Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler; d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The Aristocrat who lost his life through the People to whom he had devoted it—this was Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
Born in 1743, at Ribemont, a town in Picardy, Condorcet belonged to a noble family highly connected both with the Church and the Army.
His father was a captain of cavalry and designed his son for the same aristocratic post. But he died when the child was four; and a devout mother vowed him to the Virgin and au blanc,
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JEAN-ANTOINE-NICOLAS DE CARITAT, MARQUIS DE CONDORCET.
From an Engraving by Lemort, after the Bust by St. Aubin.
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dressed him in white frocks like a little girl, so that the luckless Caritat could neither run nor jump as nature bade him, and owed to his mother’s piety a weakness in his limbs from which he never recovered.
His first schoolmasters were the Jesuits. What is one to make of the fact that they had as virgin soil the intellects of at least four of their mightiest and fiercest opponents—Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, and Condorcet?
At eleven, Caritat was under their supervision, with his home influence pressing him to their way of thought, with an uncle a bishop, and Cardinal de Bernis a relative. At thirteen, he was sent to Rheims, to be more completely under their control. At fifteen, he came up to Paris, and began at the College of Navarre to study mathematics and to think for himself; and when once a mind has begun to do that, nothing can stop it.
His treatment of a particularly difficult theme brought him the acquaintance of d’Alembert, who first saw in the boy, who was to be to him as a son, a kindred genius, a future colleague at the Academy. Caritat was only seventeen when he introduced himself to his other great friend, Turgot, writing him a ‘Letter on Justice and Virtue’ which already proclaimed this college student a thinker of a high order. An ‘Essay on the Integral{270} Calculus,’ which he presented at the Academy of Sciences when he was twenty-two, attracted to him the flattering notice of the famous mathematician, Lagrange. There was in it not only the ardour of youth and a buoyant fecundity of idea, but a profundity of learning not at all youthful.
Caritat was now no longer a student, but still lodging in Paris. In 1769, when he was twenty-six, he entered the Academy of Sciences in opposition to the wishes of all his relatives, who never pardoned him, he said, for not becoming a captain of cavalry.
The man who ought, by the solemn unwritten laws of the family compact, to have been a heavy dragoon, was soon acknowledged as one of the finest original thinkers of his age, the friend of d’Alembert and of Voltaire, and something yet greater than a thinker—greater than any great man’s friend—a practical reformer and a generous lover of human-kind.
The character of Condorcet—he who with Turgot has been said to have been ‘the highest intellectual and moral personality of his century’—has in it much not only infinitely good, but also infinitely attractive. Perfectly simple and modest, somewhat shy in the social world which he himself defined as ‘dissipation without pleasure, vanity without motive, and idleness without rest,’ among{271} his intimates no one could have been more gay, witty, and natural. Though his acquaintances might find him cold, his friends knew well what a tender and generous soul shone in the thoughtful eyes. If he listened to a tale of sorrow coldly and critically almost, while others were commiserating the unfortunate, Condorcet was remedying the misfortune. Though he never could profess affection, he knew better than any man how to prove it; and if all his principles were stern, all his deeds were gentle. So quiet in his tastes that he had no use for riches, wholly without the arrogance and the blindness which distinguished his class, he had its every merit and not one of its faults; and he well deserved the title Voltaire gave him—‘The man of the old chivalry and the old virtue.’
In 1770, when he was twenty-seven, he went with d’Alembert to stay at Ferney. Voltaire was delighted with him. Here was a man after his own heart, with his own hatred of oppression and fanaticism and his own zeal for humanity, with better chances of serving it! The Patriarch did not add, as he might have added, that this young Condorcet had a thousand virtues a Voltaire could never compass—that he was pure in life and hated a lie; that he was wholly without jealousy, without vanity, and without{272} meanness. Caritat soon worshipped at the feet of a master of whom his friendship with d’Alembert had already proclaimed him a pupil, while Voltaire enlisted his guest’s quiet, practical help for the rehabilitation of the Chevalier de la Barre, for the revision of the process of d’étallonde; and honoured him by becoming his editor and assistant in the critical ‘Commentary on Pascal’ which Condorcet produced later.
Because his humility was the humility of a just mind and his modesty of the kind that scorns to cringe, Condorcet’s admiration for his host did not blind him to his literary faults or make him meanly spare them; and while it was Condorcet who spoke in warm eulogy of his ‘dear and illustrious chief’ as working not for his glory but for his cause, it was also Condorcet who deprecated that production of Voltaire’s senility, ‘Irène.’ Sometimes the three friends would talk over the future of France—the two older men who had done much to mould that future and the young man who had much to do. ‘You will see great days,’ old Voltaire wrote afterwards to his guest; ‘you will make them.’
The visit lasted a fortnight, and was a liberal education indeed.
Three years later, in 1773, Condorcet received the crown of his success as a mathematician and{273} was made Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, where he wrote éloges of the savants who had belonged to it, with the noble motto for ever in his mind, ‘One owes to the dead only what is useful to the living—justice and truth.’
So far, Condorcet had been a mathematician alone. Knowledge might free and redeem the world—in time; but the time was long. Beneath that quiet exterior, palpitating through his leisurely, exact studies at the College of Navarre and the Scientific Academy, there throbbed in this man’s breast a vaster and fiercer passion than any passion for learning—the passion for human-kind. Where did young Condorcet come by that ruling idea of his that opened to him a field of labour which he must till all his days, unremittingly, before the night cometh when no man can work—that idea which should steel him to endure, exulting, the cruellest torments of life and death—‘the infinite perfectibility of human nature, the infinite augmentation of human happiness’?
The friend of d’Alembert was Condorcet, the geometrician; the friend of Turgot was Condorcet, the reformer.
In August, 1774, Turgot was made Controller-General. He appointed Condorcet his Inspector of Coinage at a salary of 240l. a year, a payment which Condorcet never accepted.{274}
The pair had work to do, which only they could do, and do together. The vexed subject of Trade in Grain—‘for a moment,’ says Robinet, ‘the whole question of the Revolution lay in this question of Grain’—incited them to fierce battle for what they took to be the cause of freedom against the cause of that well-meaning commonplace, Necker. Condorcet attacked Necker with a rare, fierce malignity, and wrote two stinging pamphlets on the subject which made him many enemies.
But there were other reforms waiting the doing, less in importance then and greater in importance now. To curtail the advantages of the privileged classes, to open for commerce the rivers of central France, to abolish the slave trade, Taille and Corvée, Vingtième and Gabelle, and to make the nobility share in the taxation—these were the tasks into which this noble put his life and his soul. That every reform meant loss to himself, that all his interests were vested in the privileges he sought to destroy, that every human tie drew him towards the old order, makes his work for the new, more excellent than that of his fellow-workers. They had nothing to gain; Condorcet had everything to lose.
In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot f?t chassé, même{275} envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way, for her own ruin and that of France. Condorcet renounced his Inspectorship of Coinage; he would not serve under another master. Turgot’s death in 1781 was the first great sorrow of his life. His other friend, d’Alembert, won for him a seat in the French Academy in 1782; and in the next year he too died. Condorcet tended him to the last, with that quiet and generous devotion which says little and does much. D’Alembert left to him the task of providing annuities for two old servants, and Condorcet accepted the obligation as a privilege, and fulfilled it scrupulously in his own poverty and ruin.
He was now not a little lonely. His relatives still resented his choice of a profession; his best friends were dead; the great Master of their party had preceded them. From ‘social duties falsely so called’ Caritat had long ago freed himself. He was three and forty years old, occupied in writing that ‘Life of Turgot’ which is a declaration of his own principles and policy, in contributing to the Encyclop?dia, and in many public labours, when he first met Mademoiselle Sophie de Grouchy.
If the supreme blessing of life be a happy marriage, then Condorcet was a fortunate man indeed. Mademoiselle was full twenty years younger than himself, very girlish in face and{276} figure, with a bright cultivated mind, and a rare capacity for love and tenderness. He found in her what is uncommon even in happy marriages perhaps—his wife was also his friend. From the first she shared his work and his love for his fellow-men, approved of his sacrifices, and was true not only to him, but to his example of unselfish courage and unflinching devotion, to the end of her life.
For the moment—for what a brief moment!—their world looked smiling enough.
Condorcet abandoned himself to his happiness, with the deep passion of a strong man who has never wasted his heart in lighter feelings. For a dowry—so essential to a French marriage—he wholly forgot to stipulate. For the opinion of his friends, who considered a married geometrician as a sort of freak of Nature, he cared nothing; and when they saw his wife, and forgave him, their pardon was as little to him as their blame.
The two settled on the Quai de Conti in a house where Caritat had previously lived with his mother. At that H?tel des Monnaies Sophie held her salon (le foyer de la République, men called it), where she received, with a youthful charm and grace, not only her husband’s French political friends, but also Lord Stormont the English Ambassador, Wilkes, Garrick, Sterne, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Mackintosh, and Adam Smith.{277}
Large and shy, with a little awkwardness even in his manner, it was not Condorcet but his wife who was socially successful. She was the one woman in a thousand who estimated social success at its low, just value, and was great in knowing her husband to be much greater.
Only two years after their marriage, in 1788, Condorcet entered the arena as one of the earliest and most noteworthy of all champions of Women’s Rights. On the ground of their equal intelligence he claimed for them equal privileges with men, and ignored the very suggestion that their bodily weakness and inferiority are reproduced in their minds. He judged, in fact, all women from one woman. No nobler testimony can be borne to the intellect and character of the Marquise de Condorcet than to say that she deserved as an individual what her example made her husband think of her sex.
It is not a little curious to note that Condorcet, though so wholly faithful and happy himself in the relationship, thought the indissolubility of marriage an evil. In later years, he pleaded warmly for the condemnation of mercenary marriages by public opinion, as one of the best means of lessening the inequalities of wealth.
In 1790, the profound happiness of his wedded life was crowned by the birth of his only child, a daughter. Before that, the fierce whirlpool of{278} politics had drawn him into it, and he had addressed the electors of the States-General and appeared publicly as the enemy of sacerdotalism and aristocracy, with all his gospel based on two great principles—the natural rights of man and the mutable nature of the constitutions which govern him. He was made member of the municipality of Paris, and in that, his first public function, flung the gauntlet before his caste and broke for ever with an order of which the smug selfishness was admirably typified by a Farmer-General who said to him, ‘Why alter things? We are very comfortable.’
The fall of the Bastille, the insurrection of October, the journey of the Royal Family to Paris, he had watched with the calm of one who knows that such things must needs be, who realises the necessity of painful means to a glorious end. To the monarchy he was not at first opposed. If the King were but a man! But when in June, 1791, came the ignominious flight to Varennes, Condorcet rose in a fierce, still wrath and proclaimed the necessity for a Republic. ‘The King has freed himself from us, we are freed from him,’ said he. ‘This flight enfranchises us from all our obligations.’
Nearly all the Marquis’s friends broke with him, and he stood alone. Before his ripened views on royalty were fully known, it had been proposed{279} that he should be the tutor of the Dauphin, and to Sophie that she should be the gouvernante. Husband and wife were in different places when the proposals were made; but, though they had never spoken with each other on the subject, they declined the offers almost in the same words. If Condorcet’s friends misunderstood him and parted at the parting of the ways, his wife never did.
In 1791, he was elected member for Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became in quick succession its Secretary and its President. As its President, he presented to it his Educational Scheme, startlingly modern in its demands that education should be free and unsectarian.
By the order of the Assembly, in 1792, there was burnt in Paris an immense number of the brevets and patents of nobility—among them the patent of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet—at the very moment when at the bar of the tribune Condorcet himself demanded that the same measure should be adopted all over France. Not one dissentient voice was raised against the scheme; who, indeed, should dissent from it when a marquis proposed it? A few months later he was elected Member of the National Convention for the Department of Aisne, and the extremist of the Legislative Assembly found himself all too moderate for the Convention.{280}
Then came the trial of the King.
There was never a time when Condorcet could be called either an orator or a leader of men. Though he had written most of its official addresses, he had appeared but little before the Legislative Assembly. Nervousness caused him always to read any speeches he did make, and a delicate voice robbed them of their effectiveness. His deeds and his character earned him a hearing and applause; and sometimes his complete self-devotion and the white heat of his enthusiasm discounted his manner and touched his hearers with something of his own deathless passion. But he was, as d’Alembert said, a volcano covered with snow, and that audience of his, coarse in fibre, mad for excitement, overwrought, uncontrolled, must needs see the mountain in flames, vomiting lava and death.
To be a great orator one must have in a supreme degree the qualities one’s hearers have in a lesser degree. The thoughtful reason and the lofty ideals of Condorcet found little counterpart in the parliaments of the Revolution. A Marat or a Danton for us! Or a Fouquier-Tinville even, drunk with blood, with his wild hair flung back, and his words shaking with passion; but not this noble, with the high courage of his caste, his ‘stoical Roman face,’ his stern truthfulness, his{281} unworldly enthusiasms. Worse than all, Condorcet never was for a cause, but always for a principle; and since he followed no party blindly, he was in turn abused by all.
He proved in his own history that to be a great demagogue it is essential to be without too fine a scrupulousness and the more delicate virtues; that successfully to lead the vulgar the first requisite is not to be too much of a gentleman.
Condorcet, although he had broken with monarchy as a possible form of government for France, had still no personal feeling against the monarch. Firmly convinced of his culpability, he was equally convinced that the Convention was not legally competent to judge its King at all; and proposed that he should be tried by a tribunal chosen by the electors of the Departments of France. But to take the judging of its sovereign from the Convention was to take the prey whose blood he has tasted from the tiger. When the great moment came, Condorcet was at Auteuil; he hastened to Paris, and arrived at the Assembly a few moments before the King.
What a strange contrast was this Marquis—serene in strong purpose, with his ‘just mind justly fixed,’ great in his compassion for his country and not without compassion for his King—to that poor Bourbon, ‘who means well had he any fixed{282} meaning,’ and whom Condorcet himself described in an admirable but rarely quoted description as standing before his judges, ‘uneasy, rather than frightened; courageous, but without dignity.’
On January 15, 1793, to the momentous question if the prisoner at the bar were guilty, Condorcet answered, ‘Yes:’ he had conspired against liberty. On the 17th and 18th the vote was taken on the nature of the punishment to be awarded. Consider the judgment-hall filled with the fierce faces and wild natures of men who, for centuries starved of their liberties, had drunk the first maddening draught of power. Consider that among them this noble alone represented a class they hated worse than they hated royalty itself, that if he had forsworn it, broken with it, denied it, he had still its high bearing, its maddening self-possession and self-control. We vote for death—shall you dare to know better? An Orleans sitteth and speaketh against his own kin; why not a noble, then, who owes him nothing? Condorcet rises in his place and pronounces for exile—the severest penalty in the penal code which is not death. ‘The punishment of death is against my principles, and I shall not vote for it. I propose further that the decision of the Convention shall be ratified by an appeal to the people.’
On Saturday, January 19, 1793, the execution{283} of the King having been fixed for the Monday, Condorcet implored his colleagues to neutralise the fatal effect of their decision on the other European Powers by abolishing the punishment of death altogether. With the Terror then struggling to the birth in her wild breast, one of the greatest children of his country begged for the suppression of that penalty as the most ‘efficacious way of perfecting human-kind in destroying that leaning to ferocity which has long dishonoured it. Punishments which admit of correction and repentance are the only ones fit for regenerated humanity.’
In the roar of that fierce ............