Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, better known as the Marquis de Condorcet, was a prominent member of The Enlightenment, described in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary as “a period in Europe in the 18th century when many writers and thinkers began to question established beliefs, e.g. in the authority of kings or of the Church, in favour of reason and scientific proof. The idea developed that everyone was of equal value and had equal rights.”. Condorcet was a mathematician, philosopher, politician and much more. A disciple of D’Alembert, he published his first mathematical work, an essay entitled Du calcul intégral (On Integral Calculus) in 1765, when he was only 22 years old, which earned him the respect of his contemporaries. A member of the Académie des Sciences in 1769 (aged 25), he became its perpetual secretary a few years later. His prestige was such that D’Alembert, his master, commissioned him many articles for the Encyclopédie (the grandmother of today’s Wikipedia). But Condorcet did not stop at mathematics. Educated in religious institutions, he was familiar with this type of teaching and not only became an atheist but was one of the greatest advocates of secularism in education during the years of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. He also championed the feminist cause and women’s right to vote. Although he played a prominent role during the French Revolution of 1789, his pacifist and rational attitude and his political honesty earned him the hostility of Robespierre’s supporters, and on 3 October 1793 a warrant was issued for his arrest. Although he managed to escape and remain in hiding, he was captured and imprisoned on 25 March 1794, and four days later he was found dead in his cell. Although the cause of his death is unclear, many maintain that he committed suicide. His complete works were first published in 1804 in 21 volumes and then reprinted in 1847-49.
Condorcet’s prose could be tremendously ironic. A passage that illustrates the above, and which would probably not be well regarded in today’s politically correct eyes, is the one I transcribe below, taken from his essay Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (“Reflections on Negro Slavery“), written in 1777 and published in 1781. Condorcet’s way of explaining that slavery is wrong, a masterpiece of irony, seems to me to be a stroke of genius:
“I accept that there are profound politicians who claim that the 22 million whites or almost whites that France feeds cannot be happy if 300,000 or 400,000 blacks do not fall under the lash two thousand leagues from here. They claim that this is the only way to have sugar and indigo at a good price. So when Louis X the Quarrelsome restored freedom to the serfs in his dominions, it was claimed that, since they would be free to work or do nothing, all the land would lie fallow. The same politicians even now say that negro slavery is not so pitiable as it is pretended to be, that it is a pleasant enough thing for an African to be torn from his country, crowded into a ship, in which he is so well off that they are obliged to leave him no free movement for fear he will commit suicide; to be then put up for sale like a beast of burden, and condemned, he and his offspring, to toil, humiliation, and beaten with oxen nerves. Well, the whites have no right to grant that benefit to the blacks, and that is enough!”.
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