau’s reservations with regard to historical processes. This is not to say, however, that Condorcet’s historical vision was not a profoundly Manichean one. See also the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature for Condorcet’s views on the reorganisation of the National Assembly in order to achieve this (x: 373–4). He noted in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales that the people’s participation in law-making would never be a reality if not open to all (viii: 556–7).

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In De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe he expressed a profound fear of the tenacious hold of two thousand years of prejudice, superstition, error and fanaticism over group mentalities, and he well appreciated the ease with which, even in the ninth ´epoque, modern states could be deflected from the straight and narrow path traced by the immutable, but fragile, laws of natural justice and natural morality.8 Even an enfranchised people, ‘led astray by wrong policies’, could match the worst excesses of despots (xi: 243–6). Nevertheless, enlightened public opinion could enable legislators to recognise error, rediscover the natural bases of civil authority and appreciate once again the relevance of the rights of man to the construction of the law, not as a theoretical set of propositions, but as an inescapable, all-pervasive human reality. Enlightened public opinion reminded society that the only true purpose of the law, and of political and social organisation generally, was the protection of natural rights, and that the art of law-making was the implementation of that purpose (vi: 175–6). Like many of his contemporaries, Condorcet saw the civil order as a complex intersection of natural human realities and constitutional artifice. However, unlike Rousseau, he did not interpret that intersection in terms of a clash of forces which were necessarily mutually destructive. The demands of nature and those of society could be reconciled, and the first step towards reconciliation was to ensure that the law permitted the recognition of natural rights on a universal basis through a formal constitutional declaration. Without such a declaration the legal and moral vacuum arising would allow despotism to flourish, and Condorcet described the consequences of this vacuum in the Id´ees sur le despotisme (ix: 145–73). It was only in the light of a declaration of rights that the people could properly assess their interests with regard to the law: ‘Everyone has an equal right to be informed about all their interests, to know all truths’ (vi: 178). Only with the principle of universality of rights embedded in the implementation of the law, reflecting the universality of human nature and human need, could the survival in modern government of any respect for natural law be assured.9 Condorcet referred frequently to the relationship between the criminal code, natural 8 9

Condorcet commented at length on the ideal relationship between the law and morality in the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 195–6). Lawyers had a vested interest in preserving a lack of uniformity and consistency in law codes because they gave rise to more legal, fee-generating disputes. The problem was particularly acute, for example, in the context of weights and measures. See the Observations sur le vingt-neuvi`eme livre de l’Esprit des lois for one of Condorcet’s more detailed explanations of the advantages of ‘a uniform and simple jurisprudence’ (i: 377–81). Cf. Alengry, Condorcet, pp. 745–76; Schapiro, Condorcet, p. 119. Cf. Baker’s comments on Condorcet’s critical reactions to Montesquieu’s methodology, and in particular Montesquieu’s approach to the invariability principle in legislation (Condorcet, p. 222). For Condorcet, Montesquieu had failed to define with sufficient rigour the criteria for recognising a just law.

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law and natural rights (which could be infringed but never abolished by the criminal code) in legal controversies in which he became involved, and about which he wrote passionately in such pamphlets as the 1781 R´eponse au premier plaidoyer de m. d’Epr´emesnil dans l’affaire du comte de Lally (Reply to Mr d’Epr´emesnil’s plea in the Comte de Lally affair) (vii: 25–8) and the 1786 R´eflexions d’un citoyen non gradu´e sur un proc`es tr`es connu (Reflections of an unqualified citizen on a well-known trial) (vii: 141–66). In the introduction to the 1786 essay on the impact of the American Revolution upon Europe, Condorcet distilled four fundamental natural rights, from which all laws would emanate. The civil and criminal codes governing trade and commercial life, the establishment of the civil order, the institutions of government, the framing of the constitution, all stemmed from the implications and constraints of the first three rights, namely freedom, property and equality before the law. The four basic rights were set out in order of priority. The fourth right, that of participation in the enactment of legislation, took Condorcet into more complex, controversial and certainly more subtly argued, areas – if only because it opened up the issue of the franchise, with its exclusions and preconditions, and its assumptions relating to public reason and public virtue. The accordance of the fourth right in the form of participation in law-making and constitution-changing depended for its success on an enlightened citizenry that understood its true needs and the true nature of the liberty to which it aspired. Without enlightened participation from below, the law would become the plaything of a corrupt judiciary, ruthless magistrates and unbridled vested interests.10 Enlightened participation from below was for Condorcet the means to ensure that the rights and needs derived from the nature of things and the nature of man could survive in the legislation governing the civil order. Democracy was a fragile and volatile commodity, to be handled with great caution. The realignment of civil laws with civil rights was essentially concerned with the quest for collective happiness, the ultimate justification for the constraints on individual freedom in the civil order.11 For Condorcet, however, the route forward in the establishment of a just code of laws did not 10

11

He defined the problem succinctly in 1788 in the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais sur les affaires pr´esentes: ‘In every civilised nation . . . there is no liberty and no enjoyment of natural rights without enlightenment’ (ix: 105). In the Id´ees sur le despotisme he made it clear that the untutored despotism of the people was to be feared, and he had much to say in that essay about the nature of insurrection, law-enforcement and the art of controlling the blind forces of mob-rule (ix: 161–4). See Baker, Condorcet, pp. 215–19; cf. Helv´etius, De l’esprit, pp. 322, 375. On Turgot’s opposition to utilitarian doctrines, so influential as far as Condorcet was concerned, see Baker, Condorcet, p. 443 n. 68. Utility was not the only criterion for legislation. In the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres Condorcet insisted that there were situations when the state’s interests must give way to those of the individual (R´eflexions, pp. 15–16); cf. Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven a` un citoyen de Virginie (ix: 3).

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lie in an informal reconciliation of conflicting interests, but in a formal recognition of rights. This was the principle at the heart of the sixth article of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 496). Without that formally declared recognition, civil and criminal law codes existed in a moral vacuum with the result that national character risked being debased and individual morality undermined, a double danger to which Condorcet drew attention in the Vie de m. Turgot: By bringing men together, society increases the influence of each on the happiness of each; and while, strictly speaking, [civic] duties can be reduced to justice, that is to say to a duty not to infringe the natural rights of others, from that influence duties of another kind must have emerged urging us to contribute to the happiness of others. The reward for these virtues is to be found in our hearts and in the goodwill of our neighbours . . . But in general these same private virtues, which embody what we call customs, have not been put into practice in any nation. (v: 194, 195)

The moral nature of the civil order had not so far been fully realised precisely because law codes had come into existence simply as an expression of the despotic will of the strong over the weak, of men over women, of fathers over children, of masters over slaves, of the rich over the poor: ‘It is the case that everywhere the law has flattered humanity’s vices instead of repressing them . . . As a true mirror for vanity, the law has divided men into orders, into classes, and has contradicted nature which tends to unite them’ (v: 195). The law was thus rooted in vice not virtue, as Turgot had clearly understood. Man was a sentient being, with natural needs developing as a function of that sentience, to which the law should be a direct response. The legislative provisions of the civil order should derive from an understanding on the part of legislators of that crucial interaction between individuals and institutions which together create the public realm where the public and the private co-exist. This was the public political space in which the pursuit of happiness was undertaken as a collective enterprise arising from an awareness, shared between government and the governed, of the rights and of the responsibilities of all parties to the pact of association. The link between the individual citizen and the law was thus dynamic rather than static, affective as well as jurisdictional. In the 1790 Dissertation philosophique et politique, ou R´eflexions sur cette question: s’il est utile On the other hand, the objective of the law was to make citizens behave, not necessarily as they would wish to behave as individuals, but as the general will and the rule of reason required them to behave: ‘The law can have only one objective: to govern the way in which the citizens of a state must act on those occasions when reason requires them to conduct themselves, not in accordance with their own opinion and will, but in accordance with the common rule’ (ix: 3). When the individual submits his will to a law of which he personally disapproves, he is not acting against reason but in accordance with it. Public participation in the evolution of the law enabled individuals to understand the relationship between the individual’s will and that of the collectivity (vi: 262–3).

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aux hommes d’ˆetre tromp´es? (A philosophical and political essay, or reflections on this question: is it useful for men to be deceived?) Condorcet also developed views on the moral implications of political life in his biography of Turgot, with its reiterated references to the ways in which the law extended to the inner life of the citizen. Condorcet never failed to stress the moral, sense-related dimension of the law, and the implications of this for national, as well as individual character: ‘Thus it is only because institutions are bad that people are so often inclined to steal’ (v: 362). The diagnosis of this fatal degeneration of the law as a consequence of its link with the nature of man having been lost since the time of the ancients is also to be found in many of Condorcet’s ´eloges of great academicians, and it was a recurring feature of his observations on the twenty-ninth book of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois12 of 1780 where he reflected on the place of truth in judicial processes (i: 363), and questioned Montesquieu’s reluctance to raise the moral issue of justice or injustice with regard to the laws that he discussed. The issue was particularly acute in respect of Montesquieu’s apparent acceptance of the use of torture in judicial proceedings: ‘Never any analysis, discussion or precise principle’ (i: 365, 367).13 If France was still in a semi-barbarous state, it was in part because judicial punishment was perceived as an act of vengeance rather than justice,14 and Condorcet condemned Montesquieu for accepting unconditionally the perpetuation of legal systems that appealed to the worst in human nature (i: 372–5).15 12 13

14

15

See Williams, ‘Condorcet and the art of eulogy’, pp. 363–80. Catherine II rejected advice to retain torture for the crime of l`ese-majest´e, and removed torture from the judicial process altogether: ‘A sovereign dared to do more than a philosopher ever dared to say’ (iv: 571). Judicial punishments had a deterrent purpose, but Condorcet also emphasised rehabilitation as an element to consider in the treatment of criminals. On the advantages of making convicts work productively instead of languishing in prison, see iv: 392. On the obligations of courts, and the purpose of the criminal code in this respect, see also the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 186–92). Like Beccaria, Condorcet thought that punishment must be proportionate to the offence, and linked to the nature of the crime rather than to the personal circumstances of the criminal. In his notes for the Kehl Voltaire, he denounced the punishments reserved for offences that in his view were moral rather than civil crimes such as adultery, bigamy, suicide and sodomy (iv: 326, 363, 561, 563–6). ‘Crimes which societies have the right to punish must be actions harmful to society. Their punishment must be proportionate to the harm that they might do in the sense that it must not go beyond the harm already done’ (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 14–15). None of these religious or sexual crimes had any effect on public order. He was particularly concerned with the punishment for infanticide and the operation of the medieval pregnancy laws that went back to the government of Cardinal Bertrand, Henri II’s Chancellor (v: 564), and had much to say about the establishment of hospices for women to alleviate the problem. Among the sexual crimes that fell into the moral rather than criminal category, the exception was rape (v: 577). On Beccaria and the advances made by the application of science to the law, see the Lettres au roi de Prusse (i: 315). Condorcet knew Beccaria personally, the latter being a member of Sophie de Grouchy’s salon. For further commentary on judicial punishments, see also the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 190) and the Fragments sur la libert´e de la presse (xi: 255–7).

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In no other area, other than that of the constitution itself, was the moral challenge to modernity more acute, and seemingly intractable, than in the area of criminal codes and judicial reform. In the 1776 R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es Condorcet set out the minimal conditions for good legislation, illuminating simultaneously by inference the deficiencies of ancien r´egime legal structures and practice.16 Laws affecting the life and death of every citizen must be framed in ways that are clearly understandable to the citizen; the citizen should not have to be wealthy in order to have recourse to the law to protect his property; the rights of the poorest citizen to the ownership of his possessions should no longer be legally vulnerable; no citizen should be deprived of the right to legal redress to resist the chicaneries of those who threaten his ruination simply because recourse to the law is beyond his means. Criminal procedures should no longer be held in camera; due process should not be biased against the accused; torture should be abolished as a means to establish guilt or innocence. Sentences should be in accordance with a precisely framed penal code and no longer dependent on judicial whim; cruel punishments should cease to be regarded as an effective deterrence (xi: 191–2). Condorcet envisaged a system in which rank offered no protection from due process, in which the right to judge others was not the exclusive prerogative of a corps; in which judges were accountable, and court procedures transparent ‘so that criminal courts are the people’s consolation and no longer its dread’. Condorcet’s commentary on the law in the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es, while targeting particular injustices relating to the grain trade, reflected also his characteristic concern, not so much with the technicalities of jurisprudence per se in isolation from other aspects of political and social policy, but rather with the tangible realities of the impact of the law on daily life.17 The prospects for the admission of the concept of rights into French legislation looked particularly bleak in 1775 when Condorcet published one of his most important statements on ‘unnatural’ legislation, the R´eflexions sur la jurisprudence criminelle (Reflections on criminal law). The R´eflexions interlocked closely with observations on natural and unnatural laws which 16

17

His view of the legal system of the ancien r´egime was quite simply that it represented the victory of force over justice and rights in the interests of the few. Only through the actions and writings of the philosophes had that victory been tempered by the assertion of the authority of natural, universal moral laws, see Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire (xii: 618–19). In particular, this ‘operational’ perspective also informed the formulation of amendments to the criminal code to be found in the Essai sur quelques changements a` faire dans les lois criminelles de France (see Cahen, Condorcet, Appendix 1).

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he would expound at greater length thirteen years later in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales. The overt point at issue in the R´eflexions is the salt-tax, the gabelle, but the covert issue was the nature of crime itelf. This attack on a set of laws which met all the conditions of unnatural legislation set out in the Essai is conducted in the form of a trenchant, deeply ironic commentary on quotations from eight articles forming part of the judicial code relating to punishments under the salt-tax laws, followed by a second commentary on six articles on aspects of judicial procedure, and a third commentary on the role of magistrates charged with the responsibility of convictions.18 Like the laws relating to the grain trade, the salt laws held particular interest for Condorcet as they brought together issues of fiscal policy with those of policing, public order and public happiness. They also illuminated the importance of the two principal criteria for ‘natural’ legislation: need and usefulness. Two vital questions are asked in Condorcet’s reflections on the restrictions relating to trade: what makes a good law, and what is the test of good legislation? He noted that few professors of jurisprudence had been willing to risk their reputations by identifying a specific model of good law-making, or even of a good law-maker. He proposed, tongue in cheek, to rise to that challenge in the R´eflexions, and to illustrate both good lawmaking and a good law-maker in the form of the ‘great’ Colbert’s gabelle.19 What Condorcet actually believed to be one of the most flagrant examples of ‘unnatural’, ancien r´egime legislation is then declared to be ‘one of the masterpieces of the immortal Colbert,20 whose great virtues and rare genius made France happy, as we all know’ (vii: 5). The purpose of good legislation was clearly to prevent crime as well as punish criminals, and what worse crime was there than that of the ‘enormous crime’ of faux-saunage,21 and what better way of preventing ‘a crime of human l`ese-majest´e’ than the 18 19

20

21

On the public duty of magistrates to serve the interests of the people, and the danger of ‘sectarian zeal’ adversely affecting ‘judicial zeal’, see also the Eloge de Michel de L’Hˆopital (iii: 482–3). Although Condorcet refers to the gabelle as being ‘Colbert’s law’, it was in fact a feudal law that had been introduced by Philippe VI in 1341, with supplementary ordonnances in 1343. Colbert had refined its provisions in May 1680 to increase crown revenues – for example, by restricting the legal provenance of salt destined for the Paris region, which had the effect of broadening the categories of faux-sel. ‘The others are the excise code, the tithe laws and the manufacturing regulations. These masterpieces are familiar only to professionals; and among the writers who have praised this great minister are some who have not read his works’ (vii: 5 n. 1). The crime of faux-saunage involved not only the avoidance of tax through smuggling, but also included the use of sel de devoir for the purpose of salting meat and other perishable food. The gabelle was abolished by a decree of 21 December 1790, supplemented by decrees issued between 31 October and 5 November abolishing all internal customs barriers, making France for the first time an internally unified free trade area.

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salt-tax? A footnote ensures that the irony is not missed with a sly definition of faux-saunage as the illegal trade in the kind of salt to which the gabeliers have not added dust, ‘or any other rubbish’ (vii: 5 n. 2). That the salt-tax represented an example of retrogressive, self-defeating disproportion between crime and punishment, of legislative inefficiency, fiscal damage, cruelty and inhumanity, and of a law uncoupled from natural principles of morality, is the indignant sub-text of the R´eflexions. In the commentary on the seventeenth titre of article 3 of the provisions for punishment of faux-sauniers, Condorcet cited verbatim the shocking penalties for salt-trafficking: nine years of galley service and a 500 livres fine for a first offence, hanging and strangling for a second offence, the severity of the punishment depending on whether the criminal was arrested armed or unarmed, transporting the salt with a horse and cart, by means of a boat, or just peddling it on the streets (vii: 6–7). Adopting the ‘innocent eye’ stance of Montesquieu’s Persians, or a Voltairean Huron ing´enu, Condorcet then observed that it was difficult to understand how such laws could be enacted against human beings by other human beings unless either the tax-farmers did not consider the salt-traffickers to be human, or the farmers themselves were not human. However, the reader should not jump to false conclusions. In fact, the Condorcet persona assures us, Colbert had allowed his humanity to get the better of his wisdom. The salt laws were not severe enough, and when Colbert’s successor, Chamillard, discovered in 1704 that salt-trafficking was on the increase, he found himself obliged to extend the death penalty for a first offence to any group of smugglers numbering five or more. Condorcet traces the trajectory of increasing severity of the penalties passed by successive administrations, demonstrating simultaneously the corresponding decrease in efficacy of such deterrents in preventing the proliferation of the crime.22 22

Condorcet used the salt-tax laws in the R´eflexions sur la jurisprudence criminelle to raise the whole question of the relationship between crime levels and the severity of penal codes (in particular the use of barbaric methods of capital punishment), and like Montesquieu he expressed scepticism. In the Esquisse he noted the mildness of the penal system operated by the ancients. In Rome, for example, if the death penalty had to be invoked, it could be carried out only after recourse to a formidable legal machinery of judgement and conviction, in which the whole people played a role: ‘[The Romans] felt that in a free nation this mildness is the only way to stop political dissent from degenerating into bloody massacres; they wanted to correct the savagery of their customs through the humanity of their laws’ (vi: 96). The debt of modern jurisprudence to the Romans is acknowledged in the Esquisse (vi: 96–7). The Greeks also, for all their concern with the prosperity of the polity – sometimes at the expense of the individual citizen – had felt, like Enlightenment philosophes, the need to inspire public horror at the spectacle of bloodshed, respect for human life and contempt for inhumanity in judicial procedures. In Rhodes the death penalty had involved no public spectacle (vi: 460–1). In his

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Wise legislators would abolish cruel laws which inspire pity for the criminal, and coarsen the civil order without reducing crime levels. Moreover, responsibility for judicial measures taken against the faux-sauniers was entirely in the hands of monopoly interests, that is to say, the tax-farmers themselves, who would otherwise stand to lose most from any repeal of the gabelle. A Panglossian rationalisation is disingenuously offered: ‘This arrangement might appear hard, but it makes people feel more keenly what an abominable crime it is to sell salt cheaply to the people’ (vii: 7). Thus far had France advanced from the feudal darkness. In similar vein, Condorcet extended a Panglossian pseudo-justification of the legal provisions of the gabelle for fining, imprisoning or strangling offenders in the cause of salt to other articles of the code affecting the circumstances in which salt could be sold in Brittany, the provisions for flogging and galley service in cases of non-payment of fines, the need for fines to be paid before any appeal against them could be heard, the penalties enacted against the families of faux-sauniers and so on. In each commentary the most appalling features of the gabelle are mercilessly exposed, the commentary on the seventh titre of article 16, referring to the punishment of faux-sauniers under the age of fourteen, being perhaps the most harrowing.23 The Condorcet persona finally acknowledged that some people, under the sway of thinkers like Montesquieu, Beccaria and Voltaire, might not entirely share his admiration for Colbert and the gabelle. They might say that this legislation offended nature, reason and humanity; that its effect was to kill off a lot of tax-evaders, but to perpetuate the offence, thus bringing the tax-farmers into further public disrepute. They might see in the gabelle a law that flouted enlightened public opinion, and had been imposed without public approval or consent. Enlightened minds might well think that those who administer the gabelle were simply hired assassins, allowed to promote their own interests in a way that clearly violated natural rights (vii: 21–2).

23

observations on the twenty-ninth book of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois Condorcet noted that harsh laws should be mitigated, not in the ‘spirit of moderation’, but in the ‘spirit of justice’ (i: 363). One crime that Condorcet picked out as being more effectively treated by ‘the mildness of custom’ rather than severe laws was duelling (iv: 397). Condorcet returned to the advantages of a less severe criminal code in the Esquisse, where the issue is linked to the avoidance of political upheaval (vi: 97–8). Condorcet’s effective use of the language and style of Dr Pangloss is well illustrated in his pr´ecis of article 6, relating to the punishment of minors for faux-saunage: ‘Children will be imprisoned . . . in a house of correction so that it will no longer cost the tax-farmers anything to feed them. From this come two big advantages: the first is that the tax-farmers have the right to keep in prison for as long as they think fit, on a diet of bread and water, the fathers of young faux-sauniers; the second is that every child, used to the free and active life of the countryside, eventually dies in a house of correction; all of which can only result in a major diminution of the race of faux-sauniers’ (vii: 13).

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To such arguments, three responses are offered in conclusion, of which the first two are mitigating statements of diabolical advocacy. The third, however, was no mitigation at all, but signalled the entrance of the author himself who proceeds to fill the moral vacuum created by the Condorcet persona with deeply felt outrage. Many laws, like those relating to the gabelle, Condorcet observes in his authorial voice, accord not with man’s nature and needs, but with one simple, expedient maxim: ‘Let the weak and the poor be sacrificed to the peace of mind of the rich and powerful . . . So let us leave our tax-farmers to enjoy the noble simplicity of Colbert’s laws in peace’ (vii: 24). Thus has the whole human-natural setting for true justice and good law-making in the ancien r´egime been subverted, and replaced with the unnatural laws of privil`ege.The concept of what constituted a crime had been subverted,24 and Condorcet’s mission as a social scientist was designed to counter the effects of this historic subversion. The sardonic closing statements of the R´eflexions sur la jurisprudence criminelle gave the tax-farmers ominous notice that their time to enjoy the privileges of Colbert’s law was running out. The covert broader inference was equally unambiguous: the excesses of the gabelle, and of all ancien r´egime legislation based on feudal privilege and narrow commercial self-interest, should only serve to remind France of the claims that human nature and human rights had over civil and criminal legislation. the d upat y af fair Among the pre-1789 writings that Condorcet devoted to establishing the case for legal reform, and to a consideration of the practical measures that 24

‘Definition of crime. I define crime in general as an external, physical act which causes serious, obvious and immediate harm to one or several other individuals, committed deliberately and with the intention of causing that harm. I say external and physical harm and not injury because in order for an act harmful to another person to become a crime, the harm it does to him must infringe his rights. I say that this harm is serious because minor harm cannot be the subject of criminal procedures. A legal system which is too nit-picking would be a great evil; its laws would be less respected, and in the hands of judges it would become a weapon with which they would be able to strike down too many citizens; it would lead to tyranny. I say that this harm must be clearly apparent, otherwise the prejudices of every system would create a plethora of imaginary crimes. I say that the act must be committed deliberately and with the intention doing harm. In other words, that the guilty person should not only intend to do a particular physical act but should also intend the act to be harmful, and for that the harm done must be the necessary and immediate consequence of the act. In effect, as the law has been established only to maintain citizens’ rights, and as its sanctions have as their objectives only 1. to deter crime by fear, and 2. to stop the person inclined towards crime from giving in to his inclination, it follows that if one extended the law to acts committed without any intention to harm, then those two objectives would be nullified, and the punishment would be unjust’ (BIF Condorcet MS 857, ff. 162–3).

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could be taken to remove the stain of inhumanity from the daily workings of the French judicial system, two texts stand out. The first is the R´eflexions d’un citoyen non gradu´e sur un proc`es tr`es connu which appeared on 11 June 1786. The ‘well-known trial’ in question was the trial in Chaumont of three individuals, identified in the text as Bradier, Simarre (or Simare) and Lardoise, all accused of robbery with violence, and all sentenced on 11 August 1785 by the trial judge to galley service for life, in accordance with the provisions of a 1670 ordonnance.25 After a final hearing of the case by the Paris Parlement, they were condemned on 20 October to be broken on the wheel. They escaped immediate execution only after the chance intervention in dramatic circumstances of the President of the Bordeaux Parlement, Charles Dupaty, who had been alerted to trial irregularities. Dupaty duly published a report on these irregularities in March 1786 in his M´emoire justificatif pour trois hommes condamn´es a` la roue (A justificatory statement on behalf of three men condemned to be broken on the wheel).26 Condorcet knew and admired Dupaty, and he did not hesitate to associate himself with the magistrate’s condemnation of these judicial events and the campaign for reform that ensued. It was during this campaign that he met Dupaty’s niece, Sophie de Grouchy. The case of the three peasants was in his view yet another example of the abuse of the court system by the parlements. In the R´eflexions d’un citoyen he resumes in solemn jurisdictional style Dupaty’s evidence regarding the circumstances of the alleged crime, the lack of evidence against the accused, details of judicial incompetence and the inadequacies of witness testimony.27 Thanks largely to Condorcet’s public support for Dupaty, the sentence was suspended by Malesherbes,28 and the case was referred to the Rouen Parlement for further review. The three accused men were finally acquitted on 18 December 1787. Dupaty’s M´emoire was nevertheless condemned to be burned by the public executioner on 12 August 1786, a development resulting in the appearance of another pamphlet relating to 25 26

27

28

For a full account of this affair, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 210–14. On the impact of Dupaty’s M´emoire, see M. Marion, La Garde des sceaux Lamoignon et la r´eforme judiciaire de 1788 (Paris: Hachette, 1909), p. 35; P.-A. Perrod, ‘Une contribution de Condorcet a` la r´eforme de la l´egislation p´enale’, Condorcet Studies 1 (1984), 171–86. On the issue of the credibility of witnesses, Condorcet reminds the reader in a note at this point of Roman legal practice of differentiating between the accounts of witnesses made on the spot immediately after the commission of the crime, and d´eclarations m´edit´ees (vii: 146 n. 1). For the amendments designed to resolve this problem, see Section ii of the Essai sur quelques changements a` faire dans les lois criminelles de France (Cahen, Condorcet, Appendix i, pp. 552–5). See Condorcet’s undated letter to Malesherbes, BIF Condorcet MS 854, f. 417. The case was given further publicity in July 1786 by Grimm, see Tourneux (ed.), Correspondance litt´eraire, vol. xiv, pp. 417–18. See also Perrod, ‘Une contribution de Condorcet’, 171–86.

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the affair by Condorcet, namely the R´ecit de ce qui s’est pass´e au Parlement de Paris le mercredi 20 aoˆut 1786 (The story of what happened in the Paris Parlement on Wednesday 20 August 1786) (i: 504–7). The notorious affair of the ‘trois rou´es’ was a particularly dramatic example for Condorcet of the deeply flawed nature of ancien r´egime judicial practice with regard to the rights of the accused to a competent legal defence, and of the glaring lack of accountability with regard to court procedures and decisions. In a typical gesture, after their marriage Condorcet and Sophie engaged the son of one of the accused peasants as a servant in their household. In the R´eflexions d’un citoyen Condorcet, in response to the Dupaty affair, sought to expose in the form of five Questions aspects of the case that continued to affect adversely the reputation of French courts. The five Questions relate to the impartiality and independence of witnesses, the conditions under which testimony is admissible, the recording of procedures (including statements taken from the accused under interrogation), the right of the accused to be confronted in open court with the nature of the alleged crime along with the evidence of guilt and the right of the accused to legal representation.29 In the fourth Question Condorcet also addressed the issue of judicial accountability, and the crown’s responsibility, sadly neglected, as a final court of appeal: ‘And people have groaned at the sight of a nation of Montesquieus, Voltaires, Turgots, Malesherbes, and d’Alemberts obliged to ask once more, not for a system of laws worthy of an enlightened people, but just for basic human rights’ (vii: 153).30 The dangerous inference of the last Question was that in France, unlike England or Prussia, the King was unaware of what was going on in his courts in his name, but Condorcet was careful to place the blame for that on the system rather than on the King. In France sentences were carried out so briskly that there was not even time to obtain the signed consent of the King, or even to inform him of court decisions: ‘I do not know if many condemned men would actually prefer 29

30

The right to legal representation, and the elaboration of appropriate mechanisms to ensure that this right bcame a reality in law, occupied much of the first section of the Essai sur quelques changements a` faire dans les lois criminelles de France (Cahen, Condorcet, Appendix 1, pp. 551–2). See also the 1790 R´eflexions sur l’accusation judiciaire where Condorcet tried to put his views on the protection of the rights of the accused into practice against a background of increasing instability, and of growing threats to the rule of law. In particular, Condorcet wanted to ensure that the National Assembly did not arrogate to itself the right to judge criminals even in the extreme, politically urgent, circumstances of counter-revolutionary insurgence, and a sense of national crisis inflamed by the siren voice of Robespierre and ‘the hypocritical language of a false philosophy’ (x: 3). In the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs Condorcet was less positive about other aspects of crown participation in court procedures, e.g. in the case of lettres de cachet (ix: 273–5). With regard to the reform of appeal procedures after the Revolution, he would make specific proposals in June 1790 to change the role, workings and composition of appeal courts in Sur les tribunaux d’appel (ix: 167–73).

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a quick death to two weeks or a month of anxiety, but also of hope’ (vii: 154).31 Condorcet saw the royal judicial prerogative as a useful constitutional device to ensure that the accused’s right of appeal was a practical option, and as a counter to the excesses to which permanent courts presided over by permanent judges were prone.32 Interestingly, prior to the Revolution, the dispensation of justice was still for Condorcet an area in which the monarch could exercise powers that would in effect provide a measure of public accountability. If judges worked under the eye of a more vigilant king, the people would have less to fear from judicial incompetence and erratic judgements, ‘harshness dressed up as a legal system’.33 Conversely, there would be advantages for the monarch, who would necessarily become better acquainted with the laws by which the people were policed in his name: ‘Those who would fear the additional pressures arising from these details on a government already heavily burdened, would not be doing justice to the King’s sense of humanity’ (vii: 156). To the charge that humanitarian reform would lead to the guilty escaping justice, Condorcet responded that this was already the case with the rich and the powerful who had little difficulty under the current system in obtaining pardons or suspended sentences for the crimes with which they were charged and found guilty. The effect of reform would be only to provide the poor with the benefits that the privileged already enjoyed,34 and to deprive the parlements of the arbitrary power to hang or break on the wheel without due process. Condorcet reflected again on the lessons to be drawn from the Dupaty affair, noting regretfully that ‘this contempt for the human race, for what it means to be a man’, had not yet been eliminated by a century of enlightened thinking. He noted further contemporary examples of comparably horrific judicial failure, citing cases in Lyon and Laon, and drawing particular attention to the on-going threat to the children of Jean Calas, to the barbaric treatment of Lally35 and to the malignant repercussions of the La Barre case. The rhetorical temperature 31 32

33 34 35

As far as the death penalty was concerned, Condorcet remained an abolitionist, see the views expressed, for example, in his notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 327–8, 406, 502–3). For proposed technical amendments to court procedures to help resolve this particular issue, see the Essai sur quelques changements a` faire dans les lois criminelles de France (Cahen, Condorcet, Appendix i). On the responsibilities of the government with regard to state security and the preservation of public order, see the Fragments sur la libert´e de la presse (xi: 255–7). As an example of such judgements, Condorcet refers here to the court orders requiring the burning of works by Rousseau and Raynal (vii: 154 n. 1). The Turgot administration provided Condorcet with a model of legislative virtue from this point of view, see the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 16, 68–9, 181–2). Voltaire’s was the only voice raised against the outrages of the trial of General Lally, see the R´eponse au premier plaidoyer de m. d’Epr´emesnil dans l’affaire du comte de Lally (vii: 29–30).

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of Condorcet’s prose rises as he describes the horrors at Rouen where a man suspected of murder had been tortured for six hours in the presence of his wife and daughter, ‘a sort of cruelty which has no precedent in the history of the Caligulas, Neros and Domitians of this world’ (vii: 159), and the insane savagery of the Caen Parlement which, with a judgement as flawed as that of the Chaumont court, had recently authorised the torture and execution by burning of a young girl. The thrust of Condorcet’s attack on rogue judges and compliant courts not only illuminated dramatically the suffering of individuals, but also opened up the wider question of the harm being done by the courts and their ‘contempt for man’ to the stability of the civil order: ‘And these monsters, living out their turbulent lives under the threat of the conspirator’s dagger, going from military sedition to provincial insurrection, can still find a feeble and horrible justification [for their actions] in the madness of their arrogant pride, in the troubled nature of their soul, and in the terrors of their imagination!’ court proced ures and the jury theorem The second, less impassioned, but arguably more important, text establishing the case for reform, is the sixth article of Part 2 of the 1788 Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, subtitled Justice et police, where the need to rebuild the legal system is even more urgently pressed than in the R´eflexions d’un citoyen. Without yet compromising the defence of the monarch’s judicial role, so central to his proposals in the R´eflexions, Condorcet now emphasised the disdavantages of ancien r´egime structures much more boldly, noting that France had a judicial system built during centuries of ignorance on the debris of its feudal past, in which the courts were a threat to the property, freedom and security of its citizens, venality and hereditary privilege governed the appointment of judges,36 the exorbitant cost of legislation denied justice to the poor and the cruel despotism of courts shed the blood of the innocent. When the law offended so brutally the reason of all enlightened men, then one cannot disguise the fact that these courts, these pretensions, these procedures, these laws, in a word the whole legislative system, are in need of great reform, and that it is time for a new structure, built on reason, humanity and natural right to replace the remains of those gothic monuments built by our ancestors on arrogant pride, superstition and contempt for mankind. (viii: 495) 36

In the Eloge de Michel de L’Hˆopital the appointment of judges was seen as the prerogative of an aristocratic fiefdom (iii: 539).

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In Justice et police legal reform is seen as part of a broader constitutional view of progress in which reform has important political implications, for the new edifice must be constructed not only on the firm foundations of authentic legal principle but also on the will, participation and consent of the people, acting through their elected representatives.37 In this text Condorcet gave much more emphasis than before to the role of representatives in the provincial assemblies in the management of the machinery of the law, and he was determined to place the case for reform of France’s legal structure at the centre of an agenda for constitutional reforms at the meeting of the Estates-General. Always aware of the need for tactical prudence in the advancement of proposals for change, he was anxious not to alienate the political guardians of jealously defended traditions and practices, and he was careful to insist that no reforms should be enacted, even when clearly in accordance with reason and natural law, without all cases for exemption and special provision being given full consideration. As in the case of the abolition of slavery, the pragmatics of gradualism were again uppermost in Condorcet’s approach to the management of change: ‘Reason must be firm without being peremptory, systematic without being obstinate, inflexible and rigorously precise with regard to everything that endures, indulgent and moderate with regard to everything that must continue only for as long as it takes to bring in a new order’ (viii: 497). However, tactical caution with regard to the implementation of reform did not prevent Condorcet from making some proposals for change for immediate enactment, the first of which concerned judicial appointments. He favoured a system whereby judges would be appointed by provincial electors who, knowing candidates personally, would be better placed to evaluate a local candidate in the light of basic requirements, namely ‘his integrity, his honesty and his education’ (viii: 498), than remote ministers in Paris acting on behalf of a still more remote monarch. Judicial appointments should not be in the hands of an exclusive corps, often with special interests to protect, but rather made the responsibility of an electorate whereby the public interest in seeing the best candidate selected would be assured, and the danger of venality minimised: ‘It is in the interest of electors, as it is in the prince’s, only to make a good choice. If the prince must relinquish that function, which he cannot in reality exercise by himself, it must be necessarily given to men with the same interest and the same intentions as he has’ (viii: 499). 37

On the involvement of the people in the enactment of legislation, see also the second of the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven.

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Condorcet noted the practice in England and America of charging judges with the task of explaining and interpreting the law, and juries with the task of determining guilt or innocence. He thought that this clear separation of functions, with juries nominated separately for civil and criminal courts by provincial electors, as in the case of judges, would be a useful model to follow. The underlying principle was always the authentication of due process by the formal recognition of the location of the authority of the law in the will of the people, expressed through their representatives in a National Assembly. The removal from judges of the power to decide guilt or innocence would ensure the emergence of ‘respectable’ judges: ‘A good legislative system must make judges respected, but they must never become feared; every judge with power soon becomes a tyrant’ (viii: 500). With the adoption of elected juries, with jurists elected for fixed periods of service, rather than on a trial by trial basis, Condorcet felt that all the advantages of the English and American systems could be acquired, and enhanced, with the appointment of capable men who enjoyed public confidence, and whose decisions would benefit from the accumulated experience of jurists as different cases came before them. Their election by local assemblies (provincial or district) would be a mark of esteem and honour, and a guarantee of higher standards of appointment that would avoid the arbitrary and unpredictable workings of the English jury system. In Justice et police Condorcet made detailed proposals relating to the appointment of judges, the rules governing their powers, along with proposals for administrative support, as well as a fail-safe system of measures to ensure that judicial practice with regard to sentencing was in accordance with reason and natural law, and that they were fully accountable. Quality and accountability were paramount considerations in all these proposals: For every court there must be a public part: two or three judges with deputies to replace them when they are ill or when they die; sixty-four jurists, of which sixteen could be challenged on grounds that need not be specified, and sixteen chosen at random from among those not challenged would decide the outcome of the trial. This number would suffice to establish all sizes of majorities needed for different types of judgment, and is not so high, in relation to the area of each jurisdiction, as to make it necessary to have recourse to the services of uneducated men. (viii: 502)

If Condorcet’s aim was to ensure as far as possible the ability of judges to pass just and humane sentences, he was equally concerned to maximise the probability of juries returning just verdicts. Just as the efficiency of

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the franchise would depend on the enlightenment of the people, so the efficiency of the courts would depend on the enlightenment of juries. In criminal cases he recommended that at least twelve jurists out of sixteen must vote for a guilty verdict in order for a sentence to be carried out, and he saw no particular advantage in the English insistence on unanimity. With regard to voting on juries, Condorcet believed that the key factor was the absolute size of the majority, not the proportion of the size of the majority in relation to the total number of jurors. The theorem thus required precise arithmetical reference to a number rather than generalised reference to ‘a two-thirds majority’ or ‘a three-quarters majority’, and Condorcet was always careful to apply that principle in the context of constitutional procedures as well as procedures in the criminal courts. In his jury theorem Condorcet saw a way forward for the French system of justice that would end current reliance on discredited practices.38 In applying to the problem of securing a just and scientifically based verdict from juries the theory of probabilism and its application to voting, Condorcet was reflecting once again his confidence in the relevance of social mathematics to the moral and social realms. The impact on modern jury theory of Condorcet’s jury theorem has been considerable.39 In the context of criminal procedures he would seek to apply the calculus to the evaluation of evidence and the definition of what constituted proof of guilt or innocence in French courts, issues which had first come to his attention in the light of the verdict in the La Barre case. The La Barre verdict, and others, including the conviction of the three peasants rescued from the capriciousness of the courts by Dupaty, had convinced Condorcet of the urgent need to reform a system still dependent on torture and the medieval niceties of ‘eighth-proofs’, ‘quarter-proofs’, and ‘halfproofs’. Evidence needed to be weighed in terms of a much more meaningful mathematical language than that, if the guilt of the accused was to be credibly ascertained. The more meaningful language that he had in mind was of course the language of probability theory. A probable event was one in which the number of combinations in which it occurred exceeded the number of combinations in which it did not occur. The greater the number of combinations in the first part of the equation in relation to the number in the second part, the greater the probability, and so on until the equation 38 39

In the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs the right to be judged according to the law by legally appointed judges is presented as one of the key guarantees of justice (ix: 275–6). See for example L. S. Penrose, ‘Elementary statistics of majority voting’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 109 (1946), 53–7.

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eventually transformed probability into moral certainty. The point was stressed at some length in the notes to the Kehl Voltaire.40 However, the finer arithmetical detail behind Condorcet’s application of probability theory to the process of assessment of guilt or innocence by a jury had already been set out in the theory of voting contained in the seminal 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix. The laws of probability, combined with the increasing enlightenment of the individuals involved, and an unshakeable confidence in the existence of objective moral truth, convinced Condorcet that decisions taken by majority vote would lead to the right course of action being taken, whether in National Assemblies or in juries. The degree of rightness would vary in accordance with the degree of enlightenment and the size of the majority. The formulae of probability relating to Condorcet’s jury theorem and the mathematics involved in the assignment of values to the input of individuals, the ratio of majorities to minorities in the number of votes cast, and the calibration that can be applied to the probability that the majority has drawn the correct conclusion from the evidence observed, have received close critical attention from a number of social scientists.41 When applied to jury decision-taking correctly the formulae would ensure theoretically that the probability of an innocent person being executed was no higher than the probability of drowning when travelling on a cross-channel ferry. However, as McLean and Hewitt have pointed out,42 the stress laid on the key prerequisite for enlightened individuals to participate in the process of decision-making meant that it could not function democratically. The dilemma posed by this lack of democratic virtue in the jury theorem was confirmed explicitly in a letter that Condorcet wrote to Frederick the Great in 1785 in which he told Frederick in rather obsequious terms that the happiness of the people, who were still largely uneducated, depended more on the enlightenment of their rulers than on the nature of the state’s constitutional arrangements (i: 306). 40

41

42

Cit. McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 32–3. In applying social mathematics to the legal and philosophical areas McLean and Hewitt comment on its inappropriateness: ‘Condorcet was subtle mathematically, but not philosophically. He was a Platonic realist, believing in objective moral truths’ (p. 32). For a clear and succinct analysis of the mathematical detail of Condorcet’s jury theorem, particularly with regard to the calculation of the thresholds of probability, see especially, McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 35–6. Cf. D. Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 164; B. Barry, ‘The public interest’, in A. Quinton (ed.), Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 122. McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 36.

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the regul ation of publ ic life In his relentless attack on the legacy of feudalism in the French judicial system, arguably the most urgent of all the campaigns of the Enlightenment philosophes, Condorcet pressed for the end of practices which undermined public confidence in the decisions of the court, weakened the authority of the state, applied the full rigour of the penal code only to the poor and ensured that the probability of a just verdict being reached was unacceptably low: ‘The only thing which gives a verdict authority, and the police force a motive to support it, is the assumption that the soundness of the verdict is probable. Now, by establishing one law for the rich and one for the poor, you expose the police on the contrary to the risk of supporting a verdict whose unsoundness is probable’ (viii: 504). Condorcet questioned in particular the legitimacy of remaining pillars of feudal justice, still protected by the provincial assemblies, which were based on crown privileges such as rents, seigneurial tithes on produce, seigneurial rights to the use of mills and other facilities and equipment, perquisites of office, bridge and road tolls and other forms of feudal taxation. Condorcet did not consider all these examples to be necessarily harmful to the public good, and thought in fact that the abolition of some anomalies might actually do more harm than good. Most feudal legislation, however, clearly contravened natural law and natural rights, and merited a careful review.43 To that end he proposed the establishment in each province of an elected tribunal charged with detailed re-evaluation of all feudal legislation (viii: 510–12). If the first part of Justice et police is primarily concerned with the means to restore justice to the French legal system, much of the second part is concerned with the regulation of law and order. In addition to law and order, the term police in this context also encompasses private and communal issues relating to public safety and welfare: It seems to us that by police we must take to mean that part of the legal system which governs 1. the enjoyment of what we all hold in common, of what by its very nature has no private owner; 2. the exercise of the right to property and to liberty in those circumstances in which it does not affect the right to property or liberty of others. (viii: 512)

By communal property, and the laws relating to this, Condorcet had in mind here the people’s rights with regard to, for example, well-regulated 43

Condorcet does not present here a blanket condemnation of all aspects of feudal law, but among the laws he thought could be immediately abolished without complication were, for example, the requirement to obtain seigneurial permission to marry, the conditions attached to the purchase and inheritance of property and the arcane laws affecting rights of ownership.

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amenities such as roads, canals, access to and maintenance of all forms of public space. Police involved the precautions that must be taken to protect communal well-being and security, and in this respect the laws relating to police differed in scope and application from the laws relating to justice. Both sought to protect the individual’s natural rights, but the latter were concerned with rights that derived from the natural order of things and from the nature of man, while the former were more concerned with rights arising from the nature and conditions of civil life in a social order derived from the pact of association. Justice guaranteed the exercise of natural rights; police related to the rules and conditions under which those rights were to be enjoyed. Police would thus include, for example, measures to protect public health arising from the poorly planned location of factories, to control the diversion of streams and rivers affecting private property, to mitigate the adverse effects of the demolition of buildings, and so on. The monitoring of environmental threats to public well-being was thus as central to the concept of police as issues of law and order and the prevention of crime: ‘If an activity, in itself innocent, might expose to some kind of harm, not those engaged in it (for their lives and limbs are their own), but others who are not doing anything dangerous, then freedom is not infringed when that activity is banned’ (viii: 513–14). Public well-being, safety and the preservation of law and order were for Condorcet aspects of the individual’s right to live in a civil society governed by wise legislation. This required the state to provide as a first step an effective police force to prevent crime, to assist the victims of crime, to identify the perpetrators and to bring them before the courts. Secondly, the state was required to pass laws (‘prohibitions’), drafted in response to need and in the light of proven usefulness, which would ensure public safety and public order: ‘So you see that regulations regarding law and order are necessary and, at the same time, that, as they tend to restrain natural liberty, we must demonstrate and prove the need for them, if they are to be just’ (viii: 514). The enforcement of law and order need not threaten individual liberty, provided that the line of political accountability for that enforcement was clear.44 Regulations relating to law and order were the direct responsibility of government, and their enforcement was the responsibility of judges elected by local communities, and monitored by a police authority also elected by the local community: ‘A power divided in this way cannot, under any form of constitution, injure either the rights of the nation, or 44

On the risk of the police becoming an instrument of oppression, see the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (vii: 516–23); Sur l’´etat des protestants (v: 474).

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the rights of any part of the legislative’ (viii: 516). The apparent tensions in the social order between law and order provisions and the right to freedom arose in Condorcet’s view mainly from ignorance of principles that might otherwise reconcile them in ways analogous to the resolution of apparent tensions and contradictions in the scientific world. In practice, those tensions had not yet been fully resolved, and their resolution would in Condorcet’s view require reforms in the management of justice and police as fundamental as those he advocated for the reform of the criminal code itself. Here, as in other areas of justice and the law, feudal ordonnances still survived to the detriment of rights. Condorcet was also worried by the dangers to liberty posed by the policing of the people in times of national emergency, when security regulations, passed provisionally to meet a challenge to public order, tended to assume an illegal permanency.45 Such regulations currently required the approval of provincial authorities and of the King’s representative, but Condorcet felt that this was an insufficient safeguard, and proposed that any policing laws passed in these unusual circumstances should remain in force only for a maximum statutory period of one month. In cases of urgent national emergency requiring extreme security measures to be taken, Condorcet wished to see the promulgation of any special policing regulations to be the direct responsibility of the community assembly, and enforceable only for a period of a few days (viii: 518–19). Most of Condorcet’s observations on the continuing subversion of justice and the rule of law in Justice et police are made in the context of urban rather than rural life. However, in the closing part of Justice et police he drew particular attention to the plight of rural France and the baneful legacy of feudal legislation. The focus narrows to one specific aspect of rural life which Condorcet uses as an illustration of the need for reform of the law drawn from everyday life in the countryside, namely the hunting laws and the rights and privileges retained by the land-owning aristocracy over the lives, possessions and produce of their tenant-farmers. Reform of the hunting laws was an example of the need on occasion, not for immediate abolition of past legislation, but of the need to balance an ancient right of the aristocracy with a new concept of rights in the name of justice for all. Condorcet found in hunting a legitimate right that did not offend natural law in itself, but where new legislation was needed to mitigate its more damaging effects. The hunting laws deprived farmers of the right to 45

As with the constitution, Condorcet thought that no law should be permanent. In Sur la n´ecessit´e de faire ratifier la constitution par les citoyens he suggested twenty years as being the maximum life for laws governing the constitution before becoming subject to review (ix: 415).

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fence land, to crop grass, to work the fields at certain times of the year, not to produce anything that might affect the taste of wild game which they were compelled to preserve for hunting purposes. However, the case for reform which Condorcet advances at this point is less concerned with justice and individual rights and much more concerned with physiocratic considerations relating to the modernisation of agriculture and the improvement of the national economy.46 As far as the individual was concerned, the case for reform of the hunting laws was related to the need to protect the right to property, and the right to enjoy freely the produce of property, one of Condorcet’s four basic natural rights. The narrow specificity of the issue sets this section of Justice et police apart; to some extent it appears almost as a self-contained essay in its own right. In fact, it enabled Condorcet to bring together themes that had a broader relevance to the problems of regulating public order, and his closing, summative commentary on the hunting laws, far from being a distraction from the main lines of the preceding commentaries, brings into sharp focus the social, economic and moral issues with which Justice et police is concerned in general. His proposals would leave an ancient, but in this case defendable, right intact, while resolving the problem of the harm that right did to the rights of others, ‘without any danger to public order, and without having to fear the spread of a spirit of idleness, banditry and savagery among the people’ (viii: 522). Justice et police offers in the discussion of its concluding example of an ancient privilege in need of attention from modern legislators a model of how to manage change with minimal damage to individual freedom, and maximum advantage to the public interest. It was an ideal which Condorcet would seek to apply in all aspects of his thinking on the management of change. 46

The hunting laws amounted in Condorcet’s view to an arbitrary form of local taxation on which he estimated the annual return to be in the region of 40 million livres, a cost to the farmers and to the state that was increased further by the financial burden of administering these laws, ‘a huge loss, particularly in the neighbourhood of the capital where land has a very high value, not to speak of the cost of the guards who, as useless as those who guard farms, would together form a fine army, and cost more than the highest paid soldiers’ (viii: 520).

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ref orm of the assemblies Condorcet’s ambition to construct what he described in the Esquisse as ‘the edifice of a society of free and equal men’ (vi: 72) was probably kindled in the years following Turgot’s death in 1781, at a time when he was starting to reflect seriously on Turgot’s achievements, and on the lessons of his own experience of public service during Turgot’s ministry. The Vie de m. Turgot provided Condorcet with an early opportunity to set out in general terms some of the operational principles of representative government he admired in Turgot’s record of achievement as provincial intendant for Limoges, and subsequently as Controller-General of Finance. In the brief interval between the publication of the first volume of his biography of Turgot and the convocation of the Estates-General in 1789 he would work intensively on the further refinement of those principles. By 1788 he had completed a comprehensive reassessment of ancien r´egime governmental structures in a treatise, most of which was written at a time when royal assent to a meeting of the Estates-General still seemed only a remote possibility. The treatise in question is the monumental Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (Essay on the constitution and functions of provincial assemblies), and it would be overtaken by events almost as soon as it reached the printer. A presentation copy was sent to Frederick II, together with an accompanying letter, dated 2 May 1785, in which Condorcet famously declared his hatred for despotism. Despots have harmed the cause of humanity, and their power must be opposed in the name of human rights. At the same time, in this interesting letter he expressed a more accommodating view of enlightened despotism, reflecting not only a need to be diplomatic when addressing the King of Prussia, but also the distance he still had to travel in the mid-1780s on his journey towards democracy and republicanism (i: 305–8).1 1

See also Correspondance in´edite, ed. Henry, p. 145; Baker, Condorcet, p. 218.

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In the hastily composed Post-Scriptum Condorcet noted with some trepidation the implications for his freshly minted Essai of the news of the impending, in his view dangerously premature, convocation of the EstatesGeneral.2 The Essai had been conceived with a view to examining the steps which needed to be taken in order to modify the constitution of provincial assemblies in ways that would harmonise their activities with those of a new National Assembly in which quality and equality of representation would be the constitutional centrepiece.3 The fundamental reforms required to bring about this harmonisation of provincial and national assemblies necessitated a period of cautious and judicious public reflection which would now be alarmingly curtailed: It would have been desirable, no doubt, for the nation to have had time to inform itself of its rights and true interests . . . A National Assembly, prepared for by a process of public education, would just have inspired the hope of certain restoration, and not a crisis whose outcome is uncertain. Today, we have barely a few months to disperse the cloud of error built up by several centuries of ignorance, habit, and prejudice, and destroy the sophisms on which private passions and interests have based their mistakes. (viii: 656)

The Post-Scriptum is in fact a tactical preface in which Condorcet sought to reconcile the Essai with the urgent challenge presented by the forthcoming meeting of the Estates-General. In the summation of the fundamental precepts with which Condorcet believed the Third Estate must arm itself in readiness for the meeting, the most crucial were those relating to the political implications of the rights to freedom, to equality and to property, ‘so overlooked by all those nations which dare to boast of being free’.4 Legislation, old and new, must be measured rationally and objectively against the yardstick of those implications, of which the first was the degree to which the exercise of political 2

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La Fayette had audaciously initiated a proposal to convene the Estates-General on 21 May 1787, see M.-J. La Fayette, M´emoires, correspondance, 6 vols. (Paris: Fournier, 1837–8), vol. ii, p. 177. On the complexities of Condorcet’s position regarding the meeting, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 251–2. The fact that much of the pressure for the convocation also came from the Paris Parlement strengthened Condorcet’s scepticism about the prospects for success. He was always aware that freedom had other enemies apart from absolute monarchists. ‘In general, enlightened men are honest, but you could not say that honest men are generally enlightened. Choose men who combine honesty with enlightenment, but do not judge enlightenment by honesty, and remember that it is easier to deceive people about honesty than it is to deceive them about enlightenment. Seek in your deputies first honesty, then common sense, followed by enlightenment, courage and finally zeal’ (ix: 255). On the responsibilities of deputies with regard to rights, see the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat (ix: 246–7). Condorcet offered detailed advice on policies to be followed by the provincial representatives at the Estates-General in the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs (ix: 257–81).

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authority served the interests only of those submitting their individual will to it: Man did not enter into society in order to be crushed between opposing powers, becoming their victim in times of unity as well as dissent, but to enjoy peacefully all his rights under one authority created specifically to uphold them, and which, with no power to infringe them, does not have to be counterbalanced by another power . . . A declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, drafted by enlightened men, is the true brake on all powers, and the only one which does not put public order or individual security at risk. (viii: 658–9)

With a concluding rhetorical flourish of maxims from which to derive a profile of the ideal representative to advance the public interest at the Estates-General, the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales was relaunched, in retrospect, as it were, through its misleadingly titled Post-Scriptum. The nine articles and two appendices that constitute the first part of this treatise relate directly to the processes and principles of representation, and encapsulate Condorcet’s most substantial statement on the theory of representative government, its mechanisms and its purpose. It was here also that Condorcet set out in non-mathematical terms his theory of voting, together with his criterion for judging voting systems, known today as the ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’. Condorcet was not of course the only political thinker to reflect on the problem of ancien r´egime approaches to representation, especially in the light of the unsatisfactory response from Lom´enie de Brienne5 to the negative outcome of the 1787 Assembly of Notables, called to ratify Calonne’s proposals for reform.6 The main lines 5

6

Brienne had proposed a modified version of Calonne’s proposals that prioritised the representation of Third Estate deputies. This was not ratified by the Third Estate deputies, and the Assembly of Notables dispersed on 25 May 1787 as a result of the deadlock. The widely held view that Condorcet supported the Brienne proposals enthusiastically is erroneous, despite the evidence for his support for these proposals in the Sentiments d’un r´epublicain sur les assembl´ees provinciales et les Etats-G´en´eraux (ix: 125), see J.-P. Joubert, ‘Condorcet et les trois ordres’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 308–9, 310. Jean-Joseph Mounier was Condorcet’s most prominent rival in the race to devise a new constitution, and his roles as secretary of the July 1788 Assembl´ee de Vizille (source of the formal request to the King to call the Estates-General), as founding member of the Committee of Twelve and, from January 1789, as an elected deputy to the Estates-General itself, certainly gave him a higher public profile. Mounier was the moving force behind the reconstitution of the Communes as a National Assembly on 17 June 1789, whose task it was to work on the constitution. The Tennis Court Oath was also stage-managed by Mounier, but his monarchist sympathies were to prevent him from following the course of the Revolution to its logical conclusion. With the news of Necker’s exile, he started to denounce the forces that threatened absolute royal power, and he attempted in his own draft of the bill that went before the National Assembly in September 1789 to ensure that Louis XVI’s royal powers to convene and dissolve the Assembly were safeguarded. Mounier’s bill was defeated in favour of Condorcet’s

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of argument in the Essai relating to the creation of provincial, city and communal assemblies, with representatives elected by property-owners and dispensing with the separation of orders, were drawn from a line of constitutional thinking already partly envisaged in d’Argenson’s Consid´erations sur le gouvernement ancien et pr´esent de la France (composed in 1737 and published imperfectly in 1764), developed in the 1750s by the physiocrats, by the marquis de Mirabeau, and further refined in the M´emoire sur les municipalit´es by Turgot (in collaboration with Dupont de Nemours) in 1773. Condorcet’s seminal treatise is more rigorously argued than most others of the period, and many of its themes and proposals would resurface in the remarkable series of addresses and essays on constitutional reform, and its management, that flowed from Condorcet’s pen in the two years following the initial appearance of the Essai. In addition to the consideration of ways to ensure the selection of representatives, much of the first part of the Essai is also concerned with a detailed elaboration of the process of enlightened decision-making to be adopted by those representatives, and with the practicalities upon which ‘the truth of decisions’ depended.7 The theory of voting elaborated here, with its emphasis on the merits of majority decision-making by an enlightened electorate, reflects yet again the degree to which probabilistic theory constitutes the over-arching principle behind Condorcet’s whole approach to political change. Elections, procedural rules, order of deliberation, quora and majorities, conditions of eligibility, tenure of public office, modalities of public accountability, legislative constraint and responsibility, standardisation of the day-to-day operation of government in the provincial assemblies, and above all the intricacies of their relationship with the crown, are all examined with great clarity and precision of detail, suggesting that this was a text designed to keep the flaws of France’s constitution sharply in focus.8 Of the nine divisions of Part 1, the first, third, fourth, fifth and seventh, dealing respectively with the conditions of the franchise, eligibility of those standing for election as representatives, the composition of assemblies, the

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proposals, and he resigned. By May 1790 Mounier had been forced into exile in Switzerland, and was not to return to France until 1801. Napoleon appointed him Prefect in 1802. He thus left the field clear for Condorcet to fulfil his role as reformer of the constitution at an early stage of the deliberations. The appeal to the enlightened reader is explicit: ‘This expression an enlightened man is understood too often to mean a man who shares our own views, but it has a less arbitrary meaning. An enlightened man is one who, irrespective of any of his views with which we might disagree, is acknowledged, even by his opponents, to have a profound and extensive understanding of particular areas of knowledge, and for having studied the principles and methods relating to them’ (viii: 124). In the Introduction Condorcet stresses repeatedly the importance of clarity: ‘I have done everything I can to make the reading of this work easy . . . I have carefully avoided anything that assumes prior knowledge; I have tried to be clear’ (viii: 120–1).

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election process and the creation of a representative National Assembly, are central to any interpretation of Condorcet’s programme for constitutional regeneration, to his theory of representation and above all to his understanding of the political applications of the key principles of freedom and equality, enshrined in the concept of droit de cit´e (right to citizenship).9 the franchise and the bal ance of representation While Condorcet recognised as a natural right the participation of citizens in the formulation of the rules by which they submit their individual will to the will of all, a participation exercised through powers of decisionmaking delegated to elected representatives, the exercise of droit de cit´e was subject in practice to specified conditions and exclusions, the primary condition of eligibility being that of property-ownership, ‘property-owners being the only true citizens’ (viii: 128). Never at any point in the Essai did Condorcet envisage the possibility of a universal franchise on any other basis.10 In most countries, with the notable exceptions of America and ‘a few small republics hidden away in the Swiss mountains’, droit de cit´e was constrained as a right by autocrats invested with the power of veto, and in no country, even the most enlightened, was every citizen eligible unconditionally to exercise this right. Minors, monks, prisoners, the insane, foreigners, vagabonds and ‘those whom one can legitimately suspect of having a corrupted will’ (viii: 130) were rationally justifiable exclusions, as was the individual who did not own property, provided that property meant more than just the ownership of land. Even with an appropriately flexible definition of property-ownership, Condorcet accepted that a privileged class of citizens would be created, but it would be a reconfigured class, not composed exclusively of rich landowners, which would actually reduce inequality in some measure: all men owning a property sufficient for their needs are in the privileged class, and most of those fall into the wealthy category. At the same time, this privileged class also includes the well-educated, and you would find very few with no education at all. This distinction itself creates equality between men of modest fortune and the great landowners and those whose wealth is in cash or investments; thus real equality is more certain than would be the case if no distinction existed at all. (viii: 135) 9 10

See also Sur la forme des ´elections where happiness as well as rights is seen to be the beneficial consequence of a reformed electoral system (ix: 287). The disadvantages of a system based on universal franchise had already been identified in 1781 in the R´eflexions sur l’esclavage des n`egres (R´eflexions, pp. 23–25). See also the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven (ix: 11).

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After the Revolution, Condorcet would begin to have doubts about the way in which the property qualification would be applied, particularly after Si´ey`es made his controversial distinction in 1789 between active and passive citizenship. In the case of church property, Condorcet questioned the implications of access to the franchise by the clergy. Property destined for public use belonged only to the citizenry in general, and in principle clergy living in church property were enjoying a benefit that fell within the orbit of remuneration ‘in place of a pension or fee’ which did not necessarily confer the status of property-owner, only ‘the enjoyment of publicly owned premises’ (viii: 139–40). There was, however, no question yet of the disenfranchisement of the clergy, and Condorcet saw in 1788 no ‘inconvenience’ in allowing clergy, or other representatives of public bodies with territorial possessions, to exercise the vote, ‘provided that they all enjoyed that right only as the current stewards of a public property whose ownership belonged to the public alone’. Their interest did not entirely coincide with that of property-owners, but Condorcet thought that the dangers of conflict were minimal, as long as those enjoying such benefits did not regard them as personal property, or as property protected by privilege. An electoral system which denied the franchise to citizens who did not belong to the property-owning class did not necessarily cause injustice since Condorcet envisaged the basis of the system to be a reflection of that broadly recognised communality of civic interest inherent in the pact of association, whereby the interests of the property-owning and non-property-owning classes were made to interlock. Acceptance of communality of interest between the two classes was dependent, however, on the existence of a system of representatives that would ensure the election of deputies of high political and moral calibre. This was a crucial caveat, and Condorcet commented at great length on the qualities needed by deputies in the light of their primary role as protectors of the public interest. A property-based suffrage that depended on a differentiation between either men and women,11 or between different types of property, was an absurdity sustained only by the inertia of tradition, and equalled in absurdity only by differentiation 11

In the Essai, as elsewhere, Condorcet rejected surviving feudal practice that prevented women from exercising their rights to direct and indirect suffrage, and also from holding public office, ‘an exclusion contrary to justice, though authorised by more or less general practice. The reasons why it is thought necessary to keep them out of public office, reasons moreover which could be easily destroyed, cannot justify depriving them of a right that would be easy for them to exercise, and which men enjoy, not because they are men, but because of their merits as reasonable, sensitive human beings, qualities which they share with women’ (viii: 141). Under current legislation for representation in the provincial assemblies, female owners of seigneuries could enjoy the benefits of the franchise indirectly through representatives, whereas female owners of propri´et´e territoriale had no such right.

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based on privilege. While the same inertia ensured that some citizens were disadvantaged with regard to the franchise, it ensured that others, such as monks, with their right, not only to vote, but also to be deputies,12 were unjustifiably privileged. In accepting property-ownership as the key qualification for suffrage in the Essai, and in other statements prior to the Revolution, such as those contained in the New Haven letters, Condorcet was following in the steps of Turgot and the physiocrats: ‘In advanced countries, territory makes the state. Thus property is what must make citizens’ (ix: 12). From the clarification of conditions of eligibility to exercise the franchise in the choice of representatives to an elected assembly, Condorcet turned in articles 3 and 4 to the issue of eligibility to stand for election to assemblies, and also to public office, the qualifications needed in representatives (literacy, for example), the problem of ensuring an appropriate balance of representation of interests between the orders, and the timing of elections.13 Most of article 3 is in fact devoted to an examination of the role in assemblies of orders, and the vexing auxiliary issues arising from the allocation of seats in accordance with the privileges of inherited rank. Condorcet saw in this arrangement only a device to introduce into assemblies representatives whose interests lay principally in the protection of their position, and whose presence was thus diametrically opposed to the interests of electors. A pattern of representation based on orders institutionalised inequality in the civil order, and as such was a clear affront to ‘healthy politics’. Reforms under consideration to allocate a fixed number of seats to each order simply to prevent over-representation of the two upper orders would not be needed, in Condorcet’s view, once a reformed franchise was in place: ‘What does it matter if men from the upper classes have all the seats, if they have them only because citizens from all classes think that they deserve to have 12

13

On this point Condorcet differentiated monks from eccl´esiastiques, the latter being isolated individuals, and the former ‘always a corps’. Monks were disqualified on educational grounds: ‘The expertise required in really useful assembly members is incompatible with the position and education of monks. So far we have had more good books on philosophy from the cloisters than good books on politics’ (viii: 142). In Section 4 of Sur la forme des ´elections, Condorcet commented on the timing of the interval between choosing electors and the actual election of representatives. Correct timing of these separate processes would prevent corruption and intrigue (ix: 290–1). In Section 5 he also stressed the importance of ensuring that holders of public office were not themselves eligible for election (ix: 291–2). Condorcet was later to attack the decrees relating to taxation that restricted eligibility to vote in an address to the National Assembly given on 5 June 1790, Sur les conditions d’´eligibilit´e (x: 87–91). He would object in particular to the way in which the proposed conditions would exclude enlightened persons who were not rich. In the Lettre sur le marc d’argent, published in the Patriote franc¸ais on 14 August 1791 he defined the minimum amount of taxation to qualify an individual as ‘citoyen actif ’ as being the equivalent of ‘a direct tax on three days work’ (BIF Condorcet MS 861, ff. 391–3). Cf. Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 267–9.

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their confidence ?’ (viii: 154). The talent and honesty of representatives mattered more than birth and a nominally egalitarian redistribution of seats to the orders: ‘We want a man able to understand and defend our interests, and nobody is stupid enough to be unaware of how much weight is given to opinions and proceedings by the birth, wealth and personal integrity of representatives.’ Condorcet’s 1788 proposals on the place of the aristocracy in a reformed system of representation was by no means hostile, his defence being based on the view that seats in an assembly not filled through elections, whether occupied by aristocrats, clergy or Third Estate, always threatened the people’s interests.14 Only by opening all assembly seats to the electoral process, and thereby to the discipline of public accountability, could that threat be lifted. On this point Condorcet was very conscious of ‘the English electoral vice’ (viii: 157 n. 1),15 but concluded that the deficiencies of the English system derived from the way in which elections were organised, rather than from the fact that all Parliamentary seats were filled by elected members. After examining at some length the history of the representation of the three orders in the provincial assemblies on the basis of a fixed allocation of seats, Condorcet returned to his defence of aristocratic representation sanctioned by public approval through elections rather than royal prerogative.16 The advantages of rank and wealth would not be entirely neutralised, 14

15

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Condorcet defined what he meant by peuple in a note in the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait, et sur ce qui reste a` faire: ‘The correct meaning of the word people means the totality of citizens having no public duties and no official titles. In a broader sense, it means the same totality, less a more numerous, separate class of people. Thus the word people means those who are not nobles in a country with a privileged nobility; it means ordinary citizens in a country where equality reigns; it means people who are not senators in a country with a hereditary senate, and it also means everywhere that class of citizens deprived of the advantages of education, and of the possibility of becoming enlightened’ (ix: 446 n. 1). ‘If there resulted, from the need to enfranchise the people, a real [system of] dependency, as in England, where the seats of the nation’s representatives are allocated directly by men who can have no understanding of either the functions or the duties of those representatives, where the importance of those seats obliges people to buy them with base, demeaning behaviour, and at extravagant expense, then we would no doubt be right to feel wounded by this servitude, out of patriotism more than vanity’ (viii: 156). In Sur la forme des ´elections Condorcet commented that English voters had no other wish but to please and obey in a system driven by sophistry and self-interest, reflected particularly in the sale of votes (ix: 329–30). See also Sur le choix des ministres (x: 62–3) on the problems in the House of Commons and the factional degradation of English political life. Condorcet did not see the merits of an adversarial, two-party system in the light of the true purpose of constitutional government which was, in his view, to ensure agreement rather than conflict between opposing groups. The retention of the East India Bill seemed to be a good example of the way in which such a system protected abuse with regard to the nomination of ministers. Cf. Sur l’´etendue des pouvoirs de l’Assembl´ee nationale (x: 33). In the Fragment de l’Atlantide Condorcet again stressed the link between high quality of representation, a good electoral system and an educated citizenry (vi: 601–2). The deficiencies in deputies, to which electors should be alerted, are listed in the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat (ix: 255–9).

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but this did not necessarily lead to venal self-interest. In 1788 Condorcet saw in fact no reason to exclude the nobility from assemblies, for to do so would simply deprive the state of the personal and professional contributions of a well-educated section of the population (viii: 163).17 Until the day of universal education and enlightenment dawned, it was in the national interest for aristocratic representatives to be absorbed into a unicameral, wholly elected assembly regulated by ‘sane legislation’.18 Condorcet’s position on representation in 1788 was therefore that an assembly, in which the number of seats for each order was recalculated, and in which seats continued to be allocated by order, might redress the mathematical balance of aristocratic representation, but would not necessarily advance the interests of the Third Estate. The resulting numerical supremacy of the Third Estate would, on the contrary, actually work against Third Estate interests, ‘the Third Estate being composed necessarily of men of lower standing’.19 Limiting the number of aristocratic representatives, but concentrating their presence in an exclusively defined block of seats, would only reinforce a sense of class solidarity, and ensure the confinement of aristocratic talent and energy to the advancement of class interests. This would necessarily distort the balance of real power exercised in the conduct of assembly business. By abandoning the traditional pattern of representation by orders, natural and acquired inequalities of talent would be minimised. Moreover, aristocratic representatives, chosen for their personal qualities rather than imposed on the asssembly by virtue of their rank, would not be disdavantaged in a more stabilised forum in which their number was restricted only by the outcome of elections to all assembly seats (viii: 164–5). An elected 17 18

19

Condorcet was less sympathetic to the cause of aristocratic representation after the terms for the convocation of the Estates-General had been announced. On the merits of unicameral systems of government, see also the 1789 Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres? Condorcet had little faith in defences of bicameral systems based on the theory that the second chamber offered protection from error and corruption in the first chamber (ix: 345–50), although he did see some merit in the second chamber’s right to veto, depending on how the chamber was composed. If the second chamber in England, for example, was composed of members such as Locke, Hume, Smith and Price, then its role could be justified as a check on the theoretically limitless power of a single chamber. However, while Condorcet acknowledged this danger in the unicameral system, he thought that it could be minimised by the acceptance of a new constitution guaranteeing a Declaration of Rights monitored by the provincial assemblies. The unicameral system ensured that all deputies received the same information, and understood the full context of deliberations. Above all, it prevented vested interests consolidating as influential pressure-groups. Condorcet commented further on the workings of the bicameral system in England in the R´eflexions sur la R´evolution de 1688 et sur celle du 10 aoˆut 1792 (xii: 209–10). His hostility to bicameral government ran directly counter to the views of monarchists such as Mounier, Malouet, Lally-Tollendal and Clermont-Tonnerre. In Section 9 of Sur la forme des ´elections Condorcet emphasised the role of ‘higher enlightenment’ in the process of election (ix: 298). The construction of a system that would permit electors to assess judiciously the merits of candidates is also discussed in Section 12. On the inequality of talent, see also the Eloge de Bernoulli (ii: 577–8).

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assembly would mean that the quality of representatives, including aristocratic representatives, would rise as a result of increased competition for seats. On the question of exclusion from assemblies of public office-holders or members of certain professions, Condorcet was again concerned to ensure that quality of representation would not be adversely affected, and that assembly duties would not take representatives away from duties that required their physical presence elsewhere, or which were incompatible with representation of the people. He had in mind the case of parish priests, soldiers and magistrates, ‘because assemblies, whose purpose is to be useful to the common cause, must not start off by providing different classes of the nation with an example of that contempt for their everyday duties and activities which is one of those faults which, while not being unique to the French, the French take further than other people’ (viii: 171). The need to reconcile the demands of private interests, public duties and assembly responsibilities in establishing the rules for inclusion and exclusion from assemblies was important, but Condorcet did not wish to see the principle of exclusion extended too far, as in the case of America where all ministers of religion were excluded from Congress, or of the Republic of Bˆale where the rules of exclusion affected the University: ‘I think that we must never consider this procedure. The only spirit which must inspire any representative assembly is the public spirit, and we must work on the assumption that no profession is incapable of inspiring a spirit entirely opposed to that’ (viii: 173). Condorcet’s proposals on representation ran directly counter to those advanced in the same year by Si´ey`es in Qu’est-ce que le tiers ´etat? It was in the interest of the people, though not of the privileged ranks, to resist proposals simply to transfer the advantages of a system of reserved (i.e. non-elected) places to the Third Estate on the illusory assumption that aristocratic representatives were sui generis corrupt and incapable of transcending their class interests. Condorcet also cast doubt on the principle of differing financial criteria for assembly membership. The only possible justification for such criteria, the effect of which was to restrict certain seats to the wealthy, would be the wish to limit the choice of candidates to those whose privileged educational background would in theory ensure an enlightened and financially disinterested approach to their responsibilities. In practice, Condorcet felt that this would be more securely achieved by establishing a single, modest threshold of financial eligibility both to exercise the franchise as well as actually to become a representative, this minimal threshold to be based simply on ownership of a property ‘sufficient for their needs’. Moreover,

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while great wealth could assure the privileged of an education, it could not guarantee that they would receive a good education. Still less convincing was the view that great wealth made a representative less vulnerable to venal temptation: ‘A poor but honest man cannot be corrupted, but a rich rascal is not sheltered from seduction’ (viii: 175). On the composition and modalities of provincial assemblies Condorcet offered detailed but simple proposals.20 In his scheme each provincial assembly would have two orders of membership in the form of deputies and officers. Whatever the actual number of deputies agreed to, it should be divisible by three, so that over and above natural attrition caused by resignation, retirement or death, a third of the membership would be replaced each year.21 Condorcet was anxious to ensure that assembly rules would prevent excessive length of membership for deputies and unreasonably long tenure of office in the case of office-holders, perpetuity, as elsewhere in political life, being potentially harmful to the public interest.22 The mathematics determining tenure of representation and office-holding, together with a definition of the functions of specified officials, were separately calculated for the three different levels of assembly in question, namely district, provincial and community. The general principles underpinning these provisions were explicitly articulated: the establishment of maximum constitutional equality between deputies; the restriction of the allegiance of representatives to the requirements of law and reason, not class interest; the eradication of private interest; the primacy of the public interest in all affairs of state. The practicality of Condorcet’s proposals depended upon the integrity of the whole process being protected by legislation, the political virtues of direct and indirect levels of suffrage and representation being further reinforced by the application of the calculus to voting procedures.23 It was in the context of elections to primary assemblies at district level that Condorcet stressed the crucial link between quality of representation and the people’s awareness of their political responsibilities: ‘Thus the 20 21 22 23

See also the comments on composition in Sur la forme des ´elections (ix: 294–8, 310–18). Condorcet returned to the need for simplicity in procedures in Section 18. Of the representatives due for re-election or replacement, those who gained the votes of three-quarters of the assembly would be assured of a three-year term. In the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven Condorcet settled on two years as the ideal length of tenure (ix: 22). Condorcet elaborated his theory of elections in 1789 in Sur la forme des ´elections, and again in 1792 in the Fragment sur les ´elections. Cf. the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix. On the sensitive issue of the responsibility of deputies in the National Assembly for the promotion of the interests of their d´epartements, see the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat (ix: 246–59).

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maintenance of a free and just representation depends on the people themselves, on those with a stake in it, and the law must take precautions against the negligence of landowners, and against the ways in which they can become victims of corruption’ (viii: 185).24 Freedom as a working political principle was achievable only through reform of the primary assemblies, where the performance of representatives could be monitored most effectively by voters, and the liberating experience of communal participation in the exercise of government could be realised to some degree: ‘In short, it is the primary assemblies which truly represent a body of citizens large enough to make all sectional or local interests fade before the general interests of humanity’ (viii: 186). The primary assemblies were allocated an unprecedented role by Condorcet, reflecting a view of political power as a force that flowed de bas en haut rather than in the reverse direction. On this point he parted company explicitly in 1788 with Montesquieu on the destabilising dangers of this relocation of power to monarchical systems, and was prepared to set aside Montesquieu’s checks and balances approach to the role of sectional and class interests in the civil order. Montesquieu, in Condorcet’s view, was too concerned with finding reasons for the status quo, rather than reasons for what should be. The interests of the nation did not in fact coincide with ‘the voice of self-interest of a few classes who unfortunately have the right to make themselves heard’. The governance of a just society by enlightened, high-quality representatives would require an engagement of the public will in the mechanisms of governance. This could only be realised through a radical restructuring of assembly composition and electoral procedures, necessitating in turn the neutralisation of the traditional interplay of interests between the three orders, and also between the orders and the monarch. a theory of voting Condorcet concentrated in article 5 on the problem of eliminating error in the expression and interpretation of the people’s will with regard to the election of representatives, and on the implications of probability theory and in particular social choice theory for the refinement of decision-making. This is arguably for social scientists the most interesting and important part of the Essai.25 Condorcet’s preference was for a system that required deputies 24

25

Condorcet stressed frequently the need for government to work with the grain of the people’s wishes and motivations, the duty of government being essentially to facilitate the aspirations of an enlightened people. Black comments on the failure of mathematicians to understand the Essai (p. 162), but see also McLean and Hewitt on the reactions to the mathematics of Condorcet’s voting theory by Lhuillier,

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to register their votes formally and confidentially with the use of billets rather than by open acclamation in order to ensure that views could be expressed ‘in cold silence’ without votes being influenced by the pressure of other deputies. This would produce a more accurately established result.26 Condorcet pays particular attention to specific applications of majority voting to the framing of motions, the complexities of quorum conventions and the order of assembly business.27 That Condorcet’s thinking on the power of majorities, and the pre-eminence of the common interest as determined by those majorities, here and elsewhere in his socio-mathematical writings, reflects an element of anti-individualism, has been rightly pointed out by some modern commentators.28 As in the case of the jury theorem, the mathematical explanation of inverse probability that underpins Condorcet’s theory of voting in the wider constitutional context is not to be found in this treatise but rather in the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix.29 It is mainly to the Essai, a ground-breaking investigation into the relationship between voting procedures and collective outcomes, that Condorcet owes his modern standing as the founder of social choice.30 His theory of voting and political decision-making constitutes one of the

26

27 28

29

30

Morales and Daunou (Condorcet, pp. 49–54). The mathematics were not clarified until the 1980s (by Michaud and Young). Condorcet returned to the issue of majorities, and the problem of whether majorities are always necessarily right, in the ninth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 175–7). The issue resurfaced in Des conventions nationales, a speech given to the Soci´et´e des Amis de la V´erit´e on 1 April 1791 in which he reviewed the position of minorities in the National Convention (x: 196–7). On the issue of the constitutional protection of minorities, see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 116. See also Sur la forme des ´elections where Condorcet reasserted the main purpose of elections, namely to ensure that the will of the majority is manifested, and that votes are cast only in accordance with reason and conscience (ix: 330). On the testing of the public will by means of voting in assemblies, see also the commentary to article 42 of Sur les moyens de traiter les protestants franc¸ais comme des hommes, sans nuire a` la religion catholique (v: 521–2). Condorcet discusses the implications for the rights of minorities, e.g. the rights of women and children, arising from majority-vote decisions in the Dissertation philosophique et politique, ou R´eflexions sur cette question: S’il est utile aux hommes d’ˆetre tromp´es? (v: 349–50). In these proposals relating to electoral procedures, conditions of eligibility and quorum issues, Condorcet paid homage to Turgot’s Recherches historiques et politiques sur les Etats-Unis de l’Am´erique septentrionale. Cf. Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres? (ix: 337–8). See, for example, G.-T. Guilbaud, ‘Les th´eories de l’int´erˆet g´en´eral et le probl`eme logique de l’agr´egation’, Economie appliqu´ee 5 (1952), 501–84; Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 166; Rothschild, on the other hand, takes another view: ‘The best decision procedures – or the ones that are “in some sense natural” – are for Condorcet those that correspond to the decision-making of a single individual. The individual weighs up different grounds for choice, he discovers new grounds, he changes his mind, he tries to be as scrupulous as he can’ (Economic Sentiments, p. 205). By ‘probability of decisions’, Condorcet meant the probability that a decision is correct. ‘The phrase belongs squarely to Condorcet’s era of probabilistic reasoning’ (McLean and Hewit, Condorcet, p. 35). References are to the facsimile reproduction of the Essai (New York, Chelsea Publishing Co., 1972). McLean and Urken, ‘Did Jefferson or Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’, 445.

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most sustained elements to be found in the whole corpus of his writings, and as late as 1793 he noted in Sur les ´elections that he had still not completed his work on the theory and on the problems of public policy which arose from it (xii: 639). The mathematical nature of his theory reflected a conviction that the moral and political sciences were as open to mathematical reasoning as were the physical sciences. In this remarkable and substantial treatise, dedicated to Turgot, he sought to resolve the problem of control over a series of numeric variables. In the context of a legislative assembly these variables relate to the number of members of the assembly and the majority needed for decisions to be taken on the one hand, and what Kavanagh has called the ‘psychological probability’ that rational individuals will arrive at a just decision with adjustments in one set of variables compensating for deficiencies in the other.31 The general principles behind the application of the calculus of probabilities to the social and political sciences would be readdressed in 1793 in the Tableau g´en´eral de la science qui a pour objet l’application du calcul aux sciences politiques et morales. As in the jury theorem, the key consideration is not the size of the electorate, or the proportion of electorate size to majority size, but rather the absolute size of the majority. In authenticating the general will, which is the primary object of Condorcet’s voting theory, modern commentators have drawn attention to the differences between Condorcet and his more illustrious predecessor Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the theory of the general will that was set out in Du contrat social (Book 4, ch. 2) almost three decades earlier.32 While Condorcet was reticent about his debt to Rousseau, it is almost certain that Rousseau loomed large in his thinking.33 McLean and Hewitt rightly stress the crucial importance of understanding that the probability that a voter’s opinion is correct postulated by Condorcet relates to judgements rather than interests: ‘Aggregating individual judgements to a social judgement is another matter entirely, and both Rousseau and Condorcet are clear that that is their subject.’34 Condorcet clarifies his understanding of the role of voting procedures in ascertaining the general will in Sur les assembl´ees 31

32 33

34

Kavanagh, ‘Chance and probability’, 16. Kavanagh clarifies some of the social and political implications of the calculus of probabilities in a more modern context with regard particularly to the work of Emile Borel and Adolphe Quetelet. McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 37–8; Kavanagh, ‘Chance and probability’, 16. With regard to Rousseau’s influence in this context, see also B. Grofman and S. Feld, ‘La volont´e g´en´erale de Rousseau: une perspective condorc´etienne’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 101–6. McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, p. 38. See also Black, The Theory of Committees, p. 163; K. J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York and London: Wiley, Chapman and Hall, 1951; repr. 1963), pp. 93–6; P. Jones, ‘Intense preferences, strong beliefs and democratic decision-making’, Political Studies 36 (1988), 7–29.

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provinciales (viii: 601) where it becomes clear that he means that the outcome of voting should be the revelation of an opinion which corresponds as closely as possible to the opinions of individuals who must themselves of course be educated and hence enlightened. This is not the Rousseauist position, although the general framework of Rousseau’s discussion of the general will in Du contrat social is clearly relevant to Condorcet’s subsequent elucidation of the theory.35 The extension of the jury theorem, set out at length in the Discours pr´eliminaire to the Essai, to the broader question of collective decisionmaking rules involving more than two alternatives presented Condorcet with a more complex problem. His solution involved a method of ranking the options, and would result in a methodology that combined a theory of social choice with probability mathematics whose revolutionary implications have only recently been teased out by social scientists.36 A rank order count system had already been mapped out by Jean-Charles Borda in his M´emoire sur les ´elections au scrutin of 1784,37 and in the Discours pr´eliminaire of the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse Condorcet discusses Borda’s system of evaluating the votes given to candidates in accordance with their ranking positions. Giving Borda due credit for his system, Condorcet thought that it had the merits of clarity and avoided ‘the conventional plurality method’s drawback of presenting as the plurality decision an opinion which was in fact contrary to it’ (Essai, pp. clxiv–clxxix). However, Borda’s system was not entirely satisfactory, and could result in preference being given to a candidate whose probability of merit is below that of another. In article 5 of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales Condorcet restates the problem and its associated paradoxes in these terms: What does it actually mean to be elected? Is it not to be judged preferable to one’s competitors? Why make that judgement dependent on the view of the majority? It is because we think that a proposition declared valid by fifteen people has a higher degree of probability than a contrary judgement declared valid by only ten. Thus, in an election the person who really represents the will of the majority must be the one whose superiority over his competitors is the most probable, and is consequently the one who gains a majority vote higher than any of the others. Now, it is possible, with only three candidates, that one of them will have more 35 36

37

On this point see Arrow, Social Choice, pp. 81–6; Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 183–4. Urken’s work has been particularly illuminating, see ‘The Condorcet–Jefferson connection’. With regard to the mathematical aspects, McLean and Urken draw attention to Condorcet’s debt to Jacob Bernoulli’s Ars conjectandi (‘Did Jefferson and Madison understand Condorcet’s theory of social choice?’, 445). An English translation of this text can be found in McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 114–19.

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votes than either of the other two, but that one of the latter, even the one with the fewest votes, is considered in reality to be superior to the other two. This seems paradoxical, but you will have the feeling that it could be true if you reflect on the fact that a person voting for one of the candidates is certainly making known that he believes that candidate to be superior to either of the others, but he is not making known his view on their respective merits, that at this point his judgement is incomplete, and that in order to know the true will on the matter, it is necessary to complete that judgement. (viii: 193–4)

The dilemma crystallises in the case of three candidates A, B and C ranked by five electorates of differing size, giving an order in which each voter’s preferences between each pair of candidates can be inferred resulting in a win for C as the candidate scoring the largest total number of votes and a clear loser in third place of candidate A.38 Modern analyses of Condorcet’s application of the formulae of mathematical probability to the three-candidate electoral model have shown, however, how the values assigned to the component elements in the formulae of probability could lead to an irrational outcome.39 Condorcet recognised the dilemma in the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse where he considers the example of an election in which three candidates present themselves (pp. lvi–lxx). For the solution he had to move away from probabilism. Rationality could be restored with the elimination of the candidate with the greatest plurality of votes cast against him. Thus candidate A would be seen as an irrelevant alternative to be dispensed with in any comparative calculations relating to the voting outcome for candidates B and C. Condorcet clarified further the criterion of ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’ in 1788 in two appended notes to the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, subtitled respectively ‘Sur la mani`ere de connaˆıtre le vœu de la pluralit´e dans les e´lections’ (viii: 559–78) and ‘Sur la forme des d´elib´erations prises a` la pluralit´e des voix’ (viii: 578–608).40 With the calculus of probabilities now enriched by requirements of ‘simple reason’, the way was now open for Condorcet to address the problem of cycles in voting patterns. In the Discours pr´eliminaire of the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse he had recognised that cycles in the pattern of voter preferences were dangerous to democracy, undermined the general 38 39 40

The statistical basis to the three-candidate model, and an analysis of outcomes, is set out by McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 39–40. See Black, The Theory of Committees, pp. 169–71; H. P. Young, ‘Condorcet’s theory of voting’, American Political Science Review 82 (1988), 1238. It should be noted that Condorcet prefers the term ‘plurality’ to the term ‘majority’ (rarely used). On this point, see Sommerlad and McLean, The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), p. xiii.

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will and threatened the integrity of the decision-making process. The problem was acute in cases where more than three candidates were presented to an electorate rendering the principle of ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’ inapplicable. Young has expounded convincingly the formulae that Condorcet evolved to break the problem of cycles by showing how Condorcet’s ranking rule evolved into a maximum likelihood rule agreeing ‘the maximum number of pair-wise votes, summed over all pairs of candidates’.41 In the first mathematical appendix to the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales Condorcet’s elucidation of the principle of ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’ is restated in more coherent terms than previously, this time in the context of the three candidate contest between ‘Pierre’, ‘Paul’ and ‘Jacques’ and six electorates of varying numbers. After reviewing critically the flawed outcomes of plurality voting and voting by successive elimination, as well as the score value system advocated by Borda, he then proceeds to demonstrate the advantages of the ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’ condition over systems based on traditional plurality voting procedures, and more recently on Borda’s ranking system: ‘The conventional method is deceptive because you make an abstract generalisation of what should be counted; the new method is deceptive because you give consideration to judgements which should not be counted’ (viii: 570). Voting outcome judgements between Paul and Jacques are irrelevant to the evaluation of the outcome between Paul and Pierre, and here Condorcet rejected Borda’s view of the relevance of the full ranking order to comparisons between any two of the three candidates. Interestingly, Condorcet’s argument now omits reference to probability; it pertains entirely to social choice. The differing Borda and Condorcet approaches to voting procedures still fuel fierce debate among social scientists today.42 The Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (see especially article 5) contains the essence of Condorcet’s voting theory expressed in non-technical terms. Its scientific rationale is embedded in the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse and also in the two mathematical appendices attached to the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales referred to above, and modern interpretations of this aspect of Condorcet’s thinking on representative government have sought 41

42

Young, ‘Condorcet’s theory of voting’, 1236. A ranking rule is not to be confused with a choice rule, the former producing the best rank-order of candidates and the latter a winner, see McLean and Hewitt on the implications of this differenciation (Condorcet, p. 42). On the modern debate see Arrow, Social Choice; M. Dummett, Voting Procedures (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and R. Sugden, The Political Economy of Public Choice (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981).

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to integrate these coterminous texts more coherently. Later refinements to the rationale behind Condorcet’s voting theory, and his thoughts on the practicalities involved, including his remarkable anticipation of the advent of ‘arithmetical machines’ to facilitate the computation of votes in the Tableau g´en´eral de la science, are to be found in Sur la forme des ´elections (1789), Sur les ´elections (1793) and the preamble to the Plan de constitution (1793). from estates-general to national assembly Articles 7 and 8 of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales raise the crucial question of a modern National Assembly with all its implications for ancien r´egime governmental practices.43 In both sections the key points of the previous six are consolidated as fundamental principles of political management which Condorcet was to revisit frequently in later years. The preconditions of legitimacy for such an Assembly are articulated in article 7 in uncompromising terms,44 the opening list of desiderata exposing starkly the inadequacies of the forthcoming, and for Condorcet unwelcome, meeting of the Estates-General: Even if there existed a National Assembly which could be regarded as being truly constitutional, in other words [a National Assembly] which had received that public or tacit approval of the nation which alone allows it to deserve that title, if that constitution seemed to be faulty, if it was necessary to change it, reform it, or at least confront issues, which might cause a section of the citizenry to lose faith in it, with the authority of a new vote of confidence, an assembly of representatives, convened for the purpose of deciding on that change, would have the legitimate power to do so, provided that its members had been elected with the specific intention of charging them with that function, and provided that no civil rights had been infringed by any inequality in the way in which their representatives had been elected, or in the form of representation. (viii: 222)

The issue of consent for a National Assembly was critical, and Condorcet made the political reality of that consent dependent on two linked conditions: first, that a National Assembly should meet with relative frequency 43

44

On the American example, see the Eloge de Franklin (iii: 399–400). Condorcet returned to the essential role of a National Assembly in a healthy constitution on 7 August 1791 in the Discours sur les conventions nationales, a speech given to the Amis de la Constitution (x: 191–206). Here he discussed also how the people’s right to demand the convocation of National Assemblies ensured vigilance against political abuse. Condorcet returned to the question of the authority of a National Assembly in the Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres? where he examined more closely the bases for popular confidence in the decisions of such an assembly (ix: 335–44).

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so that each citizen qualified to exercise the franchise had the opportunity to make a judgement on the Assembly’s record, and secondly that public approval or disapproval of that record should be freely expressed.45 Condorcet’s proposals for the replacement of the Estates-General with a new National Assembly were informed by two over-arching principles: the formal assurance of legitimacy for any new constitutional modifications, and the unqualified right of the people to revise the whole framework, as well as the individual terms, of the constitution.46 Condorcet was deeply suspicious of any constitutional arrangement which, by virtue of its establishment, asserted claims to permanency. Constitutions must have the capacity for self-renewal and evolution in response to the dynamics of progress and enlightenment, and Condorcet was convinced that if the new Assembly did not have that capacity then future generations would be condemned to suffer indefinitely the accumulating consequences of flaws unintentionally, but fatally, embedded in the constitution by its founders, ‘a principle as contrary to the natural rights of men as it is dangerous in its consequences, since it means giving representatives absolute authority over those they represent, and at the same time making a sectional interest the judge of its own case’ (viii: 224). It was therefore essential for citizenship in the modern age to be a concept that integrated the spirit of constitutional respect with the spirit of constitutional change: ‘Today’s legislators are just men who think only to give their fellow men, their equals, laws that are as transitory as they are’ (ix: 375). For the legitimacy of a National Assembly to be realised, Condorcet referred the reader back to the discussion in article 1 relating to the free choice of representatives, nominated by a property-owning electorate under a formally regulated system in which exclusions relating to age, sanity, civil status, etc., were precisely defined and rationally justifiable,47 and in which the balance of representation between the orders was corrected in the interests of quality and equality. The purpose of a National Assembly would be to know the will of the nation. Reviewing the history of the EstatesGeneral, Condorcet noted that since the reign of Philippe-le-Bel no formal constitution had ever been exposed to the will of the people, and that 45

46 47

The question of the frequency of meetings of assemblies, and the need to consult the people on when to convene, would arise again in 1791 in Condorcet’s other great essay on social choice, the Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven. Here Condorcet commented positively on the role of referenda in the democratic process (ix: 30). Cf. R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs (ix: 280–1). On the problem of forming new constitutions see the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat (ix: 223–5). On the question of exclusions (see also above, pp. 161–2, 199, 204), Condorcet now added to the list ‘those whom one could legitimately suspect of having a corrupted will’ (viii: 130).

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therefore legitimacy grounded in consent had never been a feature of the Estates-General. The way forward was to devise such a constitution built on a revised system of representation involving, as in the case of provincial assemblies, a radical redefinition of the qualifications to exercise the franchise, a carefully calculated process of direct nomination of candidates to a unicameral assembly, in which all seats would be filled by election, with no division of representation between orders. Articles 7 and 8 contained the seeds of a revolutionary reconfiguration of political life in which principles of universality, equality and consent would replace feudal privilege, tradition and the personal authority of the monarch as the driving force in the machinery of representation, and in that of government itself: While it does not take effect immediately, this [system of] representation is nonetheless real and legitimate; the will which declares representatives to be elected emanates from the universality of the citizenry in a systematic way. Mandated by citizens, and charged by them to choose their representatives, these electors carry out their functions, have the right to have a vote, and to form a will. (viii: 227–8)

Representation in the form of three formally separate orders had its historical origins, in Condorcet’s view, in the imposition of the will of victors over the conquered, consolidated subsequently by the church’s arrogation to itself of secular prerogatives and politico-judicial authority in times of ignorance and superstition. Separate orders had generated a belief in the separation of rights, a belief that for Condorcet explained in part the lack of unity and purpose in the defence of the common cause characteristic of ancien r´egime provincial assemblies. Modernity required uniformity and universality of rights and especially the liberation of assemblies from the contradictions inherent in the pursuit of self-interest on the part of the orders. The business of a reformed National Assembly would no longer be dictated by the ebb and flow of inter-order conflicts and cabals, but would relate exclusively to the advancement of the public interest, the enactment of laws based on reason, and the pursuit of public happiness and enlightenment. High on Condorcet’s list of priorities for the new model of representation, with its pyramidic structure of direct elections to district assemblies by property-owning citizens (‘votants’), indirect elections by districts to provincial assemblies (by ‘´electeurs’) and a crowning process of indirect election to a National Assembly by the provincial assemblies, was the promotion of national unity and national purpose: But today, when it is a matter, not of reaching agreement with powerful chiefs, not of disarming a dangerous resistance, but of knowing the will of the nation, of consulting it on its needs, we must admit to the body representing it only those

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men who can be motivated by no other interest, and in whom [the nation] believes it can confide its own [interest], in short, of representatives of the citizens chosen by the citizens. (viii: 233–4)

With this model of representation in mind, Condorcet turned his attention again to the question of size. A National Assembly that was too small would be weak in moments of crisis, ‘because, on those occasions when courage is needed, each must fear compromising himself personally’. On the other hand, an assembly that was too large could become detached from the general will, and cease to be effectively representative (viii: 235). In proposing an assembly made up of four deputies elected by each provincial assembly, requiring a quorum of two-thirds (representing five-sixths of the provinces) for the purpose of assembly deliberations and decision-making, Condorcet felt that the chances of having a body capable of conducting the affairs of the nation in an orderly, calm and mature fashion, and of reaching decisions quickly with minimal dissension, ‘expressing the true will, the considered will of the majority’ (viii: 236), would be optimised. Ideally, the assembly would be composed of honest, enlightened representatives deserving of public confidence, and whose functions would be legitimised by the collective will of ‘educated citizens’. Condorcet’s model for a National Assembly was thus characterised by a clear line of accountability through direct and indirect suffrage, with representatives elected on the basis of the empirical evidence of their record.48 Membership of a National Assembly would not be left to chance; ‘the most enlightened men from each province would be charged with electing representatives to it’ (viii: 237), and chance would also be removed from the process whereby members of provincial assemblies were elected by district and community assemblies. At the same time, freedom of choice must be unconditional, and this implied that voters and electors must be trusted to choose wisely: In response we would say that clear and serious reasons are needed to limit that freedom, and not leave it intact, a principle for which I shall be reproached for repeating, but on which I can be allowed to insist since it has made little impact so far, not only on the majority of representatives, but even on political writers who are always . . . less hostile to freedom. (viii: 238)

Condorcet urged acceptance of his proposals for the election of four deputies from each province even if his other proposals for the restructuring of provincial assemblies were to prove unacceptable. He added a further 48

The issue of ministerial accountability in the National Assembly was treated in the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs (ix: 278–81).

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refinement that the four deputies should be chosen by a prescribed number of electors chosen by each arrondissement. No order would be permitted to mandate its representatives in the choice of the four deputies; electors would not be seated separately by order, would record their votes by private billet, and the electoral procedures as set out in article 5 would be followed. As far as the provincial assemblies were concerned, the iniquities of the prevailing system of representation by order would persist, and the public interest, not to mention rights, would continue to be frustrated by prejudice and privilege, but the provincial state of affairs could at least be alleviated, and the quality of representatives raised in provincial assemblies: ‘the advantage of being able to count on a choice [of good candidates] will be retained’ (viii: 240). Condorcet felt that many of his proposals for a reformed representation in the provincial assemblies were in fact equally relevant to a new National Assembly. His plan to replace the rarely convoked Estates-General with a permanently sitting National Assembly was designed with the same hardnosed pragmatism. He saw little point to prolonged speculative argument over the historical legitimacy of current structures with a view to their retention in a modified form: ‘These are old ruins from which we can all imagine at will the outlines of a palace or a temple, but in which it is very hard to rediscover the traces of ancient foundations which have been destroyed so often, and reconstruct the building they really supported’ (viii: 253). The quest for a return to a lost, irretrievable and illusory golden age of representational virtue would lead only to controversy and confusion, and expose public opinion to the manipulation of sophists. The way forward lay in a new construction for the future, not in the refurbishment of old ruins: Thus a new form, more representative in a real sense and more legitimate per se, is one in which public peace will be more certain . . ., one which is closest to the true interests of government as well as to those of the nation, interests which in the heart of true patriots cannot be set aside by class interests.

Condorcet never underestimated the difficulty of breaking with past practices in the matter of political representation, and was always conscious of the fact that the legacy of the past could never be completely discarded. His faith in the eventual triumph of modernity, appropriately managed, never wavered, and the progressive evolution of representative government was central to that triumph. The model for a revitalised national forum was already available in the form of the American Congress, and Condorcet’s

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frequent allusions to the American constitution in the Essai confirm that his vision of electoral reform went well beyond a mere fine-tuning of France’s provincial assemblies. His unfailing confidence in the potential political integrity of the people, and the potential virtue of enlightened public opinion, is perhaps a little surprising in view of the extremes of political vice in both areas that he witnessed in the post-Girondin phase of the Revolution. But his optimism in 1792 and the early months of 1793 was anchored as firmly to his faith in the redeeming power of education and enlightenment as a means to make men into citizens (iii: 383), to his belief in their essential goodness and to his confidence in the onward march of progress itself as it was in 1788.49 Articles 8 and 9 address specific aspects of political management such as the prerogatives of representatives (not to be confused with the traditional privileges of the two higher orders), assembly responsibilities, including taxation, public works, the administration of state property such as hospitals, schools, factories and also churches, and the arrangements for the inspection and maintenance of public facilities. In article 10 Condorcet re-emphasised the need for national uniformity in the structure and procedures at all levels of provincial assembly business, and this article contains closely detailed commentary on the physical and logistical implications of ensuring such uniformity relating, for example, to the need for territorial dimensions of all communities to be such that citizens were within a day’s travelling distance from the site of communal assemblies, half a day for district assemblies, a whole day for the provincial body (viii: 273). Physical access of the people to assemblies was essential to the maintenance of lines of communication between representatives, voters and electors,50 and here 49

50

‘Grˆace a` elles, Condorcet avait apport´e dans les derni`eres ann´ees de sa vie une dimension eschatologique a` sa th´eorie sociale. Cette dimension, qui deviendra si importante au XIX si`ecle, rassemble largement ses id´ees sociales des ann´ees pr´ec´edentes’ (Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 167). Cf. A. Cento, Condorcet e l’idea di progresso (Florence: Parenti, 1956), pp. 93–105. Condorcet distinguished carefully between ‘votants’ and ‘´electeurs’, the former being those with the right to vote at the lowest tier of the electoral process, and the latter being those for whom they vote who then, as electors, vote other representatives into public offices, if they are not themselves already office-holders, see Sommerlad and McLean, The Political Theory of Condorcet, 1 (1989), p. xii. On Condorcet’s interpretation of the practical way in which the people could exercise their sovereign power, see Jaume, ‘Individu et souverainet´e’. Jaume observes: ‘Pour concilier la repr´esentation avec l’exercice imm´ediat de la souverainet´e, il faut pallier l’absence de canaux l´egaux par o`u doivent monter les vœux de l’opinion publique, et par lesquels s’effectuerait une information en retour suivie de la sanction populaire . . . Au lieu de l’id´ee unanimiste d’un Peuple-un qui oppose sa volont´e aux repr´esentants, Condorcet d´ecrit un m´ecanisme qui fait appel a` l’opinion de chaque citoyen en restant toujours soumis a` la r`egle majoritaire’ (p. 300). See also L. Jaume, Le Discours jacobin et la d´emocratie (Paris: Fayard, 1989).

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Condorcet already had in view the administrative reorganisation of French territory into a new departmental configuration to help facilitate this key requirement.51 The transformation of the process of representation had physical as well as constitutional implications: ‘Those who would regard uniformity of constitution in the assemblies, in legislation, in taxation, in measurements, etc., simply as a kind of metaphysical ideal which seduces the academic mind, but which in practice is not worth all the obstacles which have to be overcome in order to realise it, are not offering us very profound thoughts’ (viii: 274).52 Access to assemblies, compactness of constituencies, defined responsibilities and functions were all viewed as ways of enabling the citizen to acquire an experience of equality and political engagement characterised by inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. Uniformity of administrative practices and structures on a national scale would liberate all orders of citizens from self-interest and narrowly based allegiances, and reinforce the commitment of voters, electors and representatives to the advancement of the public good. Assembly members and officials, even the wealthiest,53 should be remunerated appropriately. Effective representation, in which the individual deputy’s commitment to truth, justice and the public interest prevailed, required measures that would protect that deputy from the pressures that might otherwise compromise the strength of his commitment to the public interest.54 It was for this reason, for example, that Condorcet inserted a proposal to abolish the religious ceremonies that traditionally accompanied assembly business. Religious symbolism, pageantry and above all sermons read out to assemblies were potent weapons of persuasive and prejudicial influence which strengthened the grip of a privileged and unaccountable order on assembly business. Condorcet was convinced that the public display of religious ceremonial and symbolism in a political 51

52

53

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Condorcet’s views on this point reflected the influence of the 1775 Plan de municipalit´es by Turgot and Dupont de Nemours (published in 1787). See C. Wolikow, ‘Condorcet et le projet de Grandes Communes (1786–93)’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 242–3. Detailed proposals for the rationalisation of French territory for electoral purposes were set out in the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers ´etat (ix: 249–53) where Condorcet sought to prevent the growth of ‘enclaves’, or pockets of influence. ‘If his wealth means that he could do without it, let him make good use of it, and let him regard the means given to him to do a little more good as a reward. Refusing to accept it could be based on pride and imposture as much as real generosity. He would be establishing a prestigious way of distinguishing the rich, which is always a bad thing. He would be creating a slight prejudice in his favour, which would be another bad thing. Service without remuneration is not always a sign of unselfishness’ (viii: 275–6). Condorcet further examines the question of what those who agree to submit to the decisions of their representatives require from them in return in the Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres? (ix: 335–6).

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arena undermined secular authority in the civil order, and that the need to obtain the blessing of the church on the conduct of affairs of state debased the political authority of assemblies. Such fears might not be taken seriously by some, ‘but those who know their history will recall [its lessons] easily’ (viii: 277). Article 10 concludes with a rueful acknowledgement of the enormity of the challenge any move to reform France’s creaking mechanisms of representation that lay ahead. Not least among the obstacles to be surmounted was that of human nature itself, a problem that Condorcet never underestimated. He was always aware that most people were usually more preoccupied by the privileges that divided them than by the rights that united them, ‘even when the rights are important, and the privileges frivolous’. The Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales was overtaken quickly by events when Necker agreed on 26 August 1788 to recommend to Louis XVI that the Estates-General should meet (the meeting was scheduled initially for January 1789, but postponed until May).55 Necker’s concession more or less coincided with the completion of Condorcet’s Essai. In the R´esultat du conseil of 27 December 1788 that followed the second Assembly of Notables, hastily convened to finalise the terms under which the Estates-General should conduct business, the Royal Council agreed to double the representation of the Third Estate, and to freedom of the press. However, while the key demand made by Condorcet and Si´ey`es that the representation of the Third Estate should equal that of the combined representation of the two other orders was accepted, the critical issue of how votes were to be counted remained unresolved. Arrangements for elections were promulgated by the Royal Council on 24 January 1789, but the decreed provisions fell short of Condorcet’s proposals on a number of points.56 All French male citizens were invited to elect representatives, but female citizens were excluded; the bailiwick and s´en´echauss´ee would form the basic electoral constituency, the number of representatives being related to territorial size and population. The Third Estate would elect 500 deputies, the nobility and clergy 250 each. Representatives could not be mandated, but the orders would continue to sit separately in the electoral assemblies in each bailiwick. With regard to the clergy, all benefit-holders 55

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Controversy about the meeting was soon provoked by the newly reinstated Paris Parlement which decreed on 28 September 1788 that the Estates-General should meet strictly in accordance with its 1614 modalities. Condorcet wrote to Mme Suard on 31 December 1788: ‘The new arrangements fall well short of what we are entitled to have’, Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et Mme Suard, ed. Badinter, Letter 183.

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and rural clergy had the right to attend bailiwick assemblies, other clergy (in chapters, other religious communities and towns) being represented indirectly. All fief-holders in the Second Estate would be summoned to attend (female fief-holders sending a proxy), and attendance at the bailiwick assemblies would be open to all with purchased or inherited nobility over the age of twenty-five, French-born or naturalised, and domiciled within the bailiwick. Nobles and clerics possessing fiefs outside their place of residence could attend more than one assembly through proxies. A system of indirect, multi-stage elections was offered to the Third Estate with males over the age of twenty-five, French or naturalised, involved at all stages, provided that they were domiciled locally, and that their names were recorded on the tax registers. The Third Estate could choose its representatives from any of the three orders, the clergy and nobility being confined to members of their own orders.57 Provision was made for the cahiers des dol´eances to be drawn up at the general assembly of the bailiwick. A designated number of representatives would be elected to the Estates-General by secret ballot.58 As the emergence of the Third Estate as an autonomous political force gained momentum in the autumn of 1788 and spring of 1789, months 57

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The mathematics were as follows: in rural communities two representatives per village with up to 200 households, three for villages with 200-300; in towns assemblies of guilds and corporations could elect one representative per 100 members, wealthier guilds and professions being allowed double. Other citizens could elect two representatives per 100 inhabitants through municipal assemblies. All would then form a single municipal assembly to elect four representatives to the general assembly of the bailiwick. Provision was made for a higher number in the case of larger towns and cities. Condorcet commented at length in 1789 on the principles behind the consolidation of village communities for electoral purposes, and the problem of finding suitable representatives from such communities, in Sur la formation des communaut´es de campagne (ix: 433–9). In this essay Condorcet also set out his own calculations for constituency numbers at province, district, city, town and village levels. His rationale related not only to electoral efficiency; he also referred to the importance of reorganising rural communities for other, highly practical reasons, e.g. financial advantages, ability to deal with natural disasters, reduction of counterproductive inter-village rivalries, containment of the power of great landowners, better judicial arrangements, and above all the transformation of isolated people into citizens. The ballot was open and by acclamation at all other levels of the electoral process. Special provision was made for elections in Paris in accordance with regulations issued on 28 March, 13 April and 2 May 1789. With regard to the Third Estate in Paris, no guild representation was permitted. Sixty districts were established to draw up cahiers, and elect representatives to a municipal assembly of about 400 members. The municipal assembly then elected twenty representatives to the EstatesGeneral. In addition to the age, residence and nationality requirements, Parisians were required to pay a capitation tax of 6 livres (see Jones, ‘Intense preferences, strong beliefs and democratic decision-making’). For Condorcet’s views on the importance of Paris as a constituency, see the Adresse a` l’Assembl´ee nationale, pour que Paris forme partie d’un grand d´epartement (ix: 395–401). Paris remained the centre of enlightenment, ‘the sentinel guarding the rights of all, common ground for all the provinces, the model of respect for legal authority, the boulevard of freedom’. Condorcet was to become increasingly concerned by the threat to national unity caused by tensions between Paris and the provinces, however, see Sur le pr´ejug´e qui suppose une contrari´et´e d’int´erˆet entre la capitale et les d´epartements (x: 133–63).

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marked by the first stirrings of insurrection and by the widespread proliferation of inflammatory treatises and pamphlets from Si´ey`es, Target, Desmoulins and others, Condorcet followed up the publication of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales with a rapidly penned series of supplementary essays on aspects of representation reform. Most of these essays appeared in the late autumn and winter of 1788–9, some written in response to the decree of the Royal Council and in anticipation of the meeting of the Estates-General, the majority in response to the actual proceedings of the Estates-General, to the birth of the National Assembly on 17 June 1789, and to the events of 14 July.59 Eleven major essays relating directly to constitutional and representational matters were issued by Condorcet in that year: the Sentiments d’un r´epublicain sur les assembl´ees provinciales et les Etats-G´en´eraux,60 Sur la forme des ´elections, the Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres?, the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait et ce qui reste a` faire, the two Lettres a` m. le comte Mathieu de Montmorency, the three Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers ´etat, the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs et instructions a` donner par les provinces a` leurs d´eput´es aux Etats-G´en´eraux, the Adresse a` l’Assembl´ee nationale pour que Paris forme partie d’un grand d´epartement, Sur la formation des communes, Sur la n´ecessit´e de faire ratifier la Constitution par les citoyens and Sur la formation des communaut´es de campagne. In the Sentiments d’un r´epublicain (The Feelings of a Republican), written from the standpoint of an outside spectator of the French political scene just after the arrangements for the meeting of the Estates-General had been promulgated in December 1788, Condorcet noted the progress that had been made in the provincial assemblies with the adoption of many of the reforms proposed originally by Turgot, and reformulated in his own Essai. The meeting of the Estates-General was ill-timed, in his view, because it would effectively negate the post-Turgot prospect of a new, authentic National Assembly, and simply revive and relegitimise the old structures. He was thus deeply apprehensive about the outcome of the Estates-General, and in the Sentiments he sounded a warning note ‘so that this meeting of the Estates-General, so ardently desired, should be useful to the people and not bad for them’ (ix: 130). The enthusiasm of the privileged orders for the convocation of the Estates-General by bailiwick and not by province, 59

60

In addition, Condorcet found time to write on the declaration of rights and financial issues, and to complete his annotations to Roucher’s translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as well as to work on the Voltaire biography and complete works projects, together with a number of ´eloges. This essay was presented as the Suite des Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un Franc¸ais, sur les affaires pr´esentes.

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and in accordance with the rules for the allocation of seats to the separate orders, was a symptom of aristocratic resistance. Of particular concern was the danger to any proposal relating to a declaration of rights posed by the Second Estate.61 In short, the meeting of the Estates-General was simply a device, supported by the newly reinstated parlements,62 to safeguard the First and Second Estates from the rightful claims to just representation of the Third Estate, and it had been timed to take place before the new provincial structures could be consolidated, before the people had time to become fully aware of their rights, and the government to prepare properly its proposals for reform. Condorcet anticipated a negative outcome: ‘a turbulent, unenlightened assembly in which they will seek to persuade us that the provincial assemblies are unconstitutional’ (ix: 134). The precipitate convocation of the Estates-General was for Condorcet nothing less than a betrayal of the public interest, and the pressure that continued to emanate from the parlementaires to convene the meeting only fuelled his anxieties further. The EstatesGeneral was not a truly national body, its structures were legitimised only by the personal authority of the King, its meetings were irregular and it was bereft of even the tacit approval of the people. Since the occasion of its last meeting society had moved on: ‘during which time men have emerged from the most primitive darkness into the dawn of a day which at last is about to enlighten them’. The 1614 modalities were no longer acceptable to enlightened minds, and it was now essential for the general will, ‘such as it is’, to determine the nature of a new National Assembly. At this point, he reiterated the conditions for reformed representation that he had already detailed in the Essai, relating specifically to equality of representation in a unicameral system, territorial reorganisation of constituencies and revised voting procedures.63 61

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On this point Condorcet noted the need for each order to have the right of veto in anticipation of this danger: ‘Perhaps the clergy will demand intolerant laws, but it will only be able to get them with the consent of the other two [orders]’ (BIF Condorcet MS 858, f. 25). Condorcet’s hostility to the influence of the parlements continued to be constant and intense. In the Vie de Voltaire he noted their negative role in Voltaire’s moves to free the serfs of the Jura, the rehabilitation of La Barre and the reform of the education system (iv: 150–1). The most detailed elaboration of proposals relating to these issues was soon to be formulated in the second of the Lettres d’un gentilhomme a` messieurs du tiers-´etat, where Condorcet also explored the sensitive question of the investment of authority in such an assembly prior to the formation and public acceptance of a new constitution (ix: 281–3). The powers of assemblies were defined and categorised in the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs under the sub-heading ‘Pouvoirs’. While the notion of balance of power in constitutions in Montesquieu’s terms was ‘a fantatical and even dangerous idea’, Condorcet was confident in his calculations relating to equality of representation, see for example, Sur la formation des communaut´es de campagne (ix: 433–6).

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Condorcet anticipated little conflict with the crown at this stage in his thinking on representation. The threat of despotism came not from monarchs but from an ambitious aristocracy, against whom monarch and people were joined: ‘The interest of sovereign and people are necessarily the same: to escape the yoke with which the aristocracy threatens them both’ (ix: 138).64 At a time of transition, during which national unity and purpose threatened to disintegrate, Condorcet worried about growing threats to the monarchy, still for him at this time the repository of national unity and purpose, which were already detectable in the volatile situation prevailing in the provinces, with their increasingly insistent demands for regional independence.65 The new edifice of representation which Condorcet had constructed in the Essai had been predicated on the consolidation of a France forged as one nation under a reformed constitutional monarchy, and he saw any claims for exclusion from crown authority on the part of provincial assemblies with regard to legislation, taxation or electoral procedures as attacks on national unity. Provincial exclusions were ‘a shameful proposition’, and a betrayal of the public interest by those claiming to be its defenders. Electoral reform and the devising of a system that would accurately reflect the general will form the substance of the twenty-four sections of Sur la forme des ´elections (On the form of elections).66 In the light of the decision to retain the format of separate orders for the meeting of the Estates-General, the issue of unicameral government in a National Assembly became crucial, and Condorcet devoted a lengthy defence of the unicameral system, together with an analysis of the dangers of bicameral and tricameral systems, in the 1789 Examen sur cette question: Est-il utile de diviser une assembl´ee nationale en plusieurs chambres? (An examination of this question: is it useful to divide a National Assembly into several chambers?). The proposal from monarchists such as Mounier, Lally-Tollendal and others to establish a second chamber in the form of a senate or National Council was dissected in the second Lettre a` m. le comte Mathieu de Montmorency, dated on the titlepage 6 September 1789 (ix: 377). Condorcet had always rejected the principle of bicameralism, as is clear from the New Haven letters where he had tried to influence Jefferson and others on this point in the drafting 64 65 66

On the need for agreement rather than conflict with the King, see also Sur le choix des ministres (x: 60–1). Condorcet had in mind here the turbulence in Rennes and Nantes. The aristocracy would not rest, according to Condorcet, until everything that favoured progress had been abolished, including all memory of man’s rights, after which ‘the silence of the grave’ would prevail.

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of the new American constitution (see above p. 24). In his view the power of the executive and the legislative could be controlled more efficiently by an appropriately regulated franchise and scientifically calculated voting rules for a qualified majority, rather than by the creation of a second chamber. His views prevailed on 10 September 1789 when the Constituent Assembly rejected a bicameral legislature. Condorcet’s 1788–9 essays on representation revisit in increasingly tense constitutional circumstances many of the issues addressed presciently in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales. The Essai can be ranked among the most penetrating and historically relevant analyses of a failing machinery of government, and of ways to repair that machine, to emerge in the years immediately prior to the demise of the ancien r´egime.

chap t e r 9

The economic order

Condorcet did not write extensively or systematically on economics, although he is the author of a number of pioneering works devoted to specific economic issues relating to taxation reform, public finance, debt, insurance, annuities, tariffs and free trade. In these texts he had much to say about financial reforms and the creation of a revitalised infrastructure to underpin a stable and productive economic order. The R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es (Reflections on the grain trade), published in 1776, is the most substantial. Written in defence of Turgot’s policies, the R´eflexions represents Condorcet’s most sustained analysis of the benefits of free trade but, as with so many of his economic writings, the elucidation of economic principle is narrowly focussed, intersects with social and moral issues and is confined to a single, though centrally important, aspect of contemporary public policy, in this case the management of periodic bread shortages and the desperate plight of the poor arising from harvest failure. The historical specificity of the R´eflexions, and indeed of the majority of Condorcet’s economic writings, has ensured that his achievements as an economist have been largely obscured until the late 1980s.1 With the exception of the R´eflexions, the Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie a` m. N ∗ , auteur prohibitif, a` Paris (1775), Monopole et monopoleur (1775), the R´eflexions sur les corv´ees (1775), Sur l’abolition des corv´ees (1776) and a number of essays and pamphlets dedicated to technical aspects of fiscal and monetary reform, issued mainly after 1789,2 Condorcet’s wider-ranging 1

2

Condorcet’s reputation as an economist was badly dented in 1954 by J. A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), p. 135. His reputation has been retrieved since then by Cr´epel and Gilain’s 1989 collection of essays that included seminal studies of technical aspects of Condorcet’s economic thinking by Deloche, Dippel, Billoret, Troyanski, Darnis and others. The rediscovery of Condorcet as a serious economic thinker has been further advanced by Sommerlad and McLean (in the context of insurance and related actuarial theory), Faccarello and above all by Rothschild (see especially Economic Sentiments, pp. 157–217). Among the more interesting of these much-neglected writings, some quite substantial, are Sur les op´erations n´ecessaires pour r´etablir les finances (xi: 363–85), Plan d’un emprunt public avec des hypoth`eses

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economic pronouncements tend to be buried as chapters or sub-sections in works on other subjects such as the Vie de m. Turgot, the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, the notes for Roucher’s translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the Fragment of the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse. Many, perhaps the majority, of Condorcet’s economic texts, reflecting his views on historically remote issues like the salt-tax or contemporary currency technicalities, now have little interest for modern readers. As Rothschild has indicated, there is little on the theory of value, the theory of rent or the theory of capital: ‘The only part of his work that has been of interest to subsequent economists is his description of social choice and voting, a theory that has been seen as concerned with political rather than economic decisions.’3 The exception remains, of course, the great seminal 1785 treatise, the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix. Here Condorcet expounded not only a coherent theory of social choice and political decision-making, but also elaborated an original analysis of the economic environment in which social choice takes place. In the Essai social choice and economic policy are shown to be inseparable, economic policy being perhaps the most crucially important area in which social choice operates. The close attention paid to the political dimensions of the economic environment to which economic policy responds, so prominent a feature of the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es, will not surprise readers of the Essai.4 The R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es is a work that takes the reader to the heart of one of the most crucial economic debates of the Enlightenment, and in recent years interest has been rekindled in Condorcet’s views on the regulation of the grain trade. With its

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sp´eciales (xi: 351–61), Sur les caisses d’accumulation (ix: 389–403), M´emoires sur la fixation de l’impˆot (xi: 407–70), Sur l’impˆot personnel (xi: 473–81), Sur la proposition d’acquitter la dette exigible en assignats (xi: 487–515), Nouvelles r´eflexions sur le projet de payer la dette exigible en papier forc´e (xi: 519–27), Des causes de la disette du num´eraire, de ses effets, et des moyens d’y rem´edier (xi: 531–40), Sur la constitution du pouvoir charg´e d’administrer le tr´esor national (xi: 543–79), M´emoires sur les monnaies (xi: 583–673), Instruction pour le paiement des annuit´es et leur remboursement (xii: 35–42), M´emoire sur les effets qui doivent r´esulter de l’´emission de la nouvelle monnaie de cuivre (xii: 43–50). A footnote in the Vie de m. Turgot seems to be one of the very rare occasions where Condorcet uses mathematical formulae in his economic writings, although the determination of prices was compared to the three body problem in celestial mechanics, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, p. 176 n. 72; M. Chapront-Touz´e, ‘Condorcet et le probl`eme des trois corps’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 29–35. This surprising absence of algebraic equations was deliberate, according to Rothschild. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, p. 159. For a full analysis of the connections between social choice and economics, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 180–5. Rothschild observes that the first illustration in the Essai of the problem of finding a ‘Condorcet winner’ in the discussion of the choice of candidates in an election concerns three candidates representing differing economic policy options.

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luminous elaboration of a theory of public policy suitable for France’s transition from economic chaos to a condition of general wealth, flourishing trade and public happiness and enlightenment, the R´eflexions transcends the immediate historical circumstances of its composition with a striking analysis of the interaction between the worlds of political decision-making, economic theory, the administration of the public purse, crisis management and the impact of all this on the precarious lives of the working poor. It is also one of the few texts in the Condorcet canon of economic writings where the link between truth, virtue and happiness, one of the basic unifying principles of Condorcet’s politics, illuminates the bleak world of commercial imperative and market regulation with a brilliance that still casts its light over our own twenty-first-century economic landscape. the grain war The R´eflexions was published anonymously in 1776, the year of Turgot’s dismissal from office. The issues raised in the treatise are located in the explosive economic disputes that had dragged on for many decades between the physiocratic and mercantilist schools of thought on the subject of the fiscal regulations governing the grain trade and its associated products. In fact, few issues of government policy were more intensely discussed in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. Consumption patterns and the precarious ways in which bread reached Parisian consumers in the face of recurring provisioning crises have been carefully analysed by Kaplan, and more recently by Miller and Abad.5 The grain trade had been deregulated in 1749 when Jean-Baptiste Machault d’Arnouville was ControllerGeneral, and the principle of a free grain trade had been reaffirmed in 1764. A partially free commerce in grain prevailed in France until 1769–70 when controversy about free trade policy arose again. In 1770 Louis XV’s 5

S. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976); S. Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade during the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); S. Kaplan, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1770–1775 (Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 1996); J. Miller, Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); A. Cl´ement, Nourrir le peuple. Entre ´etat et march´e, XVIe–XIXe si`ecle. Contribution a` l’histoire intellectuelle de l’approvisionnement alimentaire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); R. Abad, Le Grand March´e. L’Approvisionnement alimentaire de Paris sous l’ancien r´egime (Paris: Fayard, 2002). In his magisterial reconstitution of the geography of production and distribution of food networks supplying seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris, Abad does not confine his study to bread alone but covers food provisioning in general. See also the invaluable data supplied by P. T. Hoffman, Growth in a Traditional Society. The French Countryside, 1450–1812 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); J.-M. Chevet, ‘National and regional corn markets in France from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’, Journal of European Economic History 25 (1996), 681–713.

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Controller-General, Joseph-Marie Terray, and also the King himself, were accused of encouraging monopoly interests, of causing the price of bread to rise to unacceptably high levels and of hoarding grain unnecessarily, provoking rumours among consumers of a famine pact or plot.6 Calls for the reinstatement of prohibitory laws to remedy the situation became irresistible, and Terray reauthorised a strict regulatory regime. According to Abad, governments in the second half of the century tended to be adversaries of free trade on the issue of the liberalisation of grain, but simultaneously tried to embrace market economy philosophies.7 Opposition to regulation was led by Turgot whose preference was for a free market as the most efficient way to protect the people on a longterm basis from the horrors of famine, in spite of the short-term problems arising during the transition to commercial freedom. In 1773 Turgot attacked the Swiss financier Jacques Necker, who in that year had nailed his anti-physiocratic colours to the mast in the Eloge de Colbert where he had praised Louis XIV’s Controller-General Jean-Baptiste Colbert for his interventionist policies.8 Necker took his revenge on Turgot in La L´egislation et le commerce des grains, published just before the outbreak of the bread riots marking the opening shots of the Grain War of the spring of 1775. Turgot belonged to the physiocratic movement, established in the 1750s by the demographer and controversial economic theorist Franc¸ois Quesnay.9 Condorcet was no enthusiast of economic sects, as his correspondence with Turgot indicates, and Dippel has demonstrated persuasively that he never subscribed fully to physiocratic theory.10 Nevertheless, he came to Turgot’s defence in the quarrel with Necker, and his counter-attack opened in 1775 with the Lettre d’un laboureur de Picardie a` m. Necker, auteur prohibitif a` Paris (Letter from a Picardy ploughman to Mr Necker, a prohibitory writer in Paris) (xi: 1–34). Reflecting the physiocratic position, Turgot rejected the conventional wisdom that the grain trade should be regulated in order to maintain fair price levels, and that government statutes to regulate the operation of the 6 8 9

10

7 Abad, Le Grand March´e, p. 55. Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 127 n. 1. The encounters between Turgot and Necker in 1773 have been described in detail by Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, pp. 129–31. Quesnay’s first major statement on economic matters was the entry ‘Fermiers (Economie politique)’ for the Encyclop´edie (vol. vi) in 1756. This was followed in 1757 with his second, more celebrated antimercantilist entry, ‘Grain’ (vol. vii). Quesnay’s best-known statements of physiocratic principles are to be found in the 1758 Tableau ´economique and in a collection of essays, Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement le plus avantageux au genre humain ([Paris], 1768), issued under the aegis of Dupont de Nemours, in which the term ‘physiocracy’ was used in print for the first time. See also T. P. Neil, ‘Quesnay and physiocracy’, Journal of the History of Ideas 9 (1948), 153–73. Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, p. 156.

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trade offered the only practical prospect of averting famine conditions among the poor. Turgot believed that regulatory or ‘prohibitory’ legislation produced the very result it was intended to prevent, a view that Condorcet also echoed in the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 41). Restrictions on the free internal and external movement of grain interfered with long-term cycles of market demand, generating short-term crises of supply. This in turn endangered the prosperity of the whole agricultural sector, and agriculture was in Turgot’s view the key sector in national economic life. Reappraisal of policy priorities with regard to agriculture was a prerequisite for the replenishment of the state’s coffers, for successful fiscal reform and ultimately for the happiness and well-being of the people. In his Lettres au Contrˆoleur-G´en´eral sur le commerce des grains of 1770, itself a mini-treatise on the theory of free trade, Turgot had tried therefore to convince Terray of the need to abandon his decision to reintroduce regulation, but without success.11 The clash of economic ideologies over the burning question of the grain trade came to a head after the death of Louis XV in 1774, and the appointment by Louis XVI of Turgot to Terray’s position as Controller-General. The Guerre des farines, or Grain War, finally broke out after the promulgation on 13 September 1774 of Turgot’s decree revoking Terray’s prohibitory legislation, and reauthorising the free movement of grain within France’s borders. With this decree, which applied to the whole of France with the exception of Paris, all restrictions on grain sales were withdrawn, and the traditional practice of stockpiling grain as a means to assure supplies when times were hard was scheduled to come to an end. At first the decree was welcomed, but it soon lost public support as the price of bread rose in the winter of 1774–5 as a consequence of the failure of the 1774 harvest. Moreover, administrators became increasingly unwilling to implement fully Turgot’s September decree as events unfolded. Bread riots started on 27 April 1775 in Beaumont-sur-Oise, some twenty miles from Paris, and unrest spread rapidly to many parts of the provinces. The rioting reached Versailles on 2 May, and looting of bakers’ shops was soon a daily occurrence in Paris itself. Public unrest increased, exacerbated by panic-buying, the activities of speculators, the well-publicised hostility of the anti-physiocrats and wavering governmental strategy. Condorcet was obliged to witness the public excoriation of the free trade policies of the heroic Turgot, whom he venerated, as well as the military action against the mobs which Turgot was obliged to deploy to restore order to the streets. By 10 May the Grain War was over, but the affair served to 11

On Turgot’s ‘Euclidean conviction’, see Baker, Condorcet, p. 58.

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rally Turgot’s enemies, and his remaining days in office were numbered. In Ribemont Condorcet witnessed some of the provincial unrest, and kept Turgot well informed of the confrontations between soldiers and rioters.12 It was against this dramatic backcloth of events, culminating in Louis XVI’s decision to dismiss Turgot from office and appoint Clugny as ControllerGeneral, that he started to draft his defence of Turgot’s free trade policies in the form of the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es. In this text the prohibitionist lobby, led by the detested Genevan banker Necker, the ‘defender of ignorant prejudice’, and Clugny’s eventual successor, would be the primary target.13 Interestingly, Condorcet’s concerns about government intervention in food supplies are confined only to bread. Nowhere does he raise the question of economic principle with regard to prohibitory regulations regarding meat, fish, fruit or other food. In this respect, the R´eflexions follows the familiar pattern of emphasis on bread common to most eighteenthcentury writers on the political economy of food. Bread was the staple food of the poor, and regular supplies were essential to their survival in a way that the supply of luxuries to Parisian elites was not. It is not that surprising, therefore, to find that the bread issue looms so large in the period’s political and economic discourse. the d ef ence of free t rade In his 1766 R´eflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, Turgot had aligned himself with the general principles of political economy associated with Quesnay and the physiocrats. His views on free trade were set out in the preamble to his Lettres au Contrˆoleur-G´en´eral sur le commerce des grains, written during his tour of the Limousin in the famine year of 1770, but not published until 1788. In the Lettres Turgot had defined the free market conditions necessary for general commercial equilibrium and the dilemmas of public policy facing governments, particularly with respect to the management of market conditions in times of famine.14 Turgot was a theorist of equilibrium, and his central economic tenets were also the foundation-stone of Condorcet’s position in the R´eflexions: commodities, wages, revenue and population growth would achieve and maintain a balanced relationship of values provided that commercial practices and the 12 13 14

Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, ed. Henry, p. 212. Necker’s first term of office lasted from 1776 to 1781. He reassumed the post of Controller-General in 1788–9, after the fall of Lom´enie de Brionne’s government, and again briefly in 1789–90. For a full comparative analysis of the theory of general equilibrium with particular reference to Turgot, Condorcet and Adam Smith, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 76–86.

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operations of the market were free, although this did not imply any reluctance to intervene in other areas of political management affecting the economic welfare of the nation. Freedom of the grain trade would result in the creation of maximum competitive conditions between buyers and between sellers alike, together with an equalisation of prices and an ensuing equilibrium between the interests of the rich and those of the poor (xi: 104–5).15 Prices would reach their true levels through a process of what Turgot called ‘tˆatonnement’,16 that is to say of tentative negotiation between buyers and sellers, and not through a process of centralised determination initiated by monopolists and government officials. In the case of the grain trade freedom needed to be established over a long period for beneficial economic effects to be achieved. Unfortunately for Turgot, his policy was not to be given the time needed for it to come to fruition.17 Defending himself against accusations of heartlessness and cold indifference towards the plight of the people, Turgot accepted that government withdrawal from the operations of the grain trade might well worsen conditions for the poor temporarily in the course of advancement towards economic equilibrium, but that the effects on bread prices could be mitigated by a programme of auxiliary measures relating to the distribution and storage of grain, employment, food imports, taxation and land tenure laws. In particular, Turgot was concerned to implement policies that would underpin employment and pay levels, and he preferred to follow that path to minimise hardship rather than the path of provision through public charities, and other forms of demeaning ‘authorised mendicity’ such as soup kitchens.18 Other compensatory measures proposed related to ‘approvisionnement’, that is to say the granting of government loans to grain merchants to support the high transportation costs of importing grain into crisis areas from other parts of France, the reduction of taxation on the poor, and restrictions on the rights of landowners. Such policies were implemented in the Limousin where Turgot was Intendant from 1761 until 1774, one of the poorest regions of France under the ancien r´egime, and in the Vie de m. 15

16 17

18

On the achievement of this equilibrium between the rich and the poor Condorcet wrote a particularly interesting pamphlet in 1790 entitled Sur le pr´ejug´e qui suppose une contrari´et´e d’int´erˆets entre Paris et les provinces (x: 133–63). The equilibrium between rich and poor, buyer and seller, still preoccupied him in the Fragment of the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 528–9). Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, ed. Schelle, vol. iii, pp. 324–8. Rothschild notes that this term had mathematical connotations in the eighteenth century, Economic Sentiments, see ch. 6. For a full discussion of the relationship in Turgot’s (and Condorcet’s) thought between a commitment to free trade in grain and government intervention in other markets, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 72–86. Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, ed. Schelle, vol. iii, pp. 260–3. See also Rothschild’s account of Turgot’s policies against famine, Economic Sentiments, pp. 78–81.

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Turgot Condorcet noted Turgot’s achievement in reducing mortality rates in the Limousin area after the famines following the disastrous harvests of 1769 and 1770 (v: 40).19 In opposing the liberal position on the freedom of the grain trade, Necker’s La L´egislation et le commerce des grains embodied a pragmatic interpretation of the conditions of the poor in a civil order designed fundamentally in the interests of the property-owning rich. Oppressed by the laws, able to sell their labour only for minimal wages, deprived of education and therefore enlightenment, the docile poor tolerated the inequalities of the civil order only because the government ensured their survival by maintaining the supply of bread at a level they could afford. Necker warned that this delicate social equation would break down, however, if the poor perceived that bread supplies were threatened by rising prices. Rising prices were thus for Necker the most dangerous consequence of the free trade in grain, and would ultimately undermine the civil order. It was in the interests of all, therefore, for government to intervene with the introduction of prohibitory laws to protect the poor from high prices, and thereby reinforce public order and public happiness. Necker rejected Turgot’s solution of compensatory intervention in other areas of the economic order, and insisted that maintenance of public confidence in the supply of bread at affordable prices by prohibitory mechanisms was the only way to preserve the civil order and meet the government’s over-riding obligation to protect the interests of property-owners.20 Condorcet viewed Necker’s anti-liberal position as being nothing less than a naked defence of the privileges of the rich in the hypocritical guise of concern for the poor, and as a violation of natural rights: ‘Prohibitory laws are demanded in the name of the people, but citizens’ rights also have always been violated on the pretext of defending the people’ (xi: 187). The R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es is divided into two parts subtitled respectively De la libert´e and Des prohibitions, Part 1 containing nine chapters and Part 2 seven. Condorcet added subsequently an Avertissement in which he sought to clarify his position on two points that had proved controversial, and had revived the long-standing charge of indifference to poverty that had dogged liberal economists since the 1760s. The first related 19

20

On Turgot’s success here, see M. C. Kiener and J.-C. Peyronnet, Quand Turgot r´egnait en Limousin (Paris: Fayard, 1979), p. 267. For contemporary criticism of Turgot’s policies prior to the quarrel with Necker, see Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy, vol. ii, p. 505. In his admirable summation of Necker’s position, Baker notes that ‘this was by no means an unsophisticated argument. Indeed, it was a patently undogmatic appeal for a more pragmatic approach to matters of social legislation than Turgot’s rational conviction would allow’, Condorcet, p. 63.

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to the relationship between reduced levels of consumption among the poor and the high price of bread in times of shortage. In the R´eflexions he had stated that small reductions in consumption caused by rising prices had a positive impact on the market by encouraging bakers to manage their stock more efficiently, and by allowing competition to re-establish itself more effectively in the medium to long term. Like Turgot and Adam Smith,21 whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was also first published in 1776, Condorcet believed that a free trade in grain actually diminished the threat of famine, but insisted in the Avertissement that this did not mean that he was indifferent to the realities which even a small reduction in consumption meant in terms of the daily life of the poor. Like Smith and Turgot, Condorcet would be seen as the epitome of a callous, unfeeling Enlightenment mentality which was impervious to the human tragedy that accompanied the operation of liberal economic principles. He anticipates, and contradicts, the charge in the R´eflexions with frequent, explicit allusion to his sensitivity to the stark realities of life on the breadline. The misery of the poor was ‘a very great evil’, and he protested that he was only too aware of the tragic and degrading consequences of malnutrition on child mortality rates and population growth, ‘for which the remedy will be free trade in subsistence food’ (xi: 102). He recognised the human tragedy of the people’s poverty, and wished only to dispel the notion that the free trade in grain encouraged unscrupulous merchants to enrich themselves at the people’s expense. A free trade in grain would impose on the contrary economic discipline on farmers, grain merchants and bakers, and while the adverse nutritional impact on the poor of a failed harvest could never be completely eradicated, the competitive pressures of a free trade in subsistence food would at least prevent a critical situation from becoming worse. The second point on which Condorcet defended the case for a free market concerned the relationship between wage levels and unemployment. He insisted that wage levels had little to do with humanitarian considerations, but were determined only by commercial forces. A reasonable balance between the interests of employers and employees was therefore essential. Workers lived in financially fragile circumstances, their livelihoods always at risk from illness, high birth rates and the need to support elderly relatives. 21

In his analysis of the ways in which famine conditions arise Smith identified four causes: sudden declines in wage levels, interruptions to distribution, collapse of national income in countries dependent on the importation of food and arbitrary interventionist policies. It was the latter cause that was of most concern to him, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 73–4. See also Rothschild’s summative comments on the differences between Smith and Condorcet (pp. 221–52).

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Elsewhere, notably in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 453–67) and the Esquisse (vi: 246–8), he addressed in closer detail the problem of the inadequate assets of poor families, and detailed, and forward-looking, proposals are expounded in these texts relating to social insurance, public health schemes, the retraining of workers to enable them to adjust to changing production techniques, the need to alleviate the adverse environmental effects of polluting factories, and other ways in which governments could protect the income and health of the working poor. His proposals still have a remarkable resonance for the modern reader.22 The vulnerability of the poor to disaster was, however, not the consequence of laissez-faire economics but, on the contrary, the result of an economic policy predicated on prohibitory trade laws and special tax regimes. Deregulation would liberate the workplace, encourage the expansion of industry and above all help to raise wages to the point at which family subsistence and security were placed on a much surer footing: Take away these shackles and you will see culture reach perfection and diversify, the soul of the people become more vital and dynamic, the creation of new branches of industry, and the people increase the range of resources at their disposal, become less dependent on the rich, able to demand higher wages from them, not just to survive from one day to the next, but to insure themselves against accident. (xi: 104)

Condorcet’s proposed measures to prevent famine and improve the standard of living generally for the working poor, such as employment provision (for women as well), job creation through public works, grain stock-piling policies involving government subsidies to merchants and the establishment of long-distance transportation networks, support for grain imports, reform of ‘vexatious’ taxation and restrictions on the rights of landowners, all closely echo Turgot’s thinking. The equilibrium between those who have everything and those who have nothing is achievable only within an economic order in which the balance of self-interest, reflected in the need of the poor for the money of the rich and that of the rich for the labour of the poor, is assured. Again, Condorcet 22

See E. Rothschild, ‘Social security and laissez-faire in eighteenth-century political economy’, Population and Development Review 21 (1995), 711–44; Baridon, ‘Malthus, Condorcet et le probl`eme de la pauvret´e’; Greenbaum, ‘Health care and hospital building’; D. G. Troyanski, ‘Condorcet et l’id´ee d’assurance vieillesse: risque, dette sociale et g´en´erations’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 174–80. With regard to the objectives and the cost-benefit implications of Condorcet’s theory of public expenditure in the context of social choice, see also Sur la constitution du pouvoir charg´e d’administrer le tr´esor national (xi: 543–4); R. Deloche, ‘Turgot, Condorcet et la question de l’affectation des ressources’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 121–49; G. Faccarello and P. Steiner, La Pens´ee ´economique pendant la R´evolution franc¸aise (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1990).

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was confronting long-standing criticisms of the supposed inhumanity of the physiocrats which Necker had reignited in his attack on Turgot. These two defensive clarifications in the Avertissement serve in effect as the twin pillars of Condorcet’s economic profession of faith, and the principles of government policy which derive from them underpin the movement of ideas in the rest of the treatise. On the question of markets, the R´eflexions fully reflects Condorcet’s view of the connections between social choice and social outcome as expressed in the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix around which so much of his economic thinking revolves. Economic choices are characterised in his thought as procedures which are as relevant to the art of government as they are to political and social choice. Markets and elections presented similar problems for policy-makers, whose purpose in both areas should be to influence procedures rather than outcomes.23 the operation of the grain trade The comparative analysis of liberal and regulatory policies in the R´eflexions is preceded by a close examination of the key operational features of the grain trade. The first six chapters of Part 1 are devoted to detailed descriptions of production processes, production costs, supply and distribution practices, price determination and wages and profits. Condorcet starts with the costs involved to the farmer of working the land, of purchasing and sustaining the livestock needed to provide power and fertiliser, the acquisition and maintenance of buildings and barns for livestock and also the storage of grain, the employees needed to look after the livestock, the purchase of farming equipment, the hiring of labour to harvest and thresh the corn, and so on. He explains how, in order to offset the costs involved the farmer needed to generate sufficient income to repay annual loans, to pay the landowner, the tithe-owner (often the church), the tax authorities and also to provide himself with an income high enough to make a living. He describes the turbulent, unstable nature of an ancien r´egime economic order in which the farmer is always unsure of being able to meet the costs of production, and therefore reluctant to risk the additional financial outlay necessary to increase productivity. However, the problem of productivity was, in Condorcet’s view, only in part financial, and he reflected thoughtfully on other non-financial factors that affected economic performance: ‘Thus, in order for productivity to increase we need 1. capital destined for agriculture to generate a higher 23

Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, p. 186.

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than normal rate of interest; 2. low-risk capital loans; 3. the status of being a farmer not to be subject to humiliation or oppression [my italics]’ (xi: 115). The consequences of centuries of indifference to the social and financial position of the farmer-producer, and of neglect in the crucial matter of the farmer’s relationship with the landowner, have an increasingly adverse effect on the consumer as the links in the food-production chain break down as a result of misguided economic policies. Productivity declines as the income from land diminishes under the suffocating burden of special tariffs and other prohibitory taxation laws affecting both landowner and farmer. What is a problem of financial survival for them, however, is a matter of life and death for the poor (xi: 118). To prevent a shortage turning into a famine Condorcet, like Turgot and Smith, thought that prices could best be stabilised at affordable levels, and bread supplies rationalised, by the replacement of a system which had encouraged an unwieldy and uneconomic proliferation of local small-scale grain merchants with a nationally unified network of fewer, but larger-scale, outlets, each serving more extended communities of consumers (xi: 120). The dependence of bread supplies on the operations of chance would then be reduced, with consumers no longer at the mercy of irregular and unpredictable events, and storage strategies no longer determined by localised crises of the moment. The exposure of the production-supply cycle to the capricious patterns of nature should always be minimised, and to this end Condorcet was concerned to ensure that the grain trade would no longer be organised on the basis of short-term contingency policy-making, but should be managed in a proactive way in accordance with long-term, scientifically informed strategies to ensure consistency and regularity of supply. He therefore proposed measures which improved working relationships between farmers and merchants, and above all which facilitated the free movement of grain within and across France’s borders. The success of a free trade policy also depended crucially on auxiliary measures to improve roads and communications generally so that merchants knew promptly and precisely which areas were in surplus and which were in deficit, and could then ensure the rapid and economic transportation of grain to properly prepared and administered locations. In times of abundant harvests traders would be encouraged to plan ahead with their acquisition and storage of grain so that emergency supplies were ready well ahead of any crisis.24 24

Interestingly on the question of roads and transportation problems, Abad notes that as far as the provisioning of Paris with general foodstuffs was concerned, markets and shops were often supplied punctually despite all the obstacles. The Paris issue is complicated by the fact that food supplies were

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The storage problem was in Condorcet’s view one of the major inhibiting factors in the general climate of discouragement of long-term investment in the agricultural sector, the technical difficulties involved in the long-term storage of grain not only undermining famine-prevention strategies but also deterring investors from long-term commitments of capital (xi: 21). Condorcet criticised French science for failing to address itself to this urgent problem, and accepted that reform of the political economy of food involved much more than a change in financial policy alone.25 The economic revolution of the trade would require also the services of scientists and engineers to modernise storage technology and improve road and canal systems so that supplies of grain could be rationally organised and rapidly transported. Only then would capital cease to be invested on an ad hoc basis in times of shortage when opportunists were interested only in making quick profits. He envisaged a system in which grain merchants would be permanently engaged in maintaining emergency storage facilities, ‘which would become the source of supply in the lean years’ (xi: 123), without risk of stock deterioration. An enlightened government would therefore aim to encourage the collaboration of science, commerce and agriculture as a key feature of its strategy to banish the spectre of famine, and end the cruel dependency of the poor on nature and the ‘hasard’ of a good harvest. The economic realities of the grain trade as these related to annual patterns of capital investment, profit margins, borrowing levels and above all the movement of prices in conditions of fluctuating supply and sporadic harvest failure, together with the relationship of all of these factors to wages, are explored in considerable detail in the R´eflexions. On the price of grain Condorcet reopened another problem for which the physiocrats, and Turgot in particular, had been bitterly attacked, namely the perceived inclination of merchants in a laissez-faire system to ensure that demand from increasingly desperate consumers always exceeded supply in order to keep the price of bread high. Condorcet took the view that a consistently

25

not entirely dependent on the road system. Abad’s research shows that 15 per cent of food entered Paris in the 1780s by water, 38 per cent by land and 47 per cent by a combination of both (Le Grand March´e, pp. 816–17). On the growing importance of road systems for grain, see Kaplan, Provisioning Paris, pp. 104–5. Condorcet had much to say in the Eloges of great scientists that he composed in his capacity as Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences on the responsibilities of scientists with regard to the interests of the state. See particularly the attack on the ‘false policies’ of mercantilism and the use of science in pursuit of mercantilist goals contained in the Eloge de m. Trudaine (ii: 206–38). Trudaine had been Director of the Bureau pour les Affaires du Commerce under Turgot. Cf. the Eloge de m. Montigny (ii: 580–98). On the activities of the office of the Ministry of Finance, see H. T. Parker, An Administrative Bureau during the Old Regime. The Bureau of Commerce and its Relations to French Industry, from May 1781 to November 1783 (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1993), pp. 13–16.

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sustained level of trading activity would iron out pricing irregularities, price movements in a permanently operating free market being linked only to necessary minimal adjustments to costs of transportation and storage from one area to another (xi: 128). The competitive dynamics of a free market would discipline profit expectations even during famine conditions, ‘competition between merchants, ensuring that farmers keen to sell achieve higher prices, that same competition ensuring lower prices in the dearest season. Those two price levels will vary only in relation to the merchant’s profit . . . A higher number of grain merchants will reduce the degree of variation even more’ (xi: 129, 130). The selling price of grain would be determined annually by cultivation costs, interest charged on loans, taxation, tithes for the landowner and a modest return for the farmer. With regard to all of these factors affecting bread prices, with the exception of profits and tithes, Condorcet argues that it would be in the interest of landowners, farmers, merchants, bakers and consumers to keep prices stable. In the case of tithes and profits it would be in the consumer’s interest to tolerate a level of return that would motivate merchants and farmers sufficiently to engage in the grain trade on a continuous basis, to motivate the landowner to continue to allow his land to be farmed, and to persuade the farmer not to use capital elsewhere with non-productive outcomes. If profits were too low, productivity would decline, the long-term financial basis of the agricultural sector would be undermined and the poor would continue to go hungry whenever a harvest failed. With regard to wages, Condorcet urged governments to concentrate on ways to ensure full employment throughout the year at a level of pay that would enable a worker to provide adequately for himself and his family, and if possible to save enough money to protect himself and his family against inflationary surges, and against loss of income through illness, redundancy and old age (xi: 132). Wage levels must meet these basic requirements, otherwise motivation to work would disappear. However, if workers demanded wages that exceeded basic needs, they risked pricing themselves out of employment. Wages, subsistence levels and prices of basic consumer necessities would always be closely linked, but in a grain trade operating under the yoke of prohibitory laws the equilibrium always altered in times of crisis to the disadvantage of the poor who would not survive at all, ‘if a few rich people did not set up workshops for humanitarian reasons’ (xi: 133). Just as distribution problems would be resolved with the establishment of a modernised national storage and transportation infrastructure, so worker-poverty would be alleviated by a consistent, national wages policy

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determined, not by le prix moyen, but by le prix habituel.26 Workers’ interests were not served by prices artificially depressed by interventionist legislation, in Condorcet’s view ultimately a recipe for higher unemployment. Far more important to the true well-being of workers was price stability: ‘The wage-earner must fear both high prices, which wages cannot meet, and low prices, when there is no work; price stability gives him security and wealth; it matters little to him whether that average price is high or low, provided that there is as little price-variation as possible’ (xi: 143). Condorcet understood very clearly the dangers to the economy of price and profit deflation that the regulation of prices imposed. He also understood the human cost of regulation, and the moral imperatives of the economic order to which he alludes in the opening sentence of the R´eflexions resonate powerfully in the analysis of the interaction between wages, profits and prices that fill the chapters of Part 1: Let all members of society have guaranteed levels of subsistence food in all seasons and in all years, wherever they live; above all let the man who has only what he earns be able to buy whatever food he needs; this is in the whole nation’s interest, and this must be the purpose of all legislation on subsistence food. (xi: 111)

If policies to liberate the grain trade from the stranglehold of prohibitory laws held out the promise, in the long term at least, of general economic progress, such policies would also in Condorcet’s view have a particularly positive impact on the agricultural sector itself in other ways. To the economic advantages for farmers and landowners of a free commercial environment, he added what he called ‘political’ advantages. By this he meant not only the ways in which a free grain trade would create the right financial conditions for the on-going investment of capital in agriculture, but also the right psychological conditions necessary for that investment to take place. Profit was not the sole motivator in persuading farmers not to opt for the higher rewards and easier way of life that investment in city-based commerce could offer them: ‘We can see that it is not love of money which attracts him to his condition, nor a taste for idleness and pleasure’ (xi: 145). Condorcet always stressed the need to relocate the economic world within the larger world of natural human values and psychology. As far as the agricultural sector was concerned, he saw farmers as men who preferred to be dependent on nature rather than on others, to be ruined by storms rather than by injustice, who were not mere ‘calculating machines’ whose 26

Condorcet explains how le prix moyen is calculated in chapter 6: ‘The average price is calculated by taking the total sum of prices in different times and in different countries, and dividing that sum by the number of prices observed’ (xi: 135). This differs considerably from the ‘normal’ price.

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choices were determined only by profit. The prospect of independence and self-sufficiency attracted men to agriculture, and persuaded them to work the land. That prospect was lost when the grain trade was not free. Under prohibitory regimes the farmer found himself at the mercy of bureaucrats who, pleading the cause of the poor, demonised him in the eyes of the latter even as they oppressed and abused him with their petty regulations: Bear in mind that the farmer, who is used to being duped by all kinds of businessmen living in cities full of trickery and oppression, will submit to everything prohibitory laws, which he does not understand, impose on him in the form of inspections, prohibitions, convictions and harassment in order to obtain bread, and he will not risk his savings to build up a surplus which he is obliged to purchase at the expense of his peace of mind. (xi: 146)

If this state of affairs continued, agriculture would be abandoned to poor ploughmen who would curse their lot and produce only enough to survive.27 In the last chapter of Part 1 Condorcet returned to Necker’s central accusation that the advocates of a free grain trade were guilty of showing a cold indifference to, and culpable ignorance of, the economic and social realities that governed the lives of poor people.28 The themes of his defence of free trade now broaden into a consideration of the social issues at stake in the debate on the political economy of food, and he presents in this chapter a remarkably comprehensive analysis of the nexus of factors relevant to that debate such as health, fertility, birth rate and life expectancy: ‘Similarly, the more easily the people can obtain subsistence food, the lower the infant mortality rate, the fewer the cases of childhood intestinal problems, and the fewer the cases of puberty causing either death or long-term disabilities’ (xi: 154). Connecting liberal economics to issues of conscience and humanitarianism, he infers a direct, ‘eye-witness’ knowledge of the conditions of the suffering poor, observing that anyone who has actually visited a poor household knows how appalling those conditions are. They would also know how those conditions improve with a more economically and scientifically informed management of the production-supply/price-wage equilibrium. Rejecting the utilitarian philosophies of Helv´etius (and Necker), he insisted that self-interest was not the sole motivation for human actions; moral sentiment also counted for something. To witness the misery of others was 27

28

Further comment on the psychological conditions for economic freedom are to be found in the Fragment of the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse (vi: 515–18). Cf. Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 192–3. Condorcet wrote at some length on the causes of poverty in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 453–9).

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as painful as an attack of gout.29 Condorcet’s understanding of the place of sentiment in human nature and motivation is central to his economic philosophy in general, and to his theory of economic interdependence in particular.30 The ideological clash with Necker also raised the much-debated question of population decline and its causes. For Condorcet, a free commerce in grain ensured population growth by ultimately improving standards of nutrition, and on this point he challenged Necker’s thesis that nations which depended exclusively on agriculture for the creation of national wealth would inhibit population growth.31 In support of his counterargument Condorcet compared living standards and rates of population increase pertaining to agriculturally based economies with equivalent data for economies whose policy priority lay with the development of a manufacturing sector and the production of ‘luxury goods’. Concentration on the manufacture of luxury goods reduced the amount of labour, land and capital available for the production of subsistence food. In such economies, often exhibiting the appearance of prosperity and economic vitality, standards of nutrition actually fell among the poor who went hungry in spite of a buoyant trade in manufactured goods. Bread supplies in manufacturingbased economies were dangerously over-dependent on the importation of grain from other countries; such countries were unable to support adequate levels of subsistence among the poor from their neglected domestic agricultural resources, depleted the grain stocks of other countries and denied their own populations not only a consistent and affordable supply of the basic necessities, but also other ways in which they could derive from the physical labour of working the fields important benefits essential to their well-being (xi: 157). The manufacture of goods for a luxury market at the expense of investment in, and encouragement of, agriculture was for Condorcet a key factor 29

30 31

Dissertation philosophique et politique, ou R´eflexions sur cette question: S’il est utile aux hommes d’ˆetre tromp´es (v: 371). On Condorcet’s rejection of Helv´etius and the utilitarian school, see especially ed. Henry, Correspondance in´edite de Condorcet et de Turgot, pp. 141, 148. On the notion of economic life as a system of sentiments, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 236–46. Condorcet uses Necker’s phrase, ‘population imparfaite’ (xi: 155). With regard to the social implications of population growth, he distinguishes carefully between bonheur and bien-ˆetre, the former referring to a subjective disposition and the latter to the consequence of objective, politically determined conditions which protect the individual from poverty and oppression. The generation of bien-ˆetre in the civil order is the responsibility of governments, and is a necessary precondition for bonheur, ‘but it is up to nature to do the rest. Governments, by concerning themselves with physical, moral and educational improvement can in truth correct nature, but in this case it is no longer a legal duty, but a duty of benevolence’ (xi: 155 n. 1).

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in population decline. In poor, oppressed countries the production of luxury goods took food away from the mouths of the poor. It set the stage only for destructive economic policies that encouraged one individual to devour the resources needed to sustain a hundred poor families, with corn fields that could feed the hungry being transformed into ornamental parks for the delectation of the idle rich. In contrast, liberal policies in support of agriculture, reinforced by the establishment of a free commercial environment, shielded the people from penury and starvation, and the nation as a whole from the moral corruption that accompanied the pursuit of conspicuous consumption, by transferring the balance of national economic activity from the manufacture of luxuries for the few to the provision of food for the many. With the deregulation of agriculture, capital would flow back from the city to the countryside, farming would once more become financially and ‘politically’ attractive, and the economically and socially dangerous drift of workers from useful jobs in thinly populated rural areas to frivolous employment in over-crowded cities would be stemmed: ‘With the condition of being a farmer becoming more tolerable, those born into it will no longer seek to abandon it in order to swell the ranks of the slaves who surround the rich and powerful in the cities. The population will thus become more evenly distributed, and the countryside more populated’ (xi: 160). In defence of a free trade in grain, Condorcet thus envisaged the regeneration of a once noble sector of the economy in which landowners would no longer feel that their future lay in the abandonment of their property for a life at court, or that the empty flattery of courtiers was preferable to the honest rewards of agriculture. Again the economic aspects of his defence were enhanced by insights into the ‘political’ bonus that would accrue from free trade policies: Public opinion will place the intelligent ploughman on the same level as the betterfed paper merchant, and the rich man will no longer expect piles of gold to insulate him from the people. Then you will see less of the debauchery which grows as more and more people are tightly packed together, thrives with idleness and wealth, and shuns hard work in the countryside. (xi: 160–1)

In the end, Condorcet’s free trade position transcended economics. Certainly he saw liberal economics as being first and foremost the way forward to a more efficient management of bread supplies, to an urgently needed revitalisation of the economy, to the rehabilitation of agriculture, to the re-emergence of rural France as a powerful force in the life of the nation, to the improvement of public bonheur and bien-ˆetre and to the

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encouragement of population growth. However, he also saw free trade and the consequential negation of the ‘prejudices’of prohibitory regulation as the economic catalyst for a social revolution in manners in which the debauchery of city life would fade away, the greed of the rich (‘this dropsical thirst’) be curbed, the unbearable weight of privilege lifted, and the quality of public life, especially in the world of finance, improved: ‘Thus freedom of the grain trade, by assuring the people of a ready supply of affordable subsistence food in a more equitable way, will increase their numbers, make them stronger, and less debased and corrupt [my italics]’ (xi: 161). Economics interlock constantly in the R´eflexions with moral and political life, where questions of regulation and taxation relate as much to the psychological and spiritual (in a non-religious sense) health of the nation as to its commercial life in ways strongly reminiscent of Smith’s linkage of economics to sentiment.32 Taxes and police (government regulations) are about public virtue and happiness as well as the public purse, and as such they formed an integral part not only of the operations of public finance but also of Condorcet’s programme of reform to relieve oppression. The abolition of prohibitory regulation would deliver the people above all from the ‘terror of vexations’, from the feeling of being oppressed, ‘a thousand times more painful than poverty’ (xi: 191). Sentiment for Condorcet informed economic life, and shaped economic relationships between individuals and within society generally. the prejudices of prohibitory regul at ion In Part 1 Condorcet had advocated free trade as the policy whereby the supply, distribution and pricing of grain and related produce could be managed most efficiently and equitably in the interests of landowners, farmers, workers, consumers and especially the poor. In Part 2 he examines the principles behind prohibitory legislation, and the arguments that adversaries of free trade offered in defence of their position. His purpose was to illustrate the ways in which centuries of complex commercial legislation had stifled the nation’s economic life, and had convinced the people that the normal economic condition of civil man was to be burdened with the chains of regulation (xi: 164). In effect, Part 2 of the R´eflexions is a sustained commentary on the text of Necker’s Sur la l´egislation et le commerce des grains. In this section of the treatise the attack on the regulation of the grain trade 32

For a commentary on Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments in this respect, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 8–9.

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moves in a different direction, with the opening shots taking the form of a denunciation of prohibitory laws as an infringement of the inviolable right to property and to profit from the produce of that property, property in the sense of lawful ownership of land or goods being carefully differentiated from the ownership of feudal rights to levy charges. Only the former was legitimate (xi: 244–5). Arbitrary tariffs, restrictions on markets, subsidies and price controls are interpreted as blatant violations of that right, and clear evidence of an unjust and retrogressive management of the public purse: ‘A government official must respect property to the point of making it a superstition; if he allows himself to violate that right, his administration is nothing more than daylight robbery, and the pretext of the public interest in which he drapes himself sheer hypocrisy’ (xi: 167–8). Selective tax regimes penalised not only property-owners, moreover, but also the very workforce whose sweat watered the soil, and whose blood was often shed in defence of the realm: ‘The landowner, who is attached to the soil which feeds him, wants the laws he must obey to be moderate and just; his happiness is linked inextricably to everything that contributes to public happiness’ (xi: 170). While city financiers and rentiers were allowed to pursue profits in ways that did not advance the public interest, prohibitory laws did nothing to dissuade propri´etaires from swelling the ranks of the unproductive rentier class. For Condorcet the economic, social and political case for a free grain trade was unanswerable, but he was obliged to confront the infuriating parodox of Necker’s popularity, and of a climate of widespread public resistance to any move to suspend prohibitory legislation. The inchoate views of an ignorant and deeply superstitious public, which still believed in magic and witchcraft, had in Condorcet’s eyes no role to play in the formulation of public policy. The legitimisation of public opinion as a political force to be taken seriously had to await the advent of an educated and enlightened people. By pandering to unenlightened public opinion, prohibitory legislators were merely collaborating in anarchy, colluding with the mobs which invaded markets in times of famine, broke into bakeries, stole grain from barns and disrupted distribution, while at the same time deluding the people further with the siren-call of protective policies.33 Faced with the unrest they unwittingly provoked, they compounded their errors of economic policy by their willingness to suspend the rule of law on the dangerous assumption that once the storm had passed the law would resume its 33

Necker is not the only target here. Condorcet also has in mind Simon-Nicolas-Henri Linguet, founder-editor of the Annales politiques, civiles et litt´eraires du dix-huiti`eme si`ecle (xi: 174 n. 1).

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authority. Unlike the false, beguiling nostrum of regulation, which appealed so strongly to the mob-rule mentality, free trade policies were the expression of the law, not its denial. A free grain trade, rationally administered in secure conditions, could be managed without inciting public unrest, and could guarantee the supply of bread in a way that no regulated trade could ever do: ‘It would be cruel to make the misery of the people worse on the pretext of respecting their opinion’ (xi: 176). In times of high grain prices and the threat of public disorder, the virtuous legislator will rise above the clamour, and follow his conscience and his reason by proposing laws which are in the true interests of the people. Condorcet mocks Necker’s view that the years of prosperity which France enjoyed under Turgot’s ministry had been precisely the moment to introduce prohibitory legislation to curb free trade by analogy with the ability of a healthy body to withstand the pain of surgery better than a sick one (xi: 177 n. 1). He rejected Necker’s claim that the economic achievement of the Turgot government was the undeserved legacy of the fiscal policies of the preceding administration. For Condorcet prohibitory legislation was not just a threat to the grain trade, and to the broader principle of civic freedom itself, but also violated that vital second form of freedom, namely personal freedom, in the form of the ‘vexations’, ‘oppression’ and ‘visits’ which a regulatory regime necessarily imposed: ‘Other freedoms are caught up in the same proscription; this love of freedom is, according to their leader [Necker], nothing more than a childish fancy’ (xi: 178).34 The temperature of his rhetoric rises as he counterattacks on the general grounds of freedom in an impassioned last-ditch defence of the besieged advocates of free trade whose feelings were outraged by the spectacle of widespread poverty and hardship. Responsibility for that spectacle is laid at the door of the Necker faction, the attack on the enemies of free trade acquiring wider moral and political dimensions with a long list of remonstrations relating to oppressive criminal codes, the denial of press freedom, indifference to the public interest and the protection of economic privilege. Prohibitory legislators were deaf to the true voice of the people; and blind to their tears of pain. Moreover, they mistook the hysterical panic of a frightened crowd contemplating starvation for the true voice of the people, whereas the true voice of the people was to be heard elsewhere (xi: 181). 34

A good example of the way in which government intervention in the labour market, for example, violated personal freedom was the corv´ee (the feudal law requiring peasants to undertake unpaid work for the local seigneur), see the R´eflexions sur les corv´ees a` mylord ∗∗∗ (xi: 61–86) and Sur l’abolition des corv´ees (xi: 89–97).

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Condorcet recognised that the people’s ‘prejudice’ against free trade was, like all prejudices, resistant to reason because it was embedded in the wild, untutored thought-processes of the mass mind, fearful of the perceived consequences of an unregulated trade, its misguided fears further inflamed by Necker, Linguet and the other enemies of the public interest in order to bring down an enlightened administration (xi: 197). The prejudice of fear35 underpinned the widely held assumption that it fell to governments to control the price of grain at whatever cost to farmers, merchants and bakers. Protectionism meant in reality, however, that the solemn obligation of governments to defend the rights of all would be contravened. It was fear, encouraged by the propaganda of the unscrupulous, which led to the scenes of public disorder that helped to bring down Turgot: ‘All of these disturbances are perpetrated by crowds stirred up by a vague fear of famine, and by a vague hatred of those whom they accuse of being responsible for it; these crowds are led by rogues who take good care to fan those fears and profit from them’ (xi: 205). Prohibitory legislation reinforced hatred and suspicion of free trade, and its advocates exploited popular misunderstandings so that the causes of famine, for which Jews and witches used to be the scapegoats, were now attributed to landowners, farmers, merchants and an enlightened Controller-General (xi: 202–6). These misunderstandings must be cleared up, and the influence of the enemies of free trade over the mind of the mob diminished. Ultimately the benefits of free trade could only be understood by free minds, and opponents of free trade are subtly associated by Condorcet with the enslaved minds of an anti-science, anti-progress sect, the struggle for a free trade in grain merging with the struggle for Enlightenment itself: The people are stupid because we have been pleased to brutalise them over a long period of time; they are unjust only because they have been the plaything of oppressors . . . So it is above all a matter of bringing round public opinion; and why do we despair of being able to do this? Why can the case made for the grain trade not be like that made for the movement of the earth, the circulation of the blood, emetics, universal gravitation, inoculation, etc., etc., on which views have changed, although there has been no lack of serious, eloquent apologists for dissenting prejudices . . . The people crying out for bread are people living in big towns, and it is proposed to sacrifice to them the right to property, that basic, founding principle of society, and the true interest of the nation. (xi: 207–9)36 35 36

Condorcet also wrote movingly about fear as the governing factor in poor people’s lives in Monopole et monopoleur (xi: 45). See also on this point Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 13–14. The reference here is to Turgot’s decree of 14 September 1775 abolishing the regulations regarding the sale of grain, and to the ways in which rural mobs had been tricked into rioting against a decree, which had been actually promulgated in their interests, by the lies and deceptions spread by the adversaries of free trade (xi: 208–9 n. 1).

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The fear of a free grain trade felt by the poor was ‘an automatic fear’, provoked by suspicion of grain storage policies and other precautionary measures which progressive governments had to take. This primal fear was accompanied by another order of fear, equally irrational and equally damaging to the public interest, namely the ‘considered fear’ of anti-liberal theorists and their representatives in government. This fear was less demonstrative; it disguised itself as political prudence, expressed itself in the form of regulatory policies, but it too also originated in ‘prejudices’. In addressing this subtler order of prejudice, Condorcet noted, and rejected, Necker’s ‘chimerical’ assumptions that a free trade in grain would encourage monopolies to exert a stranglehold on the nation’s food supplies. He argued that, on the contrary, a free trade would actually prevent monopolies through increased competition, and above all through the free movement of grain within France and between France and other countries (xi: 216–23).37 In this long commentary on the negative effects of these and other examples of harmful prohibitory laws, Condorcet drew particular attention to the negative economic impact of the regulations requiring farmers to sell grain only at officially designated markets, often at distant locations involving great cost and inconvenience. This aspect of market regulations had an inflationary impact on prices, mainly as a consequence of transportation costs, delayed supplies to the cities, created monopolies, increased opportunities for profiteering by restricting outlets and added to public anxiety. Abolition of this law alone would have immediate beneficial effects on both urban and rural economies: By increasing the number of markets, by making them free, by allowing people to buy and sell wherever they wish, with country-people stocking up in the local area at times when they actually need grain, and city-dwellers buying partly from markets and partly from town granaries, open at all hours, everybody would find it easier to get hold of their basic food. (xi: 234)

In arguing for the reform of specific prohibitory laws like these, Condorcet was always conscious that he was faced with the challenge of persuading governments to adopt a way of ordering policy choices which could only produce tangible benefits in the long term, but offered no quick, politically more convenient, solutions. The reorganisation of the market, the reduction of scarcities, the improvement of pay, the stabilisation of prices, and the 37

On Necker’s (and also Linguet’s) views on the need for regulation regarding the importation and exportation of grain, Condorcet notes their debt to the anti-physiocratic arguments advanced by Ferdinand Galiani, author of the 1770 Dialogues sur les bl´es (xi: 224 n. 1). The internationalisation of the grain trade was central to the operation of a free trading environment, and Condorcet’s discussion of the issue provides an opportunity for sharp satire of Necker’s counterviews.

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creation of a general economic equilibrium were not achievable overnight, as Turgot had discovered to his cost. In Condorcet’s view, Turgot’s dismissal had marked a bitter moment of defeat for enlightened minds on the issue of a free commerce in grain, and although he drew a small measure of consolation from the thought that the ‘partisans of liberty’ had at least exposed the flaws in the prohibitory case to the scrutiny of rational minds (xi: 240), his anger and disappointment at the premature termination of the ‘beautiful dream’ of progressive government under Turgot’s leadership surface intermittently in the closing pages of the R´eflexions. Regulation of the grain trade fed not the hunger for bread but the hunger for power, and resulted in the proliferation of a selfregarding officialdom intent on keeping the poor in a state of paternalistic dependency. Market dues (droits de hallage) continued to be levied; the dead hand of taxation still crippled the incomes of poor working people; feudal rights still governed the harvesting and threshing of corn, the milling of flour and the baking of bread. The people were still required to use only the mills and ovens of the local seigneur,38 and to pay him accordingly. Again the economic issue is overlaid with moral concerns: ‘All of these shameful remnants of the old enslavement of the people do them less harm in terms of taxation than they do in terms of the feelings of humiliation and disgust with their condition which go with this form of servitude’ (xi: 245). Part 2 of Condorcet’s remarkable treatise on the grain trade concludes with a passionate defence of his motive and purpose in writing it. The R´eflexions, he informs us, was intended only to present ‘truths which are of interest to all citizens . . ., and which are thought to be useful’ (xi: 250–1). His concluding words hint at a revolution to come in a final peroration in which he denounces the ‘scintillating corruption’ of Versailles, and lacerates a government whose main preoccupations under Necker’s leadership seemed to be confined to niceties of court etiquette, and whose officials 38

Condorcet saw this particular feudal law (droit de banalit´e) as being especially harmful to the grain trade in general, and to the interests of the poor in particular: ‘The law relating to the compulsory use of the local landowner’s mill is the only one to harm the grain trade directly. It is easy to see that this mill law can increase neither the consumption of grain nor the quality of the flour each mill can grind in twenty-four hours. This sort of mill is no more productive than other mills because the mill-owner can rob the unfortunates subject to his tyranny with impunity. These acts of theft, almost always impossible to record, and usually covered up by compliant magistrates who belong to the same landowner as the mill, mainly affect those people who just bring to the mill small quantities at a time, and are least able to make themselves understood. This robbery is carried out with a violence and audacity that makes it even more intolerable, and among the countless oppressions to which the poor man is condemned, this is the one which breaks him and disgusts him most of all’ (xi: 245–6).

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believed that all was well as long as courtiers continued to enjoy fat pensions and the services of good cooks. The treatise ends with a question that takes the reader well beyond the political economy of food and into more dangerous territory: was the spectacle of the oppressed poor and the wretched impoverishment of the entire nation not an unspeakable agony from which France yearned for deliverance (xi: 251)?

chap t e r 10

Managing the Revolution

1789: preliminaries Prior to the convocation of the Estates-General the principle of constitutional redress through revolutionary action was inferred in effect in Condorcet’s political thinking in the form of a firm advocacy of the right of the governed to change constitutions, and to withdraw their consent to be ruled, should the terms of the contract of association be breached. His defence of this right co-existed with a deep fear of rapid upheaval, anarchy and mob violence that would never leave him, and in the months following the fall of the Bastille he would have much to say on the management of the raw forces of insurrection and their containment, once unleashed, within a monarchical system seamlessly transformed and endowed, unlike absolute autocracies,1 with the capacity to deflect demands for radical constitutional change. In the ebb and flow of revolutionary violence Condorcet never ceased to insist that progress was achievable only through reason, not force of arms, and that true victory over despotism came about when reason had marshalled its forces more effectively than those of the mob. Power, for Condorcet, would never emanate legitimately from the streets, or for that matter from the guillotine. The 1786 De l’influence de la R´evolution d’Am´erique sur l’Europe (On the influence of the American Revolution on Europe), dedicated to La Fayette, ‘benefactor of two worlds’, is the first essay in which Condorcet reflected at length on the seismic shift in the political landscape that had taken place after the victory of the American colonists over the British crown ten years before. The angle of approach to the possibility of a similar uprising against tyranny in France is so oblique, however, as to be barely perceptible. The preamble addresses in general terms the question of collective happiness, and the ways in which this could be achieved through enlightened 1

In the Vie de Voltaire Condorcet analysed in some detail the flaws in absolutist government that encouraged insurrection (iv: 131–3).

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legislation on men’s rights, ‘those rights so sacred but so long-forgotten’ (viii: 11), rather than revolutionary action,2 and of the economic benefits of their recognition. In his essay on the American Revolution Condorcet evoked the spectacle of the birth of a nation representing the best aspects of the Enlightenment, a model for enlightened governments and a warning to tyrants. Nowhere in this essay, however, is there any indication of revolutionary clouds gathering over France. America offered Europe a sanctuary from tyranny, and the success of its Revolution certainly made oppression in Europe a little more difficult to defend: So Europe . . . finds in America a useful brake on ministers who might be tempted to govern badly. Oppression must become more tentative when [Europe] knows that there is a sanctuary for whoever it might choose to victimise, that the victim can escape oppression and also punish the oppressors by forcing them to appear with him before the bar of public opinion. (viii: 15)

The American model of a free people living in equality and harmony might well help to cure Europe of its ignorance of the benefits of a system based on equality of rights under the law. The nature of the cure was then explored in legislative and constitutional terms that fell well short of the contemplation of a revolution in France.3 The American Revolution’s influence on Europe was thus essentially about the triumph of enlightenment and progress. Its potentially destabilising impact on Europe as a revolution per se is not measured. The concluding chapter (the longest) is certainly devoted to an exploration of the significance of American developments for France, but exclusively in the context of trade and economic life. Condorcet was to return to the American Revolution in the Eloge de Franklin in 1790 (iii: 412–13), and again in 1794 in the Esquisse, where the birth of the American Republic is viewed in more inflammatory terms as the liberation of a people from its chains (vi: 198–9). In the Esquisse the spread of American revolutionary fervour to Europe was seen in retrospect to have been the logical consequence of historical processes (vi: 200). Two years later Condorcet wrote a second, very different, essay on the American Revolution. This was the Lettres d’un citoyen des Etats-Unis a` un 2

3

For further commentary by Condorcet on the influence of the American Revolution on France and Europe, see the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (x: 438–9). On the general context of the debate on American constitutional issues in pre-Revolution France, see H. Dippel, ‘Condorcet et la discussion des constitutions am´ericaines en France avant 1789’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 201–6. Among the supplementary texts appended to this essay is the translated text of a letter written to Congress by George Washington presenting the new constitution for approval, followed by the seven articles of the new constitution itself, with commentary (viii: 67–92).

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Franc¸ais sur les affaires pr´esentes (Letter from a citizen of the United States to a Frenchman, on current affairs) published anonymously in July 1788, almost coinciding with Brienne’s announcement on 8 August of the King’s decision, in the face of national bankruptcy, to convoke the Estates-General. The Lettres d’un citoyen identifies more specifically Franco-American parallels in the context of constitutional reform and resistance to tyranny, and the tone is much more urgent and apprehensive. Written from the putative standpoint of an American citizen, the Lettres opens up the prospect of revolution in an ‘enslaved’ France in the cause of freedom: I shall take care not to join with one of your poets in saying: Freedom is nothing if the whole world is free [Condorcet’s italics]. On the contrary, I believe that the more free nations there are, the more assured everyone’s freedom is. I go so far as to think that as long as one enslaved nation exists in the world, the fate of the human race will not be decided, nor will its chains be for ever broken.4 (ix: 97)

The enemy of freedom is ‘parliamentary aristocracy’, and the ‘American’ interlocutor points to the grievances relating to taxation, so central to American discontents, ‘which weighs heavily on the poor in order to spare the rich’. Aristocratic rule is denounced as ‘corps-despotism’, a basic cause of instability contravening the natural rights that condition the pact of association. Condorcet resumes many of the points about the reform of the criminal code, the fiscal system, freedom of ideas, the demolition of sectional interests and the right of participation in legislation set out in more detail in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales, but again his arguments do not yet move explicitly in the direction of republicanism, although two years previously, in the Vie de m. Turgot, he had declared republican constitutions to be the best of all (v: 205). The grievances he lists against the ancien r´egime are numerous and fundamental, but the nouveau r´egime that he now predicts for France continues to be legitimised by the authority of a King, albeit modified. Condorcet continued for some time to feel optimistic about the future of the French monarchy, and in the Lettres d’un citoyen he makes his American interlocutor question the need for a more radical solution at a time when the provincial assemblies were beginning to implement a rational and enlightened programme of reform: ‘Is it when a legitimate way of demanding reform has been obtained that we must resort to violence, sedition, etc?’ (ix: 105). In the second of the Lettres d’un citoyen Condorcet reviewed the 4

In Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire, an essay on the dynamics of revolution, first printed in the Journal de l’instruction sociale in June 1793, Condorcet observed that the term ‘r´evolutionnaire’ could only be applied to insurrections whose purpose was freedom (xii: 615).

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nature of the King’s powers, and of his relationship with the judiciary in the light of Brienne’s promulgation of the 8 May decrees,5 but the principle of sovereign authority per se was not at this point challenged: ‘In France, all justice emanates from the King’ (ix: 108). ord er and disorder Condorcet’s position on Louis XVI, and the whole question of the monarchy’s future, evolved dramatically in the months following the meeting of the Estates-General. As the events of 1789 unfolded, he concentrated increasingly on the nature and purpose of the newly minted National Assembly that had emerged from the proceedings of the Estates-General on 17 June, and on the nature of the King’s relationship with the new body. On 9 July the National Assembly assumed the title of Assembl´ee nationale constituante, about whose mandate and powers Condorcet had much to say in Sur l’´etendue des pouvoirs (On the extent of power).6 There had been a rapid descent into constitutional crisis marked by the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June, the request to the King to withdraw troops from the Paris area, the dismissal of Necker, the storming of the Bastille, the ‘Peasant Revolution’ of 20 July–4 August and the ‘Municipal Revolution’ of July–September, culminating in the 4 August decrees. The R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait, et sur ce qui reste a` faire (Reflections on what has been done, and on what remains to be done), first read to the Soci´et´e d’Amis de la Paix, was composed hurriedly between the 4 August decrees, heralding the defining moment of collision between the Constituent Assembly and Louis XVI, and the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the rights of man, and of the citizen) of 26 August. Condorcet observed the accelerating pace of political change with a critical eye, as is evident from his comments on the dangers of hasty legislation in the R´eponse a` l’Adresse aux provinces (Reply to the address to the provinces) (ix: 505). In the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait he listed six requirements of the new national body: the restoration of rights to all citizens, the establishment of a constitution in which those rights would be embedded in legislation, the reform of the fiscal system, the reduction of the national debt without recourse to increased taxation on the poor, reform of the civil and 5 6

The so-called ‘May Edicts’ which related to the reorganisation of the higher courts and the changes to judicial procedures (including the abolition of torture). It was under the designation of Assembl´ee nationale constituante that the Assembly moved its seat to Paris on 9 October 1789, a move that Condorcet praised in the 1790 Adresse aux provinces as ‘a wise and necessary measure’ (ix: 506).

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criminal law codes and the removal of all abuses and privileges financed from the public purse (ix: 444–5). From the start of its existence the Assembly had been faced with entrenched vested interests as a consequence of the interdependence of the legislative, executive and judiciary. The obstacles to political equality erected by the privileged orders had resulted in the Tennis Court Oath of 20 June, and the invasion of the Assembly chamber by a frustrated crowd. Ever since then, the Assembly had been trying to function against a background of rising public disorder: ‘The people have come to the rescue of the National Assembly, and the cause of freedom has triumphed; but the executive, like the judiciary, has been left powerless . . . In the end, the Legislative Assembly found itself exposed to the influence of popular movements, and their influence over [the Assembly] could not be stopped.’ Condorcet’s immediate priority in the light of events lay not with the deteriorating position of Louis XVI7 but rather with the containment of the threat to public order posed by these ‘popular movements’. Condorcet’s fear of mob-rule had surfaced in 1776 in the R´eflexions sur le commerce des bl´es with a loud warning about the dangers of listening to the voice of ‘une multitude insens´ee’ with reference to the street violence in Paris in April–May 1775 at the time of the Grain War (xi: 210). In the R´eflexions sur les pouvoirs, written prior to the May meeting of the Estates-General, he had expressed his fear of anarchy in the light of the power-struggles and political manœuvrings marking the preparations for the meeting, and he had contemplated with horror the possible consequences of the despair of twenty-four million people caused by a disintegration of the constitution (ix: 265). In the R´eflexions sur ce qui a ´et´e fait we can see a dramatic reawakening of Condorcet’s pre-1 May 1789 fears as the stability of the polity grew increasingly fragile. The text is deeply marked by fear of the consequences of violent political upheaval. In the face of the threatened dispersal of the National Assembly, Condorcet systematically set out urgent items of unfinished business, including a list of crucially important measures to be taken to manage growing civil unrest. First among these was the solemn recognition of the 26 August Declaration of Rights in the face of opposition from hotheads: ‘Recognition of these rights is the basis to all societies, the only bulwark citizens have against any unjust laws their representatives might be tempted to pass, and the surest way to keep ideas of freedom alive in the minds of 7

On 11 September the National Assembly rejected the King’s right to wield an absolute veto, but conceded a suspensive veto. On 15 September Louis refused to endorse the decrees of 5 and 11 August embodying the decisions, taken on 4 August, relating to the abolition of feudal privileges, as well as the decree of 26 August relating to the Declaration of Rights.

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the people, and stop them from ever forgetting about the dignity of human nature’ (ix: 447). The Declaration, although incomplete,8 would ensure that citizens had the legal right to reform the constitution, and that the National Assembly would be authorised to adopt that new constitution without consulting the provincial legislatures. The question of the new constitution dominated Condorcet’s thinking in the autumn and winter of 1789–90. He saw in a new constitution the solution, not only to the longterm problem of ensuring that just and rational legislation was passed, and a good system of public administration assured, but to the short-term problem of stemming the tide of public discontent, and of removing the danger of mob-rule.9 Accordingly, the seventh section of the R´eflexions consists of an analysis of the causes of public disorder, and a discussion of possible solutions. Condorcet distinguished carefully between the sovereign rights of the people, expressed through their representatives within an agreed constitutional framework on the one hand, and the initiatives, purporting to be rights, taken arbitrarily by misguided individuals (ix: 457). This primary cause of anarchy could only be remedied by a constitution embodying an unambiguous expression of rights to which the people had immediate access, but could enjoy only if order and national unity were maintained (ix: 458). With regard to the anarchic effects of public hatred and contempt for the upper classes generally, Condorcet observed that the abolition of privileges could have calmed public resentment, but this had not happened because of ‘indiscretions’ on the part of assembly representatives,10 the wickedness of the people’s enemies and the incitements of the gutter press. He was particularly concerned with the negative effects of popular unrest caused by class hatred expressed in the departmental assemblies, and proposed the appointment to departmental assemblies of three commissaires for each department, of which at least two would be from the Third Estate, charged specifically with the diffusion and management of the people’s anger (ix: 460–1). Regarding public anger, press freedom also became a sensitive issue in the light of the need to neutralise the hatred fomented by ‘books written 8

9 10

Condorcet perceived two flaws in the D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen: first, that it referred to rights that citizens could not enjoy immediately, even after the appropriate decrees had been passed, such as proportional taxation and freedom of trade and industry (a criticism that seems to contradict his emphasis on gradualism in other areas of legislation); secondly, that the D´eclaration embodied articles that were too vaguely formulated, particularly with regard to such terms as ordre public, utilit´e and int´erˆet commun (ix: 448). Both problems could be resolved quickly in his view by means of a judicious rewording of the relevant articles. In Sur le choix des ministres of April 1790 Condorcet defined the choices that the government now had to make regarding its stewardship of public affairs (x: 65–6). Condorcet criticised specifically the decrees relating to hunting and to the bearing of arms (ix: 459).

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by a few maniacs and mischief-makers’. Condorcet’s solution lay not in censorship but in a co-ordinated programme of counter-propaganda on the part of all who were committed to the public good ‘to prove to the people that they cannot demand more than has been granted to them without running the risk of either losing everything, or contravening justice’. The welfare and happiness of the people were for Condorcet the key priorities of the Revolution. However, the people, left to their own devices, were dangerously fickle and volatile, and needed guidance and skilled moral and political leadership if their understandable resentment of oppression was not to be turned against them, and the cause of freedom lost. Unrest could be further alleviated if the National Assembly ended its persecution of the clergy. Annexation of church property, and the abolition of feudal ecclesiastical privilege sufficed to meet the demands of justice and equality. Further petty anti-clericalism was, in Condorcet’s view, counterproductive.11 With France’s increasing international isolation, ‘manœuvres’ that generated wild rumours about counter-revolutionary conspiracy, the presence of arms dumps, the movement of armies and the threat of invasion all added to public alarm and panic.12 Again the remedy lay, not with damaging the freedom of the press, but with the control and organised dissemination of factual information, although Condorcet conceded that certain developments might justify restrictions on the right of assembly and demonstration. Another ‘manœuvre’ which he identified as a threat to public order and security was the use of bribes by agents-provocateurs to encourage disruption (a danger that in his view merited a special decree). The fifth cause of public disorder and anarchy he identified was the most dangerous of all, namely the food crisis, brought to the forefront of public attention with the bread riots of January–March 1789 and further rioting in Paris on 21 October 1789, which had prompted the introduction of martial law. Condorcet laid the blame for this, not on bad harvests, but on bad legislation passed in September 1788 with a view to controlling the distribution and marketing of produce in order to prevent hoarding. Condorcet thought that the only result of this clumsy legislation had been further destabilisation: ‘However, we would be wrong to reproach the people with anything apart from illegal violence’ (ix: 464). 11

12

Condorcet subscribed to the decision taken on 2 November to confiscate church property, and this coincided with the views that he had adopted on the issue in the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales (viii: 145). However, agreement in principle with the decree did not mean that he was uncritical of the way in which the decree had been applied, as is clear from his comments in the R´eponse a` l’Adresse aux Bataves (ix: 507). On the actions of the National Assembly in the face of internal conspiracies against the Revolution, see in particular the 1792 R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (i: 391–3).

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While the people could not be blamed for their panic over food supplies, their ready disposition to disrupt public order had handed a powerful weapon to the enemies of the Revolution. The decrees subsequently passed by the National Assembly regarding freedom of internal movement of goods and produce had been frustrated by fear, prejudice and inertia, and Condorcet addressed some of the practical ways to ensure their implementation, including the provision of safe roads and secure conditions of transportation, the discouragement of unproven accusations of hoarding against suppliers and merchants and compliance with regulations for distribution. He had had in fact little faith in the financial policies adopted by the Constituent Assembly with regard to the national debt and fiscal reform. The last danger to the Revolution arose in his view from the lack of discipline in the military, weakened and demoralised by ´emigr´e desertions, and unsure of its loyalty to the new order. With regard to the problem of military loyalty and discipline, Condorcet speculated on the advantages of an oath of allegiance to the new National Assembly, and he urged the dissolution of the Assembly’s military committee as soon as it had completed the necessary reforms, simply because its existence perpetuated a sense of impermanence and discontinuity that undermined confidence and commitment.13 Many of the concerns expressed in the R´eflexions on the threat to the integrity of the Revolution, and to the cause of national unity arising from outbreaks of public disorder and violence, resurfaced in other essays. In Sur le pr´ejug´e qui suppose une contrari´et´e d’int´erˆet entre la capitale et les d´epartements (On the prejudice which assumes a contradiction of interest between the capital and the departments), for example, public disorder was again condemned as an infringement of the rights of others and for its corroding effects on communal solidarity and governmental authority, as well as for the way in which it played into the hands of France’s enemies in times of national emergency and vulnerability.14 In this brief address, 13

14

On the responsibilities of army commanders, and their accountability to the National Assembly, Condorcet drafted legislation regulating the conduct of officers with a view to ensuring that soldiers and civilians could have confidence in generals, see BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 214–15. With regard to the dangers to the Revolution from abroad, Condorcet observed in the 1792 R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature that Europe’s rulers counted in vain on the stupidity of their subjects who constituted in reality a far greater threat to their thrones than France’s 1791 constitution (x: 439–40). On the processes of revolution and counter-revolution, see also Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire. By 1793, Condorcet was prepared to tolerate all measures taken against counterrevolutionaries if taken genuinely on behalf of the people. Citing the Great Fire of London, he defended the view that one right could be sacrificed in the name of a higher right in the interests of state security, for example, when the rights of counter-revolutionaries could be removed legitimately: ‘The purpose of the social pact is the equal and full enjoyment of the rights which belong to man;

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written in the aftermath of the counter-revolutionary uprisings in Nˆımes, Montauban, Vannes, Toulouse and other provincial cities in the spring and early summer of 1790, Condorcet appealed directly for a return to order, compliance with government decrees and the restoration of international respect for the Revolution. Public order continued to deteriorate, however, and the situation on the streets worsened after the dismissal of Girondin ministers on 13 June, and the subsequent invasion of the King’s palace a week later. In spite of his support for the popular actions taken against the King (he dismissed the crowd’s invasion of the palace as the breaking of a few doors and windows, and he applauded the sans-culottes for placing the bonnet phrygien on the King’s head), his fear of anarchy was still strong, and it sharpened again with the news of the September massacres, the impending fall of Verdun and the possible invasion of Paris.15 On 21 September 1792 (the day after the Battle of Valmy) the new National Convention voted unanimously in its opening session to abolish the monarchy, and the Republic was proclaimed on the following day, royal powers having already been suspended on 10 August. Responding to this tide of events, Condorcet produced numerous essays, articles for Le R´epublicain and addresses to, and on behalf of, the dying Legislative Assembly on matters relating to monarchy, public order, national unity, the conduct of the war16 and the exercise of popular sovereignty.17

15

16

17

it is founded on a mutual guarantee of those rights. But that guarantee is suspended in the case of individuals who wish to dissolve [the pact]. So, when it is evident that rights exist in a society, it is right to take steps to make them known; and when we know them we are no longer restrained by any limitations on how we defend them’ (xii: 620). Condorcet drafted legislation consisting of no less than nineteen articles relating to the preservation of public order under revolutionary conditions, see BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 230–2. More than a thousand prisoners were murdered in Paris prisons at this time under the aegis of the Comit´e de surveillance of the Paris Commune, coinciding with the second phase of elections to the National Convention. During the power-vacuum that existed between the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August and the last session of the Legislative Assembly on 20 September power was shared between the Legislative Assembly, a Provisional Executive Council (established on 10 August with six ministers headed unofficially by Danton) and the Commune insurrectionnelle (established on 9 August to plan the King’s downfall). The Legislative Assembly authorised twelve commissioners, representing all three bodies, to tour the provinces, with powers of arrest to deal with disorder and disloyalty to the Revolution arising from the suspension of royal powers on 10 August. On the question of whether the war would advance the cause of reason, see the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (x: 438). Condorcet repudiated war throughout his life, but by the autumn of 1791 he judged it to be unavoidable: ‘So, detesting war, I voted to declare it’, Fragment de justification (i: 591). See J. Bouissounouse, ‘Condorcet, un pacifiste se jette dans la guerre’, Guerre et paix 2 (1966), 29. Among his more dramatic appeals for calm and for a renewal of faith in elected representatives after the suspension of royal powers was the Exposition des motifs d’apr`es lesquels l’Assembl´ee nationale a proclam´e la convocation d’une Convention nationale, et prononc´e la suspension du pouvoir ex´ecutif dans les mains du roi in which Condorcet offered a detailed account of the circumstances justifying the action taken against the King by the Legislative Assembly (x: 547–64). See also the Adresse et

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the trial of louis xvi and the problem of regicide As has been seen, Condorcet had hoped that a constitutional compromise over the position of the royal family might have been possible. Before the Revolution his attitude towards monarchy as an organising principle for civil association had been critical, but his republicanism had been muted. Monarchs could still be treated as allies in the struggle for enlightened government, as the flattering letter accompanying the presentation copy of the Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembl´ees provinciales that he sent to the King of Prussia indicates. In the 1779 Eloge de m. le comte d’Arcy the fate of the Stuarts had been seen as ‘a lesson in the unhappiness and dangers that go with sovereign power’, but English regicide had been roundly condemned. England had witnessed in the space of sixty years ‘two crowned heads fall beneath the executioner’s axe, acts of murder dressed up as forms of justice’ (ii: 373).18 The execution of Charles I was described in the Vie de Voltaire as ‘l’atrocit´e du fanatisme’ (iv: 372). On the other hand, Condorcet was already acutely aware that the days of absolute monarchy in France were numbered, and he would later argue the case for reform in the Vie de m. Turgot (v: 107–8). The provisions of the 1791 constitution, which the King accepted on 13 September 1791, and to which he reaffirmed his consent with the oath of allegiance to the National Assembly the next day, seemed to Condorcet, despite some serious reservations, to offer a chance of transforming France into a constitutional monarchy without compromising the ideals of the Revolution. In the autumn of 1791 Condorcet thought that the assimilation of the monarchy into the Revolution was still possible, especially after Louis XVI’s oath of allegiance, and he urged the King to further his cause by resisting the pressure of factional interests.19 His hopes for an eleventh-hour reconciliation with Louis XVI are reflected in the Opinion sur les mesures g´en´erales, propres a` sauver la patrie des dangers imminents dont elle est menac´ee (Opinion

18 19

d´eclaration de l’Assembl´ee nationale sur le maintien de la tranquillit´e publique of 10 August (x: 541), Sur la n´ecessit´e de l’union entre les citoyens (xii: 215), the Adresse de l’Assembl´ee nationale aux quatre-vingttrois d´epartements et a` l’arm´ee of 19 August (x: 565), the Adresse de l’Assembl´ee nationale aux Franc¸ais sur la guerre (x: 573) and the Adresse de l’Assembl´ee nationale aux Franc¸ais (x: 579). Condorcet’s views on the Stuarts were on the other hand not entirely uncritical, see the note on Charles II in the notes for the Kehl Voltaire (iv: 373). ‘All your interests, Sire, come down to one: the defence of French territory . . . Sire, if you want to win the confidence of citizens again, it is up to you to give the example . . . Suspicion sometimes expresses itself violently, and this cry of pain from a people which believes itself to have been betrayed has been presented to you as the work of a faction. No, Sire, the only factions are those of men who, in times of danger to the public, dare to advance their own ambitious interests, and concern themselves only with the importance of their own parties’ (BIF Condorcet MS 863, ff. 236–7).

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on the general measures for saving the country from the imminent dangers which threaten it), drafted on behalf of the National Assembly. In the six draft decrees on ministerial responsibilities, supplemented by a direct appeal to Louis XVI to take action against France’s enemies in the form of a Projet de message au roi (Draft message to the King), Condorcet portrays the King as the victim of the dangerous misjudgements of his ministers. The King was in need of guidance, not punishment (i: 506, 507). The Projet de message au roi ends, nevertheless, with a clear warning: ‘Sire, we have reminded you of the serious obligations with which the constitution charges you, and at a time when perfidious enemies would like to take up arms against freedom in your name, you will doubtless spare us the pain of discovering that you have not been true to those obligations’ (x: 519). The year 1790 had started well for the royalists with the rapturous reception of Louis XVI by the National Assembly on 4 February, marred only by the execution of the Marquis de Favras, a counter-revolutionary conspirator, two weeks later. The King’s persistent refusal to sanction decrees, however, soon caused a political deadlock which was accompanied by serious public disturbances. Louis XVI was obliged to sanction the Declaration of Rights and abolish feudalism in the wake of the demonstrations at Versailles of 5–6 October 1789, after which the royal family moved to the Tuileries. The deteriorating war situation, and continuing royal intrigue with foreign powers,20 increasing the dangers of counter-revolution, gradually sharpened Condorcet’s disenchantment with Louis XVI. In Sur l’institution d’un conseil ´electif (On the establishment of an electoral council) of July 1791 he considered the balance of advantage between a republic and a hereditary monarchy, now referred to as ‘this supposed remedy for anarchy’ (xii: 265) and, expressing his dismay in Paine-like terms at royal intransigence, he associated French acquiescence to monarchical rule with political immaturity: Surrounded by mistrust and infamy, the throne can only debase the powers that would appear to emanate from it, and weaken them by appealing to a nation which has no faith in them. This love for kings, with which the French have been so long reproached, and which shameless sycophants still dared to call a virtue in the memoir that they made poor Louis XVI write out, this old error of our forebears has vanished like a dream, whose memory fades when we wake up. The nation has cast aside the toys of its long childhood.21 20 21

For Condorcet’s comments on the international conspiracy against the Revolution, see the Discours sur l’office de l’empereur, presented to the National Assembly on 25 June 1792 (x: 284–5). For a similarly outspoken attack on the monarchists, see Ce que les citoyens ont droit d’attendre de leurs repr´esentants (xii: 545–68).

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This outspoken denunciation of monarchy was supplemented by a bitingly satirical essay, in the style of Voltaire, printed in Le R´epublicain in July 1791 under the title of the Lettre d’un jeune m´ecanicien aux auteurs du R´epublicain (Letter from a young engineer to the editors of The republican). Here Condorcet imagines the replacement of the King and court with automata. For this acidic mockery of a King-automaton Condorcet would never be forgiven by his royalist associates. By now Condorcet was convinced of the existence of a conspiracy between the royal family and counter-revolutionaries inside and outside France. After the proclamation of the First Republic, he reviewed in September 1792 developments leading up to the 10 August suspension of royal powers in the Exposition des motifs d’apr`es lesquels l’Assembl´ee nationale a proclam´e la convocation d’une Convention nationale, et prononc´e la suspension du pouvoir ex´ecutif dans les mains du roi (An account of the reasons why the National Assembly announced the convocation of a National Convention, and the suspension of the King’s executive powers), where he noted that the King preferred to forge alliances with Prussia and Austria rather than respect the terms of his oath (x: 551).22 Disaster might have been averted if Louis had publicly denounced the unconstitutional actions taken in his name, ‘but the people’s patience was exhausted’ (x: 558). The menacing presence of the Swiss guard protecting the King added to the people’s fear and anger, but nothing in Condorcet’s view could now stifle its desire for vengeance.23 The suspension of royal powers was defended in the Exposition as a constitutionally legitimate decision taken by an assembly prepared to defend freedom and equality to the death, and the text is one of several addresses signalling Condorcet’s acceptance of the failure of the 1791 constitution.24 22

23

24

In the Adresse aux Franc¸ais of 19 August 1792, circulated to all departments and to the army, Condorcet noted that the King had reneged on his oath by trying to subvert a minority of deputies, by assembling foreign troops, and by secret payments to plotters and pro-royalist agitators (x: 568). Earlier in 1792, in the Discours sur l’office de l’empereur, he had observed that other monarchs no longer treated Louis XVI, whose rule was no longer authorised by divine right, as their friend. Europe’s monarchs were convinced that Louis had not been a free agent when he recognised the rights of man (x: 283–4). On the hostilities between the Swiss guards and the people, and the ensuing danger to the Republic caused by ‘the court’s perfidy’ in breach of the 1791 constitution, see also the 1792 Lettre a` m ∗∗∗ , magistrat de la ville de ∗∗∗ en Suisse (xii: 169–77). The Lettre also contains an appeal to the Swiss to recognise the legitimacy of the action taken against the King. Condorcet was also concerned by the activities of the King’s regiment stationed in Coblenz, poised to invade Paris and restore the monarchy. Cf. Discours sur l’office de l’empereur (x: 287). Suspension of royal powers was for Condorcet the only way to flush out the treason of a conspiring court seeking to conceal its true aims beneath a cloak of constitutional legitimacy. With regard to the general threat from ´emigr´e forces, Condorcet suggested that the King could be required to sign ‘a formal statement’ dissociating himself from ´emigr´e conspiracies (x: 568).

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Condorcet’s disillusionment with Louis XVI had started to crystallise more than a year earlier with the attempted escape of the royal family from the Tuileries, and their subsequent arrest on 20 June 1791. Most of the deputies in the National Assembly preferred to accept the line that the King had been abducted. Condorcet did not share that view and, as has been seen, the event converted him finally to republicanism. The people must now resist siren calls from the ‘Tuileries conspirators’ to support the royalist cause, and the King must be held to account: So, out of superstitious respect for the constitution, must we leave the King and his perfidious counsellors in peace to destroy French liberty, along with that constitution? Must we just quietly accept the sophisms of a party that has finally dropped its mask, and confuse the summoning of the sovereign, possessing the indefeasable right to institute reforms, with a criminal violation of the constitution? Certainly not, and as irrefutable evidence of the treachery of the King and his accomplices is mounting up, who can still reproach those who, already convinced of that treachery, but unable to get their hands on any proof, were able to anticipate its impact, and had the fairness and impartiality to leave the task of judgement to others?

As his rhetorical turn of phrase suggests, his views were now strongly influenced by Paine, to whom he had become particularly attached in the spring of 1791.25 Suspension of royal powers on 10 August 1792, accompanied by decrees authorising the establishment of a National Convention and the framing of a new constitution, marked a watershed for Condorcet both as a legislator and as a political theorist, as can be seen in the proliferation of essays and addresses that flowed from his pen in the remaining months of 1792. In the R´eflexions sur la R´evolution de 1688 et sur celle du 10 aoˆut 1792 (Reflections on the 1688 Revolution and on that of 10 August 1792), composed within a month of the events of 10 August, he assumed the role of defender of the Revolution, whose cause was no longer a private matter for France but concerned the whole of Europe, whose solidarity with the Revolution Condorcet would from now on seek to ensure (xii: 208–9).26 In Aux Germains Condorcet contemplated the dismantling of all ancien r´egime 25 26

See A. O. Aldridge, ‘Condorcet et Paine: leurs rapports intellectuels’, Revue de litt´erature compar´ee 32 (1958), 47–65. Cf. Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 338. Condorcet observed in the Discours sur l’office de l’empereur that the actions of Europe’s rulers had served only to make their subjects more conscious of the achievements of the Revolution. Moreover, they were exposing their soldiers to the noble courage of a patriotic force – an additional source of subversive example and inspiration (x: 287–90). On 19 November 1792 a decree of secours et fraternit´e was passed, offering to help oppressed peoples to recover their freedom. For an informative comparative analysis of the views of Condorcet and Paine on the glorious Revolution of 1688, see Aldridge, ‘Condorcet, Paine and historical method’.

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autocracies: ‘The edifice is still standing, but the foundations have been steadily undermined; shake it a little, and the debris will be scattered all over the ground’ (xii: 152). The fall of kings is traced in quasi-apocalyptic tones that evoked betrayal, vice and mediocrity. Their survival lay only in the acceptance of new constitutions, either ‘semi-free’ like those of England27 and Sweden, or on the lines of the 1791 French model. Condorcet’s numerous, in the event counterproductive, addresses to other European nations, in which he sought to convince them of the peaceful intentions of France’s revolutionary government, were not well received in foreign embassies.28 In the face of an increasingly dangerous war situation and widespread resentment at Louis XVI’s retention of the veto over Assembly decrees,29 by the summer of 1792 Condorcet was prepared for the final reckoning with Louis XVI. The King, having broken one oath, could never be trusted to keep another. His replacement by the five-year-old dauphin under a regency, proposed by Danton and Brissot, was not in Condorcet’s view practical. For him there could no longer be any possibility of a constitutional compromise between the monarchy and the Revolution. The human race was no longer the ‘inalienable patrimony’ of a few dozen families who wished to rule only over slaves and corpses, as he put it graphically in La R´epublique franc¸aise aux hommes libres (xii: 113–14). The vote to abolish the monarchy was passed unanimously at the first meeting of the National Convention on 27

28 29

With regard to England, Condorcet clarified the iron logic of the Revolution in February 1792 in the Lettre de Junius a` William Pitt. Here he defended, again in Paine-like terms, the right of a subject people to punish a conspirator who called himself king (xii: 324). The blood that had been shed in France in defence of that right was regrettable, nevertheless: ‘The French Revolution has certainly been much bloodier than one would have wished in the cause of the happiness and prompt emancipation of humanity. The French have sometimes stained their victories with atrocities and acts of brigandage; in other words, ferocious and bloodthirsty men have lived among them, greedy, ambitious men, Tartuffes of patriotism.’ While accepting that the Revolution had not always been the model of virtue, Condorcet saw the violence as the work of foreign agents rather than as an outcome of the revolutionary process itself. English counter-revolutionary propaganda was simply a means to distract the English from the inspiring spectacle of a neighbouring people reclaiming their rights. Condorcet’s denunciation of the English enemies of the Revolution in the Lettre de Junius included a staunch defence of Tom Paine and Joseph Priestley, as well as strictures against Edmund Burke (xii: 328). On Condorcet’s illusions about possible English support for the Revolution, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 521. See Cahen, Condorcet, pp. 442–5. Condorcet was far from being a fanatical opponent of the royal veto in principle before the Revolution. He was mindful perhaps of the merits of the presidential veto retained in the American constitution. However, he always opposed the way in which the royal veto was applied. On the dangers arising for France as a consequence of the King’s retention of the veto, particularly with regard to the decree on ´emigr´es and recalcitrant priests refusing to take the oath of loyalty, see the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (x: 409–18). The threat from ´emigr´es and the problem of their protectors feature prominently in Condorcet’s analysis of the war situation in the R´evision.

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21 September 1792, to be followed closely on 25 September by the proclamation of the indivisibility of the Republic. Condorcet’s personal declaration of war on the monarchy had already been made in his 4 September address, Aux Franc¸ais sur la guerre (x: 575–7), although this address was not to save him from continuing accusations from Robespierre of monarchist deviance. The problem of translating the ideals of the Enlightenment into practical legislative action had preoccupied Condorcet with particular urgency ever since the meeting of the Estates-General, and it continued to inform his political thinking in the debate surrounding the 1791 constitution. The need to create a constitution inspired by those ideals became even more urgent after the proclamation of the First Republic and his election to the Convention. The task facing the creators of the new institutions of the Republic was set out in some detail by Condorcet in November 1792 in De la nature des pouvoirs politiques dans une nation libre (On the nature of political power in a free nation) (x: 589–613).30 The Opinion sur le jugement de Louis XVI (Opinion on the trial of Louis XVI) was composed in November 1792, two months after the proclamation of the First Republic, and against a background of lively debate on the King’s trial which started to gather pace after the authority of the National Convention to pass sentence had been confirmed on 7 November. The Opinion reflects Condorcet’s thoughts on how actually to put into effect the fundamental right of the ruled to depose a ruler perceived to have broken the terms of the pact of association. Interestingly, Condorcet also uses the occasion to draw attention to the benefits of his probabilistic theory of voting, and to advocate the application of his jury theorem to the problem of reaching a just decision on the King’s guilt or innocence. The arrangements for putting Louis XVI on trial represented a crucial moment of transition from theory into practice, and Condorcet did not underestimate the need to ensure constitutional legitimacy and a strict adherence to the principles of enlightened justice in the eyes of Europe, and also of posterity (xii: 269).31 He recognised the difficulty that the Convention faced in persuading others of the benefits of holding a trial that would seek to end the superstition of kingship, and in the Opinion he weighed the issues involved in trying ‘a conspiring king’ carefully. Could Louis XVI be judged for crimes for which there was no specific provision in the legal code? Was his person inviolable 30 31

It was this essay that marked, according to Coutel, the moment when enlightenment became revolutionary, see Condorcet, p. 37. Condorcet was to become increasingly concerned with the issue of revolutionary justice and its departure from legal and moral normalities in the name of state security, see Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire (xii: 621–3).

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by virtue of the sacerdotal nature of sovereignty? Was he accountable as a king or as an individual conspirator, and therefore subject to due process like any other citizen? What were his crimes, and who were his accusers? Which body had the authority to try him? Condorcet rehearsed the answers to these key questions in a punctilious, dialogic manner that laid bare the emptiness of royal claims to immunity. The time had come, Condorcet concludes at the end of this long self-interrogation on the fate of a monarch, and of monarchy, to teach kings that if the law is silent on the matter of royal crimes this is the consequence of an abuse of royal power, and not an expression of the will of the people. The 1791 constitution was a contract which the King could not refuse to accept without renouncing his throne, and conceding his claim to immunity from prosecution (xii: 287).32 Nevertheless, Condorcet was not convinced that the King could, or should, be tried by the National Convention sitting as a judicial tribunal, because the Convention would then be acting both as judge and jury. Impartiality was essential, and most of the second half of the Opinion is devoted to an elaboration of the conditions in which due process in this case could take place, including questions relating to where the trial should be held, how judge and jury should be appointed, sentence confirmed and appeal procedures agreed. The King was ‘jugeable’ and Europe, as well as France, must be presented in his trial with a model of enlightened justice. Few of these conditions were met. On 3 and 10–11 December 1792, Louis XVI was interrogated before the National Convention, and his defence was heard on 26 December. On 14/15 January 1793 he was found guilty of his crimes by a unanimous vote, a proposal from the Girondins for an appeal to the people being subsequently rejected.33 While voting to confirm the King’s guilt in the matter of treason, Condorcet opposed the death sentence on principle,34 and in the Opinion he urged moderation in the determination of punishment (xii: 302). On 19 January 1793 Condorcet 32 33 34

Condorcet examined the 1791 constitution, its legitimacy and its relationship to the ideals of the Revolution in the Discours sur l’office de l’empereur (x: 283–4). By no means unanimously. The vote was 424 against, 283 in favour. See above pp. 40–2. In Condorcet’s view, abolition of capital punishment was one of the most significant steps that could be taken on the road to an enlightened society. Humanity could only benefit from the elimination of ‘this tendency towards savagery which has long dishonoured it. I think that the example of murders commissioned in the name of the law is far more dangerous to public morality than the constitution of a state which allows men to retain a greater part of their natural independence. Punishments that allow for correction and repentance are the only ones that can be appropriate for a regenerated human race’ (xii: 300). See also Chapter 7. A key proposal in the 1793 Plan de constitution is the abolition of the death penalty for crimes other than those which threatened national security, public order and the freedom, sovereignty and welfare of the people. Even then it should be used sparingly and only when absolutely necessary (xii: 383–4). On Condorcet’s earlier views on the injustice of the death penalty, and the case for abolition, see also the 1774 Remarques sur les Pens´ees de Pascal (iii: 646–7) and his letters to Frederick II of 2 May and 19 September 1785 (i: 305, 315).

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abstained in the vote to suspend the death sentence, and Louis XVI was executed two days later.35 Condorcet had no more to say on the matter, but he would pay dearly for his abstention, despite the fact that he had voted with Robespierre and the Montagne on 28 December to reject the ‘appeal to the people’.36 a blueprint f or the f irst republic The problem of Louis XVI’s trial was for Condorcet part of the much broader problem of the constitution itself, and of managing the changes that became inevitable after the 1789 Declaration of Rights, and increasingly urgent after the King’s reluctant acceptance of the 1791 constitution. Condorcet had welcomed the 1791 constitution and defended it robustly, but unlike Le Chapelier, for example, he did not see it as the end of the process of revolution.37 A constitution was for Condorcet an arrangement for ordering the civil order that was continuously open to change, the right to change constitutions being inalienable, as he reminded delegates elected to the first National Assembly in the 1790 R´eponse a` l’adresse aux provinces, ou R´eflexions sur les ´ecrits publi´es contre l’Assembl´ee nationale (Reply to the address to the provinces, or reflections on writings published against the National Assembly).38 Condorcet’s thinking on the evolving role of the new National Assembly was inevitably linked to the future of the French monarchy, and his position clarified under the pressure of a revolutionary process that would transform the liberal philosophe and constitutional monarchist of 1789 into a republican. He came to accept republicanism as a crucial stage in the broader process of constitutional perfectionnement and progress.39 35 36

37

38

39

See Patrick, The Men of the First French Republic, p. 332. Condorcet had, however, criticised Robespierre in the Chronique de Paris (5 December 1792) for the latter’s ‘theory about the right to murder without prior judicial procedure people condemned by mob hysteria’. See A. Mathiez, La R´evolution franc¸aise (Paris: Colin, 1933; repr. Paris: Collection 10/18, 1972), vol. ii, p. 60. See, for example, the 1789 essay, Sur la n´ecessit´e de faire ratifier la constitution par les citoyens, et sur la formation des communaut´es de campagne (ix: 414–16). Isaac-Ren´e-Gui Le Chapelier was President of the National Assembly on the night of 4 August 1789 when feudal privileges were abolished. For an understanding of what Le Chapelier and his political allies thought about the implications of the Revolution for the constitution, see I. Birchall, ‘When the Revolution had to stop’, in Cross and Williams (eds.), The French Experience, pp. 45–8. In this address he envisaged the maximum lifespan of any constitution to be twenty years, with a rolling five-year review to make interim adjustments in the light of changing circumstances (ix: 532–6). See Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 164–5; Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 51–82.

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With his election on 26 September 1791 to the National Assembly (of which he would assume the presidency on 5 January 1792), Condorcet had entered the mainstream of national revolutionary politics. Since May 1791 he had been working closely with Du Chˆatelet and Brissot de Warville, and also with Paine, whom he had come to admire more than Si´ey`es.40 Between January and June 1792 he concentrated his energies on the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature, in effect a retrospective analysis of the events of 1789, and of the progress made by the National Assembly in the first three months of its existence, together with an assessment of the problems inherited from the Constituent Assembly, including that of the King (x: 287–8). The Revolution would take time to consolidate its gains, and he noted in the R´evision that its mission was still endangered by pockets of resistance and anarchy. Typically he urged moderation in the use of force against dissident groups, stressing the fragility of the civil order at a moment of complex transition in which all citizens were conscious of having recovered their rights, but were unsure of the constitutional implications arising from the implementation of those rights.41 Resistance to the decree of 19 June 1790 abolishing titles of hereditary nobility, for which Condorcet had voted, showed in his view how little the aristocracy understood the political realities of the world in which they now lived. The counter-revolutionary activities of a rebellious aristocracy and a fanatical priesthood, uprisings in the colonies, food shortages, the threat of ´emigr´es-led military invasion, the disruptions to Assembly business, and the activities of counter-revolutionaries42 all added urgency to the need to resolve the issue of a new relationship between the King and the National Assembly. Condorcet had much to say in the R´evision on the management of the day-to-day formalities of that new relationship, with detailed 40

41

42

Paine left France in July 1791. His first visit to France took place in 1781 (9 March–25 August), and arose in connection with the need to raise funds for the American insurgents. It is possible that Condorcet first met Paine at Franklin’s house in Paris at that time, see Badinter and Badinter, Condorcet, p. 233. Cf. Vincent, Thomas Paine, p. 163; Introduction, p. 24. Paine became a frequent visitor to the Hˆotel de La Monnaie in later years, and Condorcet was able to converse in English with him. For unpublished evidence of this, see BIF Condorcet MS 848, f. 25. With regard to the sense in which the people ratify a constitution, and the issue of its ratification on their behalf, see Sur la n´ecessit´e de faire ratifier la constitution par les citoyens, et sur la formation des communaut´es de campagne (ix: 417–19). Condorcet justified the extreme measures taken against the counter-revolutionaries in Sur le sens du mot R´evolutionnaire where he remarked on the irony of the appeal to the Declaration of Rights made by those who had sought formerly to crush those rights (xii: 618). By March 1793 Condorcet’s attitude towards the threat of counter-revolution had hardened considerably. He was convinced that the disturbances in the Vend´ee and elsewhere were offering useful lessons to true republicans as the royalist party lifted its mask and revealed its true face as the supporter of France’s enemies (BIF Condorcet MS 864, ff. 398–403).

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recommendations on protocol, the conduct of Assembly members in the King’s presence and the circumstances in which dialogue should be conducted.43 Behind such administrative minutiae lay an intention to stiffen the resolve of deputies, to remind them of their ideals, responsibilities and aspirations and to maintain the political momentum of the Revolution in times of crisis and irresolution (x: 424–5). With his election on 11 October 1792 to the Comit´e de constitution, together with Si´ey`es, P´etion, Vergniaud, Paine, Brissot, Gensonn´e, Bar`ere and Danton, work on the drafting of a new constitution began. The plan for the 1793 constitution was a project that Condorcet would bring to fruition with the help of Paine, the Reverend David Williams, Si´ey`es, Barr`ere and others, and in its final version it would reflect, perhaps more than any other document, Condorcet’s vision for the ideal management of the civil order, and of the Revolution itself, in accordance with the principles of the Enlightenment as enshrined in the Declaration of Rights. That vision owes much also to the 1787 American constitution which Condorcet had read carefully.44 Work on the new constitution took place against a background of conflicting interpretations of sovereignty and citizenship, originating with Montesquieu and Rousseau, the Rousseauist school being represented by Robespierre and his followers, and the Montesquieu school by Si´ey`es. The latter located sovereign power in an assembly of elected representatives, the former in the direct expression of the public will. Neither school of thought, in Condorcet’s view, took sufficient account of the need to educate the citizen in the exercise of political responsibility and the duties of citizenship, and he would seek to steer a course between the two. In this lay much of his originality as a political theorist.45 The opening paragraph of the Exposition des principes et motifs prefacing the 1793 Plan de constitution (Draft constitution) neatly encapsulated the enormity of the problems faced by the architects of what was eventually to provide the basis, in much revised form, for the 159 articles of the still-born constitution of 1793, the so-called ‘Girondin constitution’: To give a territory covering twenty-seven thousand square miles, inhabited by twenty-five million people, a constitution founded exclusively on rational and just 43

44 45

In the sub-section entitled ‘D´ecret sur le c´er´emonial’, Condorcet stipulated that to ensure the end of ‘idolatry’, the chairs of the King and the Assembly President should be of equal height, the terms ‘sire’ and ‘majesty’ should not be used and hats should be kept firmly on heads (x: 399–402). See Rosenblum, ‘Condorcet as constitutional draftsman’. On the impact of Montesquieu and Rousseau upon Condorcet, see J. Ehrard, L’Esprit des mots. Montesquieu en lui-mˆeme et parmi les siens (Geneva: Droz, 1998), pp. 295–306. See also C. Kintzler, Condorcet. L’Instruction publique et la naissance du citoyen (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1984), pp. 175–90; Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 38–47.

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principles, ensure that citizens have the full enjoyment of their rights; put the different parts of this constitution together in a way that ensures obedience to the law and the submission of individual wills to the general will, but leaves the sovereignty of the people, equality between citizens and the exercise of natural freedom entirely unaffected: this is the problem we have to resolve. (xii: 335)

The need for national unity and the case for the creation of a single, indivisible republic is then set out at length, and the whole project of a new republican constitution was conceived as an invitation to citizens to engage actively in public affairs, and accept the responsibilities laid on them by the Declaration of Rights with which the new constitution was to form an ideological continuum. The new constitution would involve the realisation of freedom, not merely its proclamation, and for this it needed public participation at the consultative stage as well as public consent to its final recommendations. In the Exposition Condorcet examines the role of community and primary assemblies, as well as that of a National Assembly, in putting constitutional reform into practical effect, ways of interpreting the general will, modalities of debate in separate assemblies, risks to public disorder, quality of representation, delegation of provisional responsibilities and the establishment of a single National Assembly as the repository of supreme executive power, ‘an authority in continual activity’ (xii: 338–55). With regard to the longer-term process of law-making, as opposed to the dayto-day business of public administration, the Exposition offered guidance on the ways in which the transition from despotism to liberty, and from constitutional monarchy to republic, could be managed under the aegis of a single-chamber assembly. Every aspect of the Plan reflects Condorcet’s concern to ensure as far as possible that the public will and active public collaboration in constitutional change were given their due, the linkage between government and governed being assured in the Plan by means of an intermediary body, ‘a national council of elected officials . . . of equal rank, each charged with the day-to-day administration of particular parts of the council’s business; all general resolutions, all determinations of policy would be taken on the basis of a report from the official to whom the task of implementation would subsequently go’ (xii: 368). The National Council would make deputies closely and continuously aware of the public mood, and keep them well informed of facts and circumstances relevant to assembly deliberations and policies. Its purpose was to exercise constitutional vigilance, to act as the guarantor of the public will and to ensure the retention of public confidence. All forms of ‘political heredity’ were rejected.

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The common thread running through the substantial body of proposals in the Plan is the principle of indivisibility of the Republic, which gives coherence to a whole range of recommendations regarding the reform and independence of the Treasury,46 the revitalisation of public works programmes, schools, hospitals, industry and agriculture, the geographical reconfiguration of communes and departments, the rationalisation and standardisation of judicial procedures, the abolition of the death penalty (though retained for cases where the security of the state was in danger) and the reform of public administration at national and local levels. The indivisibility of the Republic represented for Condorcet a revolutionary policy rather than a revolutionary slogan, a policy of national unity in all contexts of national life that was urgently required at a time when France’s enemies threatened invasion and counter-revolution.47 Condorcet’s Plan was thus directed towards the forging of the French nation, the making of a single people conscious of its cohesion and national identity. Federalism and the right to secession were explicitly proscribed. Interestingly, there is in all this no undercurrent of the racial and cultural dimensions to indivisibility which Herder was injecting into the reawakening of German nationalism and nationhood at this time. Other areas of the Plan raise general questions of political principle concerning the place of rights, freedom, equality and the nature of authority in a reformed constitution, ‘conforming more closely to reason, justice, and even to truly enlightened politics’ (xii: 385). Recommendations on the franchise and other aspects of the electoral process in the Plan are devised with a view to the achievement of a practical compromise between freedom and equality on the one hand, and the urgent needs of a country at war, and endangered by the conspiracies of a large ´emigr´e population on the other. In this respect, the conditions of eligibility to vote, for example, were a particularly sensitive issue, and Condorcet devised them carefully with 46

47

Condorcet identified corruption and disorder in the management of public finances as a key factor in the downfall of past republics (xii: 372–3). The Treasury was to be made accountable to the Legislative. This is the only area of government in which Condorcet accepted the principle of checks and balances between different branches. In the Discours sur l’office de l’empereur Condorcet, offering a positive assessment of France’s position, noted that times of crisis and revolutionary upheaval exposed the weaknesses of ministers rather than those of the nation as a whole: ‘But thoughtful men might ask whether stormy and revolutionary times have ever been times of weakness for nations, whether fields will lie fallow because the gibbet no longer threatens to ravage people, or because tithes are no longer payable, whether the people will be less industrious because unequal taxes have been abolished, or because the poor man will no longer be forced to make advance payments on those taxes? They might ask what France has lost, apart from gold and the nobility, and whether or not France still has men and a fertile soil’ (x: 287).

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the volatile war situation in mind.48 The number of deputies to be elected would be calculated as a ratio of the population in each department. Voting by acclamation was rejected, and for security reasons it was proposed that the names of voters should be attached to the lists of candidates (‘a simple indication’). In the next stage of voting for individuals (‘a vote indicating preference’), however, votes would be cast anonymously, ‘so as to make it the freest expression of the will of those casting the votes’ (xii: 404). In the Plan Condorcet proposed, moreover, a constitution in which political participation would become an educational, as well as liberating, civic experience for the citizen, an experience that was indispensable to the creation of a constitution based on reason, freedom and equality, the political maturity of the state being dependent ultimately on the educated mind of the individual citizen. Condorcet also had in mind here quality of representation, and in seeking to ensure that a new constitution would be less open to corruption and intrigue, he hoped that the Plan, if implemented, would encourage men of talent and virtue to present themselves for election to the Assembly, as well as to the proposed National Council.49 With regard to voting rules, Condorcet envisaged a universal male suffrage (no echo here of the Admission des femmes au droit de cit´e), with a pyramidal system of elections, with primary assemblies at its base electing members to departmental assemblies from which national deputies would be elected. Safeguards against tyranny were to be found in the right of anyone to have a referendum on any piece of proposed legislation that was suspect.50 The 1793 Plan de constitution, completed by the end of December 1792,51 was drafted with the intention of consolidating and stabilising the Revolution, and of assuring ordinary citizens that the Revolution was working in their interests. These were the people at whom the Plan was primarily addressed (xii: 411). If the allies of the Plan were to be drawn from the ranks of ordinary citizens, however, in Condorcet’s view its opponents were to be 48

49 50 51

With regard to the war situation itself, Condorcet had drafted an address to the nation sometime between March and the end of May 1793 appealing for national unity in the face of danger: ‘Citizens. There are tyrants to fight, rebels to suppress, a spirit of royalism which seeks to turn men away from republican liberty by sowing the seeds of disorder and unhappiness everywhere. These are your real enemies, these are the people against whom we must march together, we should be arguing only about our zeal for equality and about our sacrifices for the country’ (BIF Condorcet MS 864, ff. 13–18). The manuscripts of two other addresses drafted in the spring of 1793 seeking to rally the nation, and particularly the Parisians, have also survived (BIF Condorcet MS 864, ff. 519–27). With regard to procedures for election to the National Council and the qualities needed in candidates, see xii: 402–3. Condorcet accepted the impracticality of this particular proposal, and addressed the problem in a different way elsewhere, see McLean and Hewitt, Condorcet, pp. 44–8. For an incomplete first draft of the 1793 Plan de constitution, see BIF Condorcet MS 864, ff. 404–40.

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found among the vain, the ambitious and the avaricious, whose interests would not be served by the restoration of order and the implementation of a reformed constitution. To these groups could be added all those who had lost faith in the Revolution and regretted the founding of the Republic, as well as those who were plotting to destroy the Republic’s indivisibility in the interests of foreign powers. These ‘shameful hopes’ would be frustrated by the acceptance of a constitution based on the sovereignty of the people, universal equality and national unity. The Plan, embodying a renewed Declaration of Rights, thus concludes with a mixture of defiance, hope, exhortation and trepidation alerting the reader to the pressure of the events surrounding its composition that must have concentrated the minds of the Comit´e de constitution as they attempted to salvage something from the wreckage of the 1791 constitution. It reflects a determination to formulate a revitalised set of political principles and an improved constitutional framework within which the government of the First Republic could control an uncertain and volatile political situation, strengthen the links between government and people and protect the Revolution from its enemies. On behalf of the Comit´e de constitution Condorcet, now in poor health and virtually inaudible, presented the Plan to the National Convention on 15 and 16 February 1793. The opening flourish, affirming that the new constitutional proposals were founded on the rights of man, ‘recognised and declared’, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people, and proclaiming the unity and indivisibility of the Republic (xii: 423), is followed by the 380 articles of the draft constitution itself.52 The basic principles were clear. To Montesquieu’s separation of powers Condorcet preferred the limitation of powers. The people’s consent to delegate their power to their representatives would always be conditional. Their will was paramount as an operating principle, and the new proposals aimed to maximise the expression of that will, particularly in the primary assemblies whose membership would be open to all male nationals over the age of twenty-one, and all male non-nationals with one year of residence. The electricity of power was channelled through the electoral process itself, much emphasis 52

These are not numbered consecutively but are divided into thirteen titres, each with a varying number of sub-sections: De la division du territoire (seven articles), De l’´etat des citoyens, et des conditions n´ecessaires pour en exercer les droits (ten articles), Des assembl´ees primaires (fifty-six articles), Des corps administratifs (twenty-five articles), Du conseil ex´ecutif de la r´epublique (sixty-one articles), De la tr´esorerie nationale, et du bureau de comptabilit´e (thirteen articles), Du corps l´egislatif (fifty-four articles), De la censure du peuple sur les actes de la repr´esentation nationale, et du droit de p´etition (thirtythree articles), Des conventions nationales (sixteen articles), De l’administration de la justice (seventytwo articles), De la force publique (twelve articles), Des contributions publiques (eleven articles), Des rapports de la R´epublique franc¸aise avec les nations ´etrang`eres, et de ses relations ext´erieures (ten articles).

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being placed on referenda and public initiatives. Executive power would be confined to an elected Executive Council of seven members, of which the presidency would change every two weeks to avoid the dangers of ‘republican monarchy’. Ministers would be accountable to an elected national tribunal. At a more localised level, a ‘grand commune’ structure was proposed to ensure an appropriate balance of representation between urban and rural France. While the Plan owes much to the thinking of others, its originality resides in the way it sought to translate theories of universal suffrage, democratic voting procedures and popular consent into practice, and to formalise in law the rights, responsibilities and duties of citizens living in an enlightened Republic. It offered contemporaries a fresh vision of government in which the governed were engaged in constructive dialogue with their political representatives. The adversarial processes embraced by Robespierre and Si´ey`es were to be replaced by transparent decision-making, informed and scrutinised by the public will. The Plan offered nothing less than a sovereignty of the people expressed as a set of specific constitutional modalities rather than left as a vague abstraction to be interpreted at the will of governments. Such a radically democratic vision did not meet with the approval of the jacobin Montagnards for whom it was tainted fatally by girondist revisionism.53 The Jacobins saw in the electoral and voting proposals, in particular, a dangerous threat from provincial assemblies to their power-base in Paris. Debate in the Convention started on 17 April, and a week later a new Projet de D´eclaration des droits naturels, civils et politiques des hommes, amended by Robespierre, was promulgated, initiating a more detailed public discussion of Condorcet’s Projet de constitution franc¸aise.54 On 10 April Condorcet commended the merits of the Plan in a powerfully argued essay, Ce que 53

54

See Jaume, Le Discours jacobin, pp. 319–21; M. Pertu´e, ‘La Censure du peuple dans le projet de constitution de Condorcet’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, p. 325. The people could not legislate, the people’s power being confined in practice to the power to elect and to censure. In an appendix Pertu´e cites the relevant provisions for this in Titre viii: De la censure du peuple sur les actes de la repr´esentation nationale et du droit de p´etition. The main provisions of the new Declaration of Rights included the adoption of ‘common happiness’ as the aim of the civil order; the rights of man (now defined as equality, liberty, security and property); personal rights (equality before the law, freedom of expression and of the press, equality of opportunity, freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom of worship, assembly and petition, the right to trial, the right to resist oppression, freedom of trade and industry); abolition of slavery; sovereignty as the possession of the people, public assistance (a ‘sacred debt’); a state education system; the right to insurrection when the government violates the people’s rights, ‘the most sacred of rights and the most imprescribable of duties’. As far as Condorcet was concerned, the powers of any new constitution were conditioned, and constrained, by an accepted Declaration of Rights whose articles were inviolate. On the issue of rights in the context of the church and freedom of worship as part of the Declaration of Rights, see also the R´evision des travaux de la premi`ere l´egislature (x: 393–4).

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les citoyens ont droit d’attendre de leurs repr´esentants (What citizens have the right to expect from their representatives). Here he stressed the need for reinforcement of republican ideals, and offered a close analysis of the advantages of the new constitutional proposals.55 Again Condorcet demonstrated here his understanding of the psychology of power. The successful management of constitutional transition depended on the pragmatic recognition of the fact that ‘the calculations of personality’ and the primacy of self-interest on the one hand, and the inchoate, often irrational, pressures emanating from the collective will of the governed on the other, had to be taken fully into account by the wise legislator as far as this was possible, and especially in the critical weeks following the execution of Louis XVI. In reasserting constitutional control, however, the Plan makes clear to representatives in every aspect of the process of political management that it illuminates the crucial difference between being the servants of the public will and the puppets of the mob (xii: 556–68). The Plan also advocates a centralisation of executive power, in line with jacobin ideas, as the only way to ensure that the principles of the Revolution could be implemented.56 Condorcet was always conscious of the need for caution in the government of a people unaccustomed to liberty, and the maintenance of public order was high on his agenda, here as elsewhere in his political writings. In Ce que les citoyens ont droit d’attendre de leurs repr´esentants of 10 April 1793 his analysis of the destabilising elements in play since the crisis provoked by the royal flight to Varennes leads the reader only in one direction, namely the replacement without further ado of the monarchy with a republic (xii: 567). The general principles were clear, but the elaboration of those principles was too charged with technical qualifications and administrative minutiae, detailed even down to the format of voting slips, to capture the imagination of deputies. The Plan was essentially the work of a political scientist rather than a politician, and unsurprisingly its reception was disappointing. The press reports of its contents were cursory, and the reactions of deputies negative, as Condorcet himself acknowledged on 17 February 1793 in the Chronique de Paris. The Convention authorised publication, but invited counter-proposals. On the day after Condorcet’s presentation of the Plan, a new Comit´e de constitution was set up, dominated this time by Robespierre, 55

56

In this essay Condorcet also listed the additional measures with regard to national security (and the movement of ´emigr´es) that needed to be taken to coincide with the adoption of the new constitution (xii: 552–8). These included recruitment of high-quality soldiers committed to the national cause, the need to apply the latest technology in the conduct of the war, the rationalisation of food prices, the protection of property and the control of inflation. On the links between the sovereignty of the people, the power of the majority in the National Assembly and the common interest, see Dippel, ‘Projeter le monde moderne’, 165–7.

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Saint-Just, Collot d’Herbois and their supporters. They lost little time in denouncing publicly what was now seen as a girondist constitution, to be strangled at birth. Condorcet’s disappointment, after four months of exhausting work, must have been acute. Fearing an indefinite postponement of reform, Condorcet demanded in a speech to the Convention on 13 May 1793 that the primary assemblies should be convened for the following November to make a decision to accept or reject the proposals. He reiterated the need for a new republican constitution to heal France’s internal wounds, and assured the Convention that the adoption of the Plan would signal to the people the end of seditious conspiracies, and finally shatter the counter-revolutionary dreams of foreign kings (xii: 584). The Projet de d´ecret was Condorcet’s last rallying call to the cause of his vision of the new constitution, and in it he set a five-month deadline for the acceptance or rejection of the by now much-reviled Plan,57 urging submission of the Plan itself to the people as quickly as possible. These demands were applauded, but ignored. On 4 April the Convention established a six-member commission, to which Condorcet was not nominated, to examine all counter-proposals received, and the debate, in effect marking the end of the road for Condorcet’s Plan, would continue until May. On 10 May Condorcet finally broke his silence in the Convention with a brief Discours sur la convocation d’une nouvelle Convention nationale (Speech on the convocation of a new National Convention) (i: 583–97) drawing attention to the dangers to the Republic of the current constitutional vacuum. This was Condorcet’s last speech to the Convention. In the subsequent phases of the debate over the new constitution Condorcet’s proposals were by-passed. His Projet de constitution franc¸aise was too closely identified with the discredited Gironde, and with the purge of the Girondins on 2 June it was referred to a working party of the Comit´e de salut public, chaired by H´erault de S´echelles, and charged with the creation of a new draft within a week. A hurried report was accordingly produced reducing the number of articles to 180, and revising much of the surviving text to accommodate Robespierre’s views. While the redraft contains echoes of Condorcet’s wording, its contents were far less democratic, and crucially it abandoned Condorcet’s key proviso relating to the regular review of the constitution, and the requirement for the periodic renewal of its mandate from the people. An amended Declaration of 57

The Projet de d´ecret contained three articles: the first proposing the convocation of the primary assemblies for 1 November, the second establishing membership of a new National Convention that the assemblies would elect, and the third proposing 15 December as the date for the new National Convention to come into being (xii: 594).

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Rights was appended, and it was in this form that the 1793 constitution was eventually presented to the Convention on 10/11 June, given perfunctory consideration and approved on 24 June. It would never be implemented.58 Condorcet was outraged, and towards the end of June he circulated anonymously a lengthy clandestine letter, Aux citoyens franc¸ais sur la nouvelle constitution (To French citizens on the new constitution) expressing his dismay (xii: 653–75). The H´erault de S´echelles revisions had been accepted, ‘after a feeble discussion, and with a few amendments complacently accepted’, by representatives under pressure, and intimidated by armed soldiers in the atmosphere of terror that ensued from the arrest of twenty-seven Girondins on 2 June.59 The democratic credentials of the revised Plan were, in Condorcet’s opinion, non-existent, its proposals involving nothing less than the ruination of the integrity of the Convention, with the proposed abolition of press freedom, the close surveillance of the postal service and other measures denying freedom of thought and expression. He continued to defend his own Plan de constitution franc¸aise, dismantling the H´erault de S´echelles revisions point by point, but the battle was lost. The Revolution now seemed to him to have come full circle since 1789: ‘Ah! What a deadly resemblance there is between what is happening today and the last months of the Constituent Assembly!’ (xii: 673). On the eve of his denunciation by Chabot on 8 July, Condorcet’s great vision for constitutional renewal lay in ruins.60 58

59

60

A decree of 10 October 1793 put the whole project on ice, and it would remain so until 18 April 1795 when a Comit´e de constitution was elected under the Thermidorian Convention, the so-called Commission des onze. This is Condorcet’s figure. The purge of the Girondins in fact encompassed the arrest of twenty-nine, including Clavi`ere and Lebrun, to the accompaniment of popular demonstrations led by Hanriot and the Paris National Guard. Condorcet protested against these events (‘a general perfidy’) in an address entitled Les D´eput´es du d´epartement de l’Aisne a` la Convention nationale: aux citoyens du d´epartement (xii: 571–80). Aux citoyens franc¸ais became the pretext for Chabot’s attack. On the disparaging views of John Adams about Condorcet’s Plan, see C. F. Adams (ed.), The Life and Works of John Adams [with a Life of the Author], 10 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1856), vol. vi, p. 252. Cf. Rosenblum, ‘Condorcet as constitutional draftsman’, 202–3.

Conclusion: the human odyssey

In Condorcet’s growing disenchantment with the gilded, sclerotic order of the ancien r´egime, and in the arrangements that he advocated in an astonishingly wide range of contexts for France’s translation to modernity, we can detect a rich, intricately woven synthesis of the great Enlightenment narratives of reason, tolerance, humanity and hope. His deeply pragmatic vision of a regenerated civil order, in which the long-neglected conditions of the pact of association would be reinstated in formal constitutional terms in accordance with the needs, rights and aspirations of a rapidly mutating society marks him out from the generality of eighteenth-century French political thinkers. The last of the second generation of philosophes, Condorcet belonged to a new breed of social planners and political scientists, of policy-makers conscious of the potential power of political arithmetic as an instrument of efficient and enlightened governmental administration and rational forward planning, and for whom the sole purpose of the pact of association was the advancement of public happiness. To this end, he made a unique historical contribution to our understanding of what constitutes the public realm, collective liberty and what ordinary citizens can legitimately hold in common in terms of political public space. Condorcet was certainly an egalitarian, but it would be misleading to regard him as a precursor of socialism. In his numerous blueprints for managing a difficult present, and a probability-assured, but by no means risk-free, future, property remains sacrosanct, taxation is not progressive, freedom of commerce and international trade is defended unreservedly, and if the citizen has the right to resist oppression, that right was in his view best exerted through the legalities of an agreed constitution before the ultimate right to insurrection could be invoked. The inauguration of modernity did not necessarily imply for Condorcet the violent overthrow of public order, although as an elected deputy he was obliged to witness from within the heart of revolutionary government a blood-letting that was 277

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to threaten the very foundations of public order throughout Europe. He wished to engineer the downfall of tyrants, and to encourage everywhere the desacralisation of monarchy, but for him power could never be legitimised, or justice served, by the blade of the guillotine. He thus deplored the advent of a Terror which cast a malevolent shadow over the ideals of 1789, and darkened the dawn of the First Republic, though he would never accept that the darkness was anything but a passing phase, a ‘storm’. Condorcet’s mathematically driven pragmatism, and his clear-sighted understanding of what could, and could not, be achieved, has not always served his reputation well. His solutions often took the form of a calculation of compromises between the imperatives of his political conscience and a recognition of the hard realities to be confronted whenever power is brokered. His gradualist approach to reform, particularly in the context of colonial slavery, the criminal code, feudal privilege and civil rights are all examples of areas in which Condorcet is charged with ambivalence, and even betrayal of principle, by some of his modern critics.1 He preferred change to be implemented slowly, cautiously and rationally if it was to be meaningful and lasting. He thought long-term, and to see his conviction that reform and progress were not always for tomorrow as a stain on his political reputation is to make a harsh judgement. Condorcet’s diagnosis of the flaws in the civil order, and his prescriptions for their cure, were on the contrary profoundly moral, and informed by an ineradicable faith in, and understanding of, the moral nature of the political process. The release of men and women from the prison of ignorance, poverty, superstition, prejudice, error and the constraints of self-interest required an essentially moral understanding of the purpose of the polity. Morality was for Condorcet an uncompromisingly secular matter, far removed from the artificial hegemony of religious dogma, and it provided his strategies for reform with their ideological centre of gravity. Condorcet was as much an exponent of moral science as he was of social science, and the two aspects of his thought cannot easily be separated, or even fully understood, in isolation from each other. His interest in the essentially moral nature of the war against the enemies of progress becomes clearly apparent in the Discours de r´eception he gave to the Academy on assuming his seat.2 Further interesting evidence of the moral direction in which his political thinking was moving in the early 1780s can also be found in the fragment of an early 1 2

On Condorcet’s political inconsistency and the hiatus between principles and policies in his thought, see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, pp. 206–9. See Baker, ‘Condorcet’s notes’. In fact, traces of the new moral orientation are evident in a manuscript fragment dating probably from around 1772, BIF Condorcet MS 855(1), ff. 1–11, 13–38.

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draft of the introductory chapter of the Esquisse3 where he announced his intention to chart man’s intellectual and moral journey through history, and make a projection of the next stage of that journey into the world of the generations to come. Like Voltaire, Condorcet distrusted systems, and unsurprisingly it is difficult to position his political writings neatly within the compass of a generic school or movement. Turgot was much admired as a model of enlightened statesmanship, but in the end Condorcet was nobody’s political disciple. As Coutel has rightly pointed out, his politics cannot be reduced to a simple catechism,4 and this is probably why in later hagiographies of the Revolution his work and achievements, impervious to easy categorisation, are still underestimated. The fact that he is still emerging from the shadowy margins of great political discourse might be taken as evidence of ideological incoherence5 and lightness of theoretical weight. It is certainly true to say that theoretical issues were for Condorcet representations of practical problems whose solution lay in their being translated into projets de loi. Ideas were to be given life as constitutional realities rather than as philosophical propositions. His mission was about ways actually to transform the world, and in this the principles for political action, as opposed to political reflection, which underpin his analysis are clear, and they are frequently reiterated as realisable objectives in the formulation of policy: equality, universality, indivisibility, accountability, consent, secularisation, perfectibility, tolerance, usefulness and above all reason: ‘Nations which are truly free are governed by reason alone’ (x: 386). As Condorcet made clear in the essay on constitutional law that he issued in November 1792, De la nature des pouvoirs dans une nation libre (x: 589–613), these organising points of reference represented the political distillation of the values of the Enlightenment, and their elucidation and promulgation lay behind the activities of the Soci´et´e de 1789 (x: 69–76).6 Of these, the notion of rights, their public declaration and constitutional protection, is really the hub around which Condorcet’s political universe revolves, and few of his essays do not return to the need to enshrine rights as the centrepiece of any reformed civil order. He knew, however, that rights had little meaning without an accompanying recognition on the part of the state to recognise in law the existence and inviolability of those 3 4 5 6

BIF Condorcet MS 865, f. 219. See Baker’s comments, Condorcet, pp. 354, 476 n. 12. Coutel, Condorcet, p. 31. On other aspects of the unifying features of Condorcet’s thought, see K. M. Baker,‘L’Unit´e de la pens´ee de Condorcet’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 515–24. See Groethuysen, Philosophie, p. 96; Alengry, Condorcet, p. 839.

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rights. Rights co-existed, moreover, with responsibilities collectively and individually, and it was his awareness of the vital importance of this that led Condorcet to give so much emphasis to the effective engagement of the citizens in the processes by which they were governed. It was only by means of this engagement that the subject could become a citizen in the sense of being a participating agent in the exercise of the state’s sovereign authority. The metamorphosis of subjects into citizens had always collided with the paradox, illuminated though not resolved by Rousseau’s great Legislator who, in order to change others, must somehow first have been changed himself. Condorcet addressed the paradox directly in 1791 in the fourth M´emoire sur l’instruction publique in the context of an understanding of the Republic as the common property of all, in which the achievement of true political liberty was made conditional upon the achievement of public enlightenment. Enlightenment would thus become a strategic programme for government action in its own right in the form of legislative strategies for a public education system seamlessly linked to broader strategies of constitutional reform. In Condorcet’s educational proposals for legislation the Republic would accept the duty to provide a civic apprenticeship to enable the individual to engage in the process of government, and to assume the responsibilities that this implied, thereby resolving the Lycurgian–Rousseauist paradox.7 It was precisely because of its failure to address effectively the issue of civic participation that the 1791 constitution had failed in Condorcet’s eyes. Conversely, much of the originality of his own Projet de constitution franc¸aise is to be found in the proposals to diminish the political distance between rulers and ruled, that embody specific, practical provisions for realisable modes of civic interaction with the National Assembly.8 These proposals were all predicated on the establishment of a national system of public education that would create the conditions in which the spirit of citizenship could flourish, and the lifeblood of the polity be thereby reinvigorated. Condorcet’s thinking on the processes and policies involved in the modernisation of both the state and the political mentality of its citizens crystallised as a profession of faith in human progress and perfectibility, and here we get to the heart of Condorcet’s commitment to the Revolution and to republicanism. Perfectibility for Condorcet, while being a sure guarantee of progress, did not connote providentialism, predestination or determinism. There is nothing chimerical about Condorcet’s version of utopia in 7 8

On this point, see also the Eloge de m. Franklin (iii: 383). Cf. Coutel, Condorcet, pp. 5–6. See Jaume, Le Discours jacobin, p. 310.

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the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse.9 It assumed its characteristically secular, concrete meaning in Condorcet’s work in terms of the rational application of the energies of the human mind. The creation of social and political conditions favourable to the release of those energies was crucial to the art of enlightened political management, and was for Condorcet central to the responsibilities of legislators as they sought to ensure the triumph of truth over error. Truth, however, was an ever-changing commodity, and this had implications that were as important for the world of politics as they were for the world of science. Part of Condorcet’s originality was to recognise this in his urgent insistence on the fact that constitutions too were always in a state of becoming, and that legal provision for their fluid evolution through time must always be in place. Management of the legacy of the political past was for him always co-terminous with the management of the political future. The logic of perfectibility sustained Condorcet’s optimism (vi: 578–9) and reinforced that unprecedented confidence in the human enterprise which illuminates the Esquisse so brightly. This treatise represents the most comprehensive elaboration of Condorcet’s understanding of the dynamics of historical change. The tortuous navigation of nine ´epoques takes the reader from the primitive past of human socialisation, the birth of literacy, the rise and fall of the scientific enlightenment of Greece to that of Renaissance Europe, and to the challenges and achievements of the post-Cartesian world. Condorcet’s account of the achievements of the nine ´epoques culminating in the triumphant birth of the first French Republic offers us an epic account of displacement, change and movement, a ‘narrative of progress’,10 though subject to certain provisos: But is this not only on the condition that we exert all our strength? And do we not need to study carefully in the history of the human spirit what obstacles are still to be feared, and the means we have to overcome them, so that the happiness promised [by the Revolution] can be bought at a lower price, so that [the Revolution] can spread further and more rapidly, and be more all-embracing in its effects. (vi: 23–4)

In the tenth ´epoque, ‘Des progr`es futurs de l’esprit humain’ (On the future progress of the human mind), three of these obstacles are identified: the problem of political inequality between nations, the problem of social and economic inequality between classes and the problem of natural inequalities between individuals. With regard to the first problem, Condorcet explored 9 10

Baczko refers to Condorcet’s ‘utopie anti-utopique’, Lumi`eres de l’utopie, p. 192. The notion of narrative in Condorcet’s account of progress has been explored briefly by F. Palmeri, ‘Ferguson, Condorcet and Enlightenment narratives of progress’, SVEC 303 (1992), 462–3.

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the evidence for an assumption that the distance travelled by European nations could also be travelled by others still in the grip of autocratic servitude. Could it be that nature dictates an inexorable state of inequality between peoples, condemning some to eternal darkness and political stasis, and blessing others with a capacity for improvement? On the second point, among the civilised nations, were class inequalities, exacerbated by the initial move from nature to the civil order, a natural, inherent characteristic of sociability, or were they a consequence of the imperfections of the ‘social art’, and therefore manageable? On the third point, was perfectionnement at the individual level even achievable? ‘In answering these three questions, we will find in past experience, and by observing the progress made so far by science and civilisation, by an analysis of the onward march of the human mind and of its intellectual development, the strongest reasons for believing that nature has placed no limits on our hopes and expectations’ (vi: 238). Condorcet stressed repeatedly the historical and symbolic importance of the French Revolution as a beacon of light holding back the darkness that might still engulf the men and women of the tenth ´epoque. The achievement of the Revolution in France, building on the effects of the political earthquake that had already shaken the world of tyrants in 1776 in the form of the successful insurrection of the American colonists, convinced him that other, less fortunate, nations would soon be able to accept the invitation to the voyage into a future of light too (vi: 241). Colonisers and missionaries would be replaced by men interested only in spreading useful knowledge essential to happiness, in making former slaves aware of their true interests and their rights, and encouraging everywhere a fanaticism only for truth. The pace of progress in their case might be uneven, and accompanied by ‘storms’, but it would be certain (vi: 241–2). The unenlightened world outside Europe and America would thus benefit from having a path already cleared and well marked, and would be spared the painful process of trial and error that Europeans have had to endure. No nation would be left stranded on the wilder shores of its past, or becalmed in an imperfect present: So the moment will come when the sun will shine only on a planet of free men, knowing only reason as their master, where tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid, hypocritical accomplices will exist only in history and on the stage, where our interest in them will be confined to grief for their victims and dupes, to the maintenance of a vigilance, born of horror at their excesses, that will stand us in good stead, and to learning how to recognise and smother beneath the weight of reason the first signs of superstition and tyranny, should they ever dare to reappear. (vi: 244)

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In surveying the ‘storms’ which could potentially cause havoc, the mind of the public administrator and revolutionary legislator takes precedence over that of the philosophe. As we have seen, navigating a safe route towards modernity was for Condorcet essentially a matter for strategic planners, rather than philosophers, and in the tenth ´epoque the invitation to the voyage avoids the speculative excesses of more conventional utopic discourse. Condorcet accepted that the natural causes of inequality might well be in the last resort ineradicable, but he insisted that the impact of this on the everyday life of the citizen could at least be controlled, and its destabilising effects mitigated, in an astonishingly broad range of contexts which included far-sighted draft bills relating to civil rights, the slave trade, public health initiatives, canal-building, the grain trade, public works, social insurance, pension schemes, the redeployment of capital and taxation reform: ‘and we will still owe these measures to the application of the calculus’ (vi: 248).11 In all this, Condorcet’s application of the calculus of probabilities to social engineering remains central to the armoury of weapons that he put at the disposal of modern governments. The intellectual lineage of the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse reaches back to the Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a` la probabilit´e des d´ecisions rendues a` la pluralit´e des voix, and other works relating to probability theory, in ways that have yet to be fully explored, and has only recently even been recognised, thanks to the work of social scientists like McLean, Urken and others, and economic historians like Rothschild. With Condorcet the mathematical physicist, the political theorist, the economist, the exponent of actuarial science, the defender of rights and the founding theorist of positivism cannot be separated. His startlingly original extension of the arithmetical mechanisms of the calculus of probabilities to social planning and to social choice, creating thereby a ‘science of society’, and harnessing science to human needs, represents what is arguably his most significant contribution to modernity. Only through the application of the calculus could the full potential of the sciences be fully realised in the service of man. The sciences would otherwise be virtually useless to the advancement of the human enterprise: ‘crude and limited, due to a lack of instruments fine enough to discern ephemeral truths, and machines capable of reaching to the depths of the mine where some of their riches are hidden’ (vi: 260). It is through the filter of probability theory as set out in the 1785 Essai sur l’application de l’analyse, and its extended application 11

For other examples, see D. G. Troyanski, ‘Condorcet et l’id´ee d’assurance vieillesse’; A. Tzonis, ‘Un M´emoire sur les hˆopitaux de Condorcet’, Dix-huiti`eme si`ecle 9 (1977), 109–14; R. Niklaus, ‘Id´ealisme philosophique dans les Cinq m´emoires sur l’instruction publique’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 262–8; Greenbaum, ‘Health care and hospital building’.

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in the 1788 Essai sur la constitution et la fonction des assembl´ees provinciales, that the tenth ´epoque of the Esquisse has to be read and understood. That Condorcet’s view of the next stage in man’s great journey was anchored to a hard-nosed specificity is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the case he presents in the Esquisse for educational reform. In the Esquisse his comments on education and public enlightenment underline the fact that the ‘march of the human spirit’ was about the welfare of the individual citizen, and they address directly the key third question posed at the start of the tenth ´epoque concerning individual perfectibility (vi: 248). Here in the crucial context of universal public instruction Condorcet unveils the prospect of a regenerated society, illustrating once more the degree to which his probability-based projection of man’s future happiness was an expression of his confidence in the resilience of the individual human spirit, and in the infinite potential of the human mind and of human inventiveness. The Esquisse is for this reason not only about an intellectual journey through landscapes of historical change, but also about a moral journey into the self, a quest for knowledge, but also self-knowledge and self-liberation, empowering the individual to assume control over his condition, and break for ever the chains of mental servitude, to be no longer the dupe of those common errors which torment our lives with superstitious fears and illusory hopes, to defend ourselves against prejudice just with the power of our reason, and to escape at last from the conjuring-tricks of a quackery which ensnares our money, our health and our freedom of opinion and conscience while claiming to enrich us, cure us and save us. (vi: 249)

Universal education, science, enlightenment, moral renewal, freedom, equality and happiness interlock in the Esquisse, and underpin the organising principle behind a treatise built upon the assumption that man had an open future into which he could advance with confidence, but not complacency. Once universal education of the ‘whole mass of the people’ had been achieved, enabling men to govern themselves ‘by their own enlightenment’, natural inequalities between individuals would be compensated by a revolution in social relationships in which knowledge would no longer be a divisive prerogative of the few facilitating oppression of the many.12 12

F. Vial’s Condorcet et l’´education d´emocratique (Paris: P. Delaplane, 1902; repr. 1970) still offers an authoritative account of Condorcet’s educational philosophy, but see also C. de Boni, ‘The French Revolution and education: the contribution of Condorcet’, Ponte 43 (1987), 96–112; C. Duce, ‘Condorcet on education’, British Journal of Educational Studies 19 (1971), 272–82; F. P. Hager, ‘State and education in Helv´etius, Rousseau and Condorcet: a comparison’, SVEC 303 (1992), 269–71; Kintzler, Condorcet.

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Natural inequalities could not, and maybe should not, be abolished, but the exercise of power and its relationship to the pact of association could be better understood, and its civil inconveniences better accommodated, by an educated citizenry. It might then be possible for that first, crucially fateful, contract between rulers and ruled to be renegotiated fruitfully on the basis of a full awareness of rights and responsibilities, and a better-informed recognition of the imperatives of mutual self-interest: From this must come a true equality since any difference in enlightenment or talent can no longer raise a barrier between men whose feelings, ideas and language allow them to understand each other; some might feel the need to be educated by others, but not to be led by them; some might wish to confer responsibility for ruling them on the more enlightened, but not forced to surrender that responsibility confidently but blindly. This is when higher enlightenment becomes an advantage even to those who do not share it, when it exists to serve them and not to work against them. (vi: 249–50)

Condorcet described in the Fragment sur l’Atlantide, ou efforts combin´es de l’esp`ece humaine pour le progr`es des sciences the way in which the fruits of scientific progress, together with the reorganisation of humanity’s intellectual resources, would lay the foundations of ‘a society of men devoted exclusively to the quest for truth’ (vi: 597). In the Esquisse the emphasis is upon the process of becoming, on the voyage rather than the destination. Only in the Fragment does the City of Light itself, through whose gates in Condorcet’s view man would one day pass, become fully visible.13 The prospect of a new Atlantis opened up limitless, though not cloudless, horizons. Condorcet understood with prescient clarity the possible price to be paid for Utopia. He noted, for example, the crisis for future generations of exponential population growth, combined with the pressures on society arising from an extension of the human lifespan, and the double-edged consequences of an increasingly sophisticated technology. Science promised secular salvation, but its very success raised the spectre of ‘a march really in the reverse direction, or at least a sort of fluctuation between good and evil’ (vi: 257).14 13

14

On the argumentation of the Fragment, see C. Coutel, ‘Utopie et perfectibilit´e: significations de l’Atlantide chez Condorcet’, in Chouillet and Cr´epel (eds.), Condorcet, pp. 99–107; K. M. Baker, ‘Scientism, elitism and liberalism: the case of Condorcet’, SVEC 55 (1967), 129–66. On the nature of Condorcet’s utopianism in a wider context, see P. Villani, ‘De l’ˆage d’or a` l’Atlantide. Mythe de l’origine et utopie chez Condorcet’, in D. Armogathe et al. (eds.), Analyses et r´eflexions sur Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progr`es de l’esprit humain: l’histoire (Paris: Ellipses, 1989), pp. 35–44. See D. R. Lachterman, ‘The conquest of nature and the ambivalence of man in the French Enlightenment: reflections on Condorcet’s Fragment sur l’Atlantide’, in D. C. Mell et al. (eds.), Man, God and Nature in the Enlightenment (East Lansing, MI: Boydell and Brewer, 1988), pp. 37–47.

286

Condorcet and Modernity

In the end, Condorcet concluded that the prospect of an abrupt reversal, or even termination of the human odyssey was too remote a factor to take seriously into account, and thoughts of dystopia were dispelled with an assumption, informed by the calculation of probabilities, that scientific advances would ultimately enable man to balance the equation of everexpanding demands and ever-diminishing resources. Human advancement was ultimately limited only by ‘the lifespan of the planet and of nature’. The pace was variable, the route open to detours, but progress was assured provided that the laws of Newtonian cosmology continued to apply, and that the powers of the analogous mental universe remained unaffected by any ‘general upheaval or changes which would not permit the human race to survive, apply the same intellectual skills, and find the same resources at its disposal’ (vi: 13). The qualification is crucial, and it rescues Condorcet’s predictions from accusations of unconditional optimism and naivety.15 Nevertheless, the reassurances of the Esquisse with regard to man’s ability to meet the challenge of survival are reinforced explicitly, and at length, in the Fragment where he reaffirms the dependability of the unending scientific enterprise as a reliable indicator of probability with regard to a successful outcome to man’s engagement with his future (vi: 626). In confronting even the hypothesis of a closed future, and of an interruption to the odyssey, Condorcet would always reassert the liberating promise of an open destination, although the requirement that the moral distance travelled by the human mind should coincide with the distance travelled in other contexts was always to be an indispensable condition of that promise. In that requirement he located much of the responsibility of contemporaries towards the generations yet to be born: But, even if we postulate that the journey might one day come to an end, there is nothing to be feared from that, with regard to either human happiness or unending human perfectibility, if we assume that before that time comes the progress of reason has kept pace with the progress of science and art, and that the ridiculous prejudices of superstition have stopped covering morality with strictures that corrupt and degrade it, instead of refining and elevating it. Men will then know that they have obligations with regard to those not yet born; these [obligations] do not consist in giving them life but in giving them happiness; their purpose is the well-being of man and of the society in which men live, of the families to which they belong, and not in the infantile notion of filling the earth with useless, unhappy people. So there could be a limit to the total amount of food and resources available, and 15

On this point, see P. Malville, ‘Le malheur dans l’histoire’, in Armogathe et al. (eds.), Analyses et r´eflexions, pp. 82–93; L. Loy, ‘Condorcet contre l’optimisme. De la combinatoire historique au m´eliorisme politique’, in Cr´epel and Gilain (eds.), Condorcet math´ematicien, pp. 288–96.

Conclusion: the human odyssey

287

consequently [there might have to be a limit] to population size if this untimely destruction of the lives of people in the future, so contrary to nature and to the prosperity of society, is not to arise. (vi: 257–8)

Like all odysseys, Condorcet’s evoked the conventional elements of a dramatic Manichean narrative in which a heroic humanity was locked in a struggle for modernity of mythic dimensions against powerful adversaries. With the help of science, and the application of scientific principles in the form of social arithmetic, man would eventually reach a safe harbour, and the final act of the drama would see the emergence of a new order, ‘freed from all these chains, protected from the imperial sway of chance, as well as from the enemies of progress, marching resolutely along the path to truth and happiness’. Contemplation of the grandeur of that historic voyage towards modernity might well have filled Condorcet’s mind in the last dark weeks before the Revolution he venerated would tragically and brutally claim his life. The secular Elysium16 to which he invites us in the poignant concluding words of the Esquisse seems in the end to offer a personal sanctuary from the unspeakable rigours of his own bleak circumstances in those last, desperate days of his life, ‘[presenting] to the philosopher a sight which consoles him for the errors, crimes and injustices which still stain the earth, and of which he is often the victim’ (vi: 275–6). It was a poignancy that Condorcet’s first editors did not fail to note in the Avertissement des ´editeurs de l’an III: ‘This is the only homage to a wise man who, with the blade of death hanging over him, calmly considered how life for his fellow men could be improved; it is the only consolation that those of us who were the objects of his affection, and knew how virtuous he was, can have’ (vi: 819). 16

Condorcet’s ‘isles of the blest’ are further explored by R. Winegarten, ‘Visions of Elysium. Condorcet: liberal or revolutionary?’, Encounter 71 (1990), 24–33.

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Name index

Abad, R. 227, 237 Adams, John 24, 25 Aelders, Etta Palme d’ 162 Aiguillon, Emmanuel Armand, duc d’ 14 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’ 11, 12, 21, 23, 94, 108 Alengry, F. 33 Antoine, R. 150 Argenson, Ren´e-Louis de Voyer, marquis d’ 198 Bacon, Francis 95, 97, 100, 113 Baczko, B. 147 Badinter, E. and R. 28, 161 Bailly, Sylvain 23 Baker, K. M. 18, 19, 23, 26, 33, 37, 46, 72, 74, 97, 107, 174, 232 Barbier, A. A. 43 Bar`ere, Bertrand 268 Barnave, Antoine Pierre 157 Barry, B. 190 Bayes, Thomas 108 Bayes’s Theorem 108 Beccaria, Cesare 2, 66, 181 Benot, Y. 35, 142 Berkeley, George, Bishop 100 Bernoulli, Daniel 108 B´ezout, Etienne 11 Black, D. 190 Bolingbroke, Henry, Lord 100 Bonaparte, Napoleon 158 Borda, Jean-Charles 209, 211 Bossut, Charles 21 Bouguer, Pierre 94 Brissot de Warville, Jean-Pierre 26, 31, 34, 35, 41, 146, 155, 263, 267 Discours sur la n´ecessit´e 152 Burke, Edmund 3 Reflections on the Revolution 31 Cabanis, Georges 13, 43 Cahen, L. 14, 28, 33

Calas, Jean 77, 121, 185 Callens, S. 7 Calonne, Charles-Alexandre de 26, 197 Chabot, Franc¸ois 35 denounces Condorcet 42, 276 Chalaye, S. 147 Choiseul, Etienne-Franc¸ois, duc de 14 Choiseul-Gouffier, Marie-Gabriel, comte de 23, 95 Chouillet, A.-M. 33 Clavi`ere, Etienne 42 Clugny, Jean Etienne Bernard de 18, 19, 230 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 20, 179–82, 228 Collins, A. 100 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie 39 Condillac, Etienne de 12, 74, 99 Trait´e des sensations 99 Condorcet, Antoine de 10 Condorcet, Eliza 25, 28, 43 Condorcet, Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat de birth 10 death 42–3 denounced as a Girondin 35 early years in Paris 11–13 education 10–11 election to Acad´emie des sciences 22 election to Comit´e de constitution 40 election to Comit´e des Vingt-Quatre 29 election to Legislative Assembly 33 election to National Convention 38 influence declines 39 journalist, activities as 26–7, 31 political profile, beginnings of 27–8 presidency of the Comit´e d’instruction publique 31 presidency of the National Assembly 35 recognition 4–9 service under Turgot 18, 20–2 testament 43 Treasury, appointment to 30 vision of future 2–4, 277–87

301

302

Name index

Condorcet, Sophie 13, 15, 24, 31, 42, 43, 160, 183, 184 Coutel, C. 4, 33, 264, 279 Danton, Georges-Jacques 37, 39, 263 Descartes, Ren´e 93, 94, 95, 98, 100 Diderot, Denis 17, 159 Dippel, H. 74, 217, 228 Du Chˆatelet, Emilie 163, 165 Dupaty, Charles 2, 183–6 M´emoire justificatif 183 trial of three peasants 183–6 Enville, mme d’ 37, 38 Etallonde, Jacques-Marie, chevalier d’ 15, 49, 121 Faur´e, C. 170 Fermat, Pierre de 107 Fleury, Andr´e-Hercule, cardinal de 125 Fouchy, Grandjean de 11, 15 Franklin, Benjamin 12, 23, 101, 139 Frederick II 190, 195, 259 Fricheau, C. 159, 161 Galileo 95 Garat, J.-D. 43, 105 Gaudry, Marie-Magdaleine 10 Gouges, Olympe de 162 Gouy, Louis-Marthe 153 Gr´egoire, Henri, abb´e 146, 158 M´emoire en faveur des gens de couleur 154 Grouchy, Sophie de, see Condorcet, Sophie de Guilhaumou, J. 33 Helv´etius, Claude-Adrien 74, 241–8 H´erault de Seychelles, Marie-Jean 276 Holbach, Paul Thiry, baron de 14, 122, 159 Des Femmes 159 Hume, David 13, 97, 100, 107 Treatise on Human Nature 100, 107 Huygens, Christian 108 Jaume, L. 217 Jaur`es, J. 31 Jefferson, Thomas 1, 23, 24, 53, 139, 140 Kaplan, S. 227 Kavanagh, T. M. 208 K´eroudon, Georges Girault de 11 La Barre, Jean-Franc¸ois, chevalier de 1, 16, 77, 121, 185 La Fayette, Marie-Joseph, marquis de 24, 27, 37 Champ de Mars massacre 37

D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen 53 protestants 122 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis 11, 108 Lalande, Joseph-J´erˆome 11 Lally, Thomas-Arthur, comte de 49, 185, 223 Lambert, Anne-Th´er`ese, marquise de 165 La Place, Pierre-Simon, marquis de 108–9 M´emoire sur la probabilit´e 109 M´emoire sur la probabilit´e des causes par les ´ev´enements 108 Recherches sur l’int´egration des ´equations diff´erentielles 108 Lauriol, C. 122 Lebrun-Tondu, P.-H. 42 Lespinasse, Julie de 12, 13, 22 Locke, John 97–100, 106 Essay concerning Human Understanding 98 Lom´enie de Brienne, Etienne de 26, 197 Louis XIV 123, 124, 125 Louis XV 14, 123, 124, 227, 229 Louis XVI 14, 32, 33, 35, 36, 80, 137, 219, 229, 253 authority wanes 36, 37, 254 Condorcet’s disenchantment with 90–1, 260–4 execution 265 flight to Varennes 86 oath of allegiance 80, 259 trial of 40–1, 42, 80, 264–6 McLean, I. S. and Hewitt, F. 4, 23, 25, 52, 105, 190, 207, 208, 209, 210 McLean, I. S. and Urken, A. B. 209 Machault d’Arnouville, Jean-Baptiste de 227 Madison, James 24, 25, 53, 80 Mailhe, Jean 40 Maillet du Pan, Jacques 29 Malesherbes, Chr´etien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de 26, 183 Malouet, Pierre-Victoire 29, 143 M´emoire sur l’esclavage 142 Malthus, Thomas 169 Marie-Antoinette 36, 38 Maupeou, Nicolas de 14, 16 Maurepas, Jean-Fr´ed´eric Ph´elypeau, comte de 14 Mazzei, Filippo 24, 53 Recherches historiques sur les Etats-Unis 24 M´ericourt, Th´eroigne de 162 Michelet, Jules 28 Mill, John Stuart 163 Miller, J. 227 Mirabeau, Honor´e-Gabriel de Riquetti, comte de 12, 30 Mirabeau, Victor de Riquetti, marquis de 198 Miromesnil, Armand-Thomas Hue de 14

Name index Moivre, Abraham de 108 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de 76, 158, 177, 180, 181, 206–12, 268, 272, 273 Montmorency, M. de 27 Morris, Governor 24, 25 Mounier, Jean-Joseph 223 Necker, Jacques 3, 19, 28, 219, 228, 240, 241–8, 253 La L´egislation et le commerce des grains 19, 228, 232, 243 Newton, Isaac 94, 97, 106, 286 Niklaus, R. 170 Nollet, Jean-Antoine, abb´e de 11 Nora, P. 33 O’Connor, General Arthur 44 Og´e, Vincent 156 Paine, Thomas 3, 12, 24, 26, 31, 267, 268 Rights of Man 31 Pascal, Blaise 100, 107, 108, 118, 120 Poniatowski, Stanislas 53 Popkin, R. 155 Poulain de La Barre, Franc¸ois 160 Price, Richard 3, 108 Quesnay, Franc¸ois 228, 230 Rabaut de Saint-Etienne, Jean-Paul 137 Robespierre, Franc¸ois-Maximilien-Joseph de 3, 28, 39, 42, 157, 273, 275 attacked by Condorcet 35 hostility to Condorcet 35–6, 38 quarrel over portrait 36 Roland, Marie-Jeanne Philipon, mme de 13 Rosenblum, V. 56, 65 Rothschild, E. 207, 226, 231, 283 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4, 93, 135, 159, 174, 208, 209, 268, 280

303

Sabatier, Antoine 17, 122 Schandeler, J.-P. 5 Schapiro, J. S. 47 Si´ey`es, Emmanuel-Joseph 3, 27, 29, 30, 39, 267, 268, 273 Qu’est-ce que le tiers ´etat? 204 Sirven, Pierre-Paul 121 Smith, Adam 12, 13, 100, 226, 233 Sommerlad, F. and McLean, I. S. 104 Sonthonax, L´eger-F´elicit´e 157 Suard, Am´elie 13, 17 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice 29 Terray, Joseph-Marie 14, 228, 229 Todhunter, I. 107 Toussaint L’Ouverture, Pierre Dominique 157, 158 Trudaine de Montigny, Daniel-Charles 12, 20, 21 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 1, 3, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 49, 74, 101, 105, 123, 140, 198, 201, 221, 227–32, 233, 245, 248 as model legislator 17–18, 279 Lettre au Contrˆoleur-G´en´eral sur le commerce des grains 230 see also under Condorcet (service under Turgot) Urken, A. B. 283 Vergennes, Charles Gravier, comte de 14 Vergniaud, Pierre-Victurnien 13 Voltaire, Franc¸ois-Marie Arouet de 1, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 27, 77, 94, 119, 121, 158, 163, 164, 180, 181, 279 Waldstrom, Charles-Bernard 158 Williams, Reverend David 268 Wollstonecraft, Mary 161

Subject index

abolitionism 142, 143, 145–7, 150–1, 158 American War of Independence 23, 51, 251–3 anarchy 255, 256 Condorcet’s views on 36, 173, 257–8 aristocracy 76 Condorcet loses support 37 birth control 168–9 bread riots 256 canals 20–1 Cercle Social 31, 67, 89 Champ de Mars massacre 37 church 119–21 see also under intolerance civil order 69–80 army, role of 77–8 class divisions 85–6 community, early form of 70–1 custom 74 history of 69–75 justification 52 moral nature of 176 natural man 69, 70, 71, 74 natural order 69–71, 74 need for 74 pact of association 70–3, 79, 130, 176, 200 self-interest 74 sensation, origins in 47, 70, 74, 118, 172, 177 clergy 32, 35, 76 Civil Constitution of 138 Condorcet’s anti-clericalism 122 Club des Impartiaux 29 Club des Jacobins 29, 30 Club Massiac 140, 141, 143, 153, 155, 156 clubs and salons 13–14 Code Noir 145 Comit´e de constitution 268, 272, 274 Comit´e du salut public 42 Constituent Assembly 253, 257, 276 reform of 253–7

constitution of 1791 33, 80, 259, 261, 266, 272, 280 of 1793 268, 275 Condorcet’s project of reform 268–71 Polish constitution 53 right to change constitutions 64, 67 corv´ee 19, 21, 26, 155 Declaration of Rights 28, 53, 253 see also under National Convention despotism 75–80, 223 of the English 75–6 of the mob 78–80 divorce 131, 168 economics 225–49 Edict of Nantes 123, 131 education 166–7, 284–5 report on 32 of women 166–7 emancipation, see under slave trade, women’s rights e´migr´es 34–5, 257, 270 England, see under despotism, franchise, progress, science enlightenment 100–3, 174, 175, 280 epistemology, see under Locke equality 46, 62–3, 65, 83 Estates-General, meeting of 25, 26, 27, 52, 67, 72, 75, 140, 153, 187, 195, 196, 213, 219, 221, 222, 264 Condorcet’s reservations 221–3 feminism 163–6, 170 Feuillants 29 franchise 197, 199–206 English system 202 property qualification 199–201 reform of 64 theory of voting 198, 206–10 see also under women’s rights

304

Subject index freedom 51, 59–61, 65 freedom of the press 255 free trade 229, 243 general will 82, 173, 208 Girondins 13, 30, 32, 35, 39, 41, 265, 273 dismissal of ministers 36 purge of 42, 276 gradualism 33, 135, 146–7, 148–52 grain trade 226–7 Grain War 19–20 Ha¨ıti, see under Saint-Domingue happiness 52 see also under public happiness hunting, laws on 193–4 intolerance 129, 137 judiciary 77 reform of 187–8 juries 188 jury theorem 188–90 justice 46 reform of judicial procedures 187–90, 191–4 law, origins of 173 natural law 172–3 reform of 178–94 marriage 168 mean values, theory of 111 minorities 82 monarchy 88–9 defence of 86–8 disenchantment with 259–60 English monarchy 75, 202 position of Louis XVI 36 Montagnards 30, 35, 39, 272, 273 Condorcet votes with 41 National Assembly 213–14, 215–16 National Convention 258 Projet de D´eclaration des droits naturels 273 nature, see under civil order (natural order) oppression, right to resist 67 parlements 14, 16, 185, 222 Caen Parlement 186 Paris Parlement 16, 21, 124, 183 Rouen Parlement 14 perfectibility 281–7 physiocrats 74, 201, 230

305

planters 139, 141, 155 representation of 154 probability theory 16, 22–3, 104–12, 283–4 doctrine of chance 107 history of 107–9 see also under social arithmetic progress 92 scientific progress 92–6 see also under Condorcet (vision of the future) protestants 92 Condorcet’s family links 123 defence of 124–37 see also under La Fayette public good 112 public happiness 256 see also under happiness public health 20 public opinion 173–4 public order 147–9 see also under anarchy republicanism 260–1 Condorcet’s conversion to 14, 31, 32–3 see also under Condorcet Revolution 27–8, 37 Condorcet’s early role 28 defender of 34, 282 rights 31, 49–50, 54–5, 56, 65, 68 declaration, importance of 48, 52, 53–4, 174, 176, 254, 269, 279 D´eclaration des droits (1789), rights defined in 55–64, 65, 66 D´eclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, links with 67, 155 enlightenment, links with 46, 48 origins 45–7 political rights 47 Projet de d´eclaration des droits naturels 50, 55, 64 rights and the civil order 48 rights and duties 54 rights and the law 49, 57–64, 178 rights and property 61–2 rights and representation 57 roads 20 Saint-Domingue 26, 139, 156, 157 see also under planters, slave trade science, see under England, probability theory, progress, social arithmetic slave trade 139–58 Convention decree of emancipation 157 see also under abolitionism, planters, Saint-Domingue social arithmetic 2, 23, 97, 100, 104–5

306

Subject index

social guarantee 66–7 social mathematics, see under social arithmetic social pact, see under civil order (pact of association) Soci´et´e de 1789 29, 279 Soci´et´e des Amis des Noirs 25, 27, 140, 141, 152–5 membership 153 sovereignty 80–6 of the people 84

taxation 30, 78 salt-tax 179–82 see also under corv´ee tyranny 80 unicameralism 24 universal language 96 utilitarianism 74, 167 women’s rights 22, 158–71