I’ve been reading a lot of Condorcet, lately, in dribs and drabs. He was not a great writer, or particularly entertaining, but what he had to say is worth paying attention to. He was primarily a mathematician and scientist, who found himself continuously caught up in political issues (for which he would ultimately pay with his life, in Robespierre’s terror), and he was a shy, socially inept man with no talent for cultivating celebrity. Condorcet is a much more important figure than most think. I have elsewhere complained that the actual balance of intellectual influences in the Enlightenment and the period of the American and French revolutions is probably not much like the image of it that most of us have inherited from textbooks, or old chestnuts like Rousseau and Revolution. The small attention paid to Condorcet illustrates this. Recently there has been a modest growth of interest in him because of his writings on the mathematical theory of voting, and its relevance to modern ballot reform. In France, he is better known as a theorist of public education. But, still the interest is relatively small, considering the degree of his actual influence.
There is no doubt as to his relevance to the intellectual zeitgeist of the era. He was the intimately close friend and disciple of Turgot. D’Alembert was his patron in youth. He shared digs with Voltaire (whose mathematics he corrected). He met with Adam Smith (whose Theory of Moral Sentiments was translated by Condorcet’s wife, Sophie). He knew Benjamin Franklin reasonably well, and his good friend La Rochefoucauld worked as Franklin’s secretary. He was friend of Filippo Mazzei. He was a close friend and collaborator with Tom Paine. Most significantly, he was an intimate friend of Thomas Jefferson, with whom he shared a long and detailed philosophical correspondence. While he played no part in the first stages of the French Revolution, he was elected to the Legislative Assembly, and then the National Convention. He headed the committee to draft the Girondin Constitution of 1793, working under the direct influence of Jefferson. It included a Bill of Rights and proposed universal suffrage, for which he was denounced by Marat and Robespierre’s Jacobins, who by then had pretty much hijacked the Revolution. Unlike most modern interpreters of these events, Condorcet was bright enough to perceive that the Jacobins represented a more Conservative ideology, and denounced the Jacobin “counter-constitution” as a return to aristocratic rule. Declared an outlaw and hunted down by the Terror, he died under uncertain circumstances in a prison cell. His wife Sophie, with whom he had shared a profoundly equal intellectual partnership, and an intense romantic love, lived on to bravely oppose Napoleon.
Condorcet is now, as I mentioned, studied primarily for his contribution to electoral theory. But he was also a vigorous champion of women’s rights, and wrote extensively against slavery. What I didn’t know, and perhaps has not been noticed at all, is that he is the first person to explicitly advocate gay rights. In his notes on Voltaire, Condorcet specifically argues that consensual sexual relations between adult males should not be against any law “because they violate no-ones rights”. As far as I know, he is the first person to put this idea down on paper, and it is all the more remarkable in that it is unlikely that he was gay. Have historians of gay liberation noticed this? It should be a celebrated moment in history.
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