Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine Caritat, Marquis of

CONDORCET, Marie-Jean-Antoine Caritat, Marquis of. - A student of science and philosophy and a politician, b. at Ribemont in Picardy on 17 Sept. 1741, d. at Bourg-la-Reine on 29 March 1794. He devoted himself to the study of mathematics and at the age of only 27 was admitted to the Academy of Sciences.

He sided with the Encyclopedists (v. ENCICLOPEDIA), whose spirit is revealed in his Lettres d'un théologien (1772) and in his edition of Pascal. In 1782 he became a member of the French Academy. He published the Vie de Turgot in 1786 and the Vie de Voltaire in 1787. Elected a deputy, he proposed a famous Rapport sur l'instruction publique and worked on the Constitution. Having fallen into disfavor with the advent of the Commune, he had to hide but was denounced. Arrested and imprisoned at Bourg-la-Reine, he was found dead in prison. It is not ruled out that he took his own life with poison.

During his time in hiding he composed the plan of a great work that he intended to write. It is the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. In it he sets out to demonstrate that man's perfectibility has no limits and that progress may indeed be slowed, but can never be halted or reversed. He distinguishes ten epochs. After considering how the first men united into peoples, rose from the state of shepherds to that of farmers and then invented writing, he follows the development of the human spirit among the Greeks, witnesses the constitution of the sciences, their progress and their decline, caused principally by the difficulty of multiplying manuscripts and by the negligence of the Romans. The Arabs resumed the march of progress, accelerated by the invention of printing, the enemy of kings and priests. With Descartes, with American independence, with the French Revolution, C. sees the reign of reason prodigiously extended, and contemplates the future, the tenth epoch, to which it is reserved to realize the equality of peoples among themselves, the equality of citizens within each people, and the perfecting of human faculties.

The book, written in beautiful language, is a hymn to reason and it contains many just observations and useful suggestions; but his anti-religious passion spoils it and causes its inspiration, noble in itself, to go astray. The judgments on Christianity, in particular, are unjust to the point of ridicule and reveal an ignorance and a bias that only the atmosphere of those turbulent years can in some way explain. The work is on the Index (decree of 10 Sept. 1827).