17043. (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet) Condorcet’s Advice to His Daughter [written in hiding, 1794] 17044. (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet) Condorcet’s Testament [written in hiding, 1794] 17045. (Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet) Vie de Voltaire, par M. le marquis de Condorcet; suivie des mémoires de Voltaire, écrits par lui-mème.

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.

Leave a Comment