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CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. II.
Essay 3: Condorcet
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
New York: The MacMillan Company
1905
CONDORCET.
Condorcet's peculiar position and characteristics 163
Birth, instruction, and early sensibility 166
Friendship with Voltaire and with Turgot 170, 171
Compared with these two great men 172
Currents of French opinion and circumstance in 1774 177
Condorcet's principles drawn from two sources 180
His view of the two English Revolutions 181
His life up to the convocation of the States-General 183
Energetic interest in the elections 189
Want of prevision 191
His participation in political activity down to the
end of 1792 193
Chosen one of the secretaries of the Legislative Assembly 198
Elected to the Convention 200
Resistance to the Jacobins, proscription, and death 201
Condorcet's tenacious interest in human welfare 210
Two currents of thought in France at the middle of
the eighteenth century 215
Quesnay and the Physiocrats 216
Montesquieu 219
Turgot completed Montesquieu's historical conception 222
Kant's idea of a Universal or Cosmo-Political History 226
Condorcet fuses the conceptions of the two previous
sets of thinkers 229
Account of his _Tableau des Progrès_ 230
Omits to consider history of moral improvement 233
And misinterprets the religious element 234
His view of Mahometanism 238
Of Protestantism 240
And of philosophic propagandism 241
Various acute remarks in his sketch 243
His boundless hopes for the future 244
Three directions which our anticipations may take:--
(1) International equality 246
(2) Internal equality 247
(3) Substantial perfecting of nature and society 248
Natural view of the formation of character 252
Central idea of all his aspirations 253
CONDORCET.
Of the illustrious thinkers and writers who for two generations had been
actively scattering the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcet
survived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Those
who had sown the wind were no more; he only was left to see the reaping
of the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it.
Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvétius, had vanished, but
Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopædia and sat in the Convention;
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in
due season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer in
the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of
any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of
the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly
classed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured first
in the Legislative Assembly, and then in the Convention. Now, as a rule,
the political parties that have most admired the Convention have had
least sympathy with the Economists, and the historians who are most
favourable to Turgot and his followers, are usually most hostile to the
actions and associations of the great revolutionary chamber successively
swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robespierre. Between the two,
Condorcet's name has been allowed to lie hidden for the most part in a
certain obscurity, or else has been covered with those taunts and
innuendoes, which partisans are wont to lavish on men of whom they do
not know exactly whether they are with or against them.
Generally the men of the Revolution are criticised in blocks and
sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under any of these
received schools. He was an Economist, but he was something more; for
the most characteristic article in his creed was a passionate belief in
the infinite perfectibility of human nature. He was more of a Girondin
than a Jacobin, yet he did not always act, any more than he always
thought, with the Girondins, and he did not fall when they fell, but was
proscribed by a decree specially levelled at himself. Isolation of this
kind is assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the
coldness with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; it flowed from
some marked singularities both of character and opinion which are of the
highest interest, if we consider the position of the man and the lustre
of that ever-memorable time. 'Condorcet,' said D'Alembert, 'is a volcano
covered with snow.' Said another, less picturesquely: 'He is a sheep in
a passion.' 'You may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation
to his person,' wrote Madame Roland, 'that it is a subtle essence soaked
in cotton.' The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these, of warm
impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only shows that he of
whom they were spoken belonged to the class of natures which may be
called non-conducting. They are not effective, because without this
effluence of power and feeling from within, the hearer or onlooker is
stirred by no sympathetic thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because
consciousness of the inequality between expression and meaning, between
the influence intended and the impression conveyed, must be as
tormenting as to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If
to be of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the really
greatest characters, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at least it
is no proper object of blame, for it is constantly the companion of
lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps unfortunate that Condorcet
should have permitted himself to be drawn into a position where his want
of that magical quality by which even Marat could gain the sympathies of
men, should be so conspicuously made visible. The character of
Condorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers nothing to the
theatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willing
to weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science and
social speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments,
his noble solicitude for human wellbeing, his eager and resolute belief
in its indefinite expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by
a destiny that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical
days.
I.
Until the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of Condorcet's
life were as little externally disturbed or specially remarkable as
those of any other geometer and thinker of the time. He was born at a
small town in Picardy, in the year 1743. His father was a cavalry
officer, but as he died when his son was only three years old, he could
have exerted no influence upon the future philosopher, save such as
comes of transmission through blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle,
but there is no record of any intercourse between them. His mother was a
devout and trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin,
and for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl, by
way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of a vile
world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage in a state of
educational and political subjection, which prevents the growth of a
large intelligence made healthy and energetic by knowledge and by
activity, we may expect pious extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was
weakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous
clothing; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him
from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. His
earliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers,
were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That these
adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order had
acquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almost
exclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shield
their persons from proscription and their creed from hatred, is a
remarkable instance how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have a
monopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out
of harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spirit
of the time. The Jesuits were the great official instructors of France
for the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1764 the order was
thrust forth from the country, and they left behind them an army of the
bitterest enemies that Christianity has ever had. To do them justice,
they were destroyed by weapons which they had themselves supplied. The
intelligence which they had developed and sharpened, turned inevitably
against the incurable faults in their own system. They were admirable
teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the Jesuits at Rheims,
was able when he was only fifteen years old to go through such
performances in analysis as to win especial applause from illustrious
judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut. It was impossible, however, for
Jesuits, as it has ever been for all enemies of movement, to constrain
within prescribed limits the activity which has once been effectively
stirred. Mathematics has always been in the eyes of the Church a
harmless branch of knowledge, but the mental energy that mathematics
first touched is sure to turn itself by and by to more complex and
dangerous subjects in the scientific hierarchy.
At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn to problems
beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to solve. 'For thirty
years,' he wrote in 1790, 'I have hardly ever passed a single day
without meditating on the political sciences.'[1] Thus, when only
seventeen, when the ardour of even the choicest spirits is usually most
purely intellectual, moral and social feeling was rising in Condorcet to
that supremacy which it afterwards attained in him to so admirable a
degree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was already
beginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditions
of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound
sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early
enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of
syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape
into which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational
entrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous
pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him.[2]
To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creature
revolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceived
that the character which does not shrink from associating its own joy
with the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to
the finest impressions of humanity.
It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was unable to
satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the specialist, but felt the
necessity of placing social aims at the head and front of his life, and
of subordinating to them all other pursuits. That he values knowledge
only as a means to social action, is one of the highest titles to our
esteem that any philosopher can have. Such a temper of mind has
penetrated no man more fully than Condorcet, though there are other
thinkers to whom time and chance have been more favourable in making
that temper permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his
words, after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:
'We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean to
apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the future
labouring only for the _gloriole_, after flattering oneself for a while
that one was working for the public weal.' It is true that a geometer,
too, works for the public weal; but the process is tardier, and we may
well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness
of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet's
undisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labour
for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction
conventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to their
books. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to be
most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the
alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to
stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strength
of justice in society. It would have been in one sense more fortunate
for him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember the
contention of his latter days and the catastrophe which brought them to
a frightful close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who can
think it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literary
watch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in revolution. In
measuring other men of science--as his two volumes of _Éloges_
abundantly show--one cannot help being struck by the eagerness with
which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, any signal
of anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be better
worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social
spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the
martyrdom which was to consummate it. 'You are very happy,' he once
wrote to Turgot, 'in your passion for the public good and your power to
satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to
that of study.'[3]
In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with
the Academy, to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardoned
him for not being a captain of horse as his father had been before him.
About the same time, or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a
kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply
impressible. In company with D'Alembert he went to Ferney and saw
Voltaire.[4] To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has
never been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is
true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great
ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority,
pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked,
throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of a
powerful organisation and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place
before men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as
authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was
that Voltaire's place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, and
indebted to no system nor organisation for its maintenance. Again, there
have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more
permanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and
elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most part
laboured for the generation that followed them, and won comparatively
slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire during his life enjoyed
to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but
something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even
something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of
renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his
time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the
moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and
women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has
approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was
immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary
circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an
unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where
that art is more highly prized than anywhere else; he was the most
brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme
passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the
learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his
never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which
lacks vigour and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter,
and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all
institutions--the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and
popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and
injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and
absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or
injustice whose case was once brought under his eye.
It is not difficult to perceive the fascination which Voltaire, with
this character and this unrivalled splendour of public position, would
have for a man like Condorcet. He conceived the warmest attachment to
Voltaire, and Voltaire in turn the highest respect for him. Their
correspondence (1770-1778) is perhaps as interesting as any letters of
that period that we possess: Voltaire is always bright, playful, and
affectionate; Condorcet more declamatory and less graceful, but full of
reverence and loyalty for his 'dear and illustrious' master, and of his
own peculiar eagerness for good causes and animosity against the
defenders of evil ones. Condorcet was younger than the patriarch of
Ferney by nearly half a century, but this did not prevent him from loyal
remonstrances on more than one occasion against conduct on Voltaire's
part in this matter or that, which he held to be unworthy of his
character and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to print
in the _Mercure_ a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleen
placed Montesquieu below D'Aguesseau. 'My attachment,' he says, 'bids me
say what will be best for you, and not what might please you most. If I
loved you less, I should not have the courage to thwart you. I am aware
of your grievances against Montesquieu; it is worthy of you to forget
them.' There was perhaps as much moral courage in doing this as in
defying the Men of the Mountain in the days of the Terror. It dispels
some false impressions of Voltaire's supposed intolerance of criticism,
to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. He
showed himself worthy of such courageous conduct. 'One sees things ill,'
he writes, 'when one sees them from too far off. After all, we ought
never to blush to go to school if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeat
my acknowledgments to you.'[5] Condorcet did not conceive that either to
be blind to a man's errors or to compromise them is to prove yourself
his friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns,
and he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his
intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of
direct personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it is
about another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the writer
himself.
Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his correspondence with
Turgot. What Turgot loved in Condorcet was his 'simplicity of
character.'[6] Turgot was almost as much less vivacious than Condorcet,
as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quite
distinct types of character, but this may be a condition of the most
perfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is most
conscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, and
sure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow by
being watchfully held under the control of reason; whose ideas are no
less vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and ordered
train; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses or
crimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besetting
infirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this.
Whatever he wished he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of the
epoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe something
theological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters the
distant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and at
every mention of false opinion or evil-doing a sombre and angry shadow
seems to fall upon the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine of
the infinite perfectibility of human nature, and the correspondingly
infinite augmentation of human happiness; but Condorcet's
ever-smouldering impetuosity would be content with nothing less than the
arrival of at least a considerable instalment of this infinite quantity
now and instantly. He went so far as to insist that by and by men would
acquire the art of prolonging their lives for several generations,
instead of being confined within the fatal span of threescore years and
ten. He was impatient of any frittering away of life in scruple,
tremors, and hesitations. 'For the most part,' he once wrote to Turgot,
'people abounding in scruple are not fit for great things: a Christian
will throw away in subduing the darts of the flesh the time which he
might have employed on things of use to mankind; or he will lack courage
to rise against a tyrant for fear of his judgment being too hastily
formed.'[7] Turgot's reply may illustrate the difference between the two
men: 'No virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses with
justice; and I think no more of the people who do great things--as you
say--at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they produce
great beauties of imagination without regularity. I know that excessive
exactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and of
action; but there is a mean in everything. It has never been a question
in our controversy of a capuchin who throws away his time in quenching
the darts of the flesh (though by the way, in the total of time thrown
away the term that expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts is
most likely far greater); no more is it a question of a fool who is
afraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rash
judgment.'[8]
This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not among
Condorcet's gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of excess,
alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured the
motives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christian
was one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh; anybody who
declined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavish
scrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller, to whom
the especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, at
each step that it takes, it inflicts upon Moses.[9] Well, this temper
is not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance with
rich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we are
particularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatient
humour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolent
reluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers have been so
conscientious as he was, in the labour that he bestowed upon subjects
which he held to be worthy of deliberate scrutiny and consideration. His
defect was in finding too few of such subjects, and in having too many
foregone conclusions. Turgot and Montesquieu are perhaps the only two
eminent men in France during this part of the century, of whom the same
defect might not be alleged. Again, Condorcet's impatience of underlying
temperament did not prevent him from filling his compositions with
solid, sober, and profound reflections, the products of grave and
sustained meditation upon an experience, much of which must have been
severely trying and repugnant to a man of his constitution. While
recognising this trait, then, let us not overstate either it or its
consequences.
The main currents of opinion and circumstance in France, when Condorcet
came to take his place among her workers, are now well understood. The
third quarter of the century was just closing. Lewis XV. died in 1774;
and though his death was of little intrinsic consequence, except as the
removal of every corrupt heart is of consequence, it is justly taken to
mark the date of the beginning of the French Revolution. It was the
accidental shifting of position which served to disclose that the
existing system was smitten with a mortal paralysis. It is often said
that what destroyed the French kingdom was despotism. A sounder
explanation discovers the causes less in despotism than in
anarchy--anarchy in every department where it could be most ruinous. No
substantial reconstruction was possible, because all the evils came from
the sinister interests of the nobles, the clergy, or the financiers; and
these classes, informally bound together against the common weal, were
too strong for either the sovereign or the ablest minister to thrust
them aside. The material condition of France was one of supreme
embarrassment and disorder, only curable by remedies which the political
and social condition of the country made it impossible to employ.
This would explain why a change of some sort was inevitable. But why was
the change which actually took place in that direction rather than
another? Why did not France sink under her economical disorders, as
greater empires than France had done? Why, instead of sinking and
falling asunder, did the French people advance with a singleness of
impulse unknown before in their history to their own deliverance? How
was it that they overthrew the system that was crushing them, and purged
themselves with fire and sword of those who administered and maintained
it, defying the hopes of the nation; and then successfully encountered
the giant's task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, and
reconstructing the fabric of their own society with the other? The
answer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition of
France. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenth
century, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in
the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the
twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation of
Catholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but corruption
remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror
and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what
inspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possible
new, was the spiritual preparation that had been in swift progress since
the third decade of the century. The forms and methods of this
preparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath its
influence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and the
schools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots,
all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief
in human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. They
impregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is true
that we find Voltaire complaining towards the close of his days, of the
century being satiated and weary, _un siècle dégouté_, not knowing well
what it wanted. 'The public,' he said, 'has been eighty years at table,
and now it drinks a little bad cognac at the end of its meal.'[10] In
literature and art this was true; going deeper than these, the public
was eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and more
fruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keen
appetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, men had now risen
up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after
social righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, by
this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionate
conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. That
destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously
confined in the hands of castes and official churches, which
systematically and of their very constitution bury justice under the
sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition.
Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from two
sources. He was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to the
Church, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaire
flourished, the destructive movement only reached theology, and
Voltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the original
impulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economical
writers and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look upon
societies with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence of
institutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible of
modification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural,
therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movement
which set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of Lewis
XV. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire; he
was hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot; and he was urgent,
heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own. In a word, he was
the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spirit
existed in geometers and Encyclopædists; at once too reasonable and too
little reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; too
rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the
other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the
deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and
complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is of
ruinous potency.
Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can
hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great
revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and therefore
he hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no
religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific
knowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty in
unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by
bloodshed. 'Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France;
observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two
revolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened. We see on the
one side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that they
are fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country with
blood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell; on the
other, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacific
wisdom the freest constitution in the world.'[11] It is not wonderful
that his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved English
Whigs, but hated English Republicans; who could forgive an aristocratic
faction grasping power for their order, but who could not sympathise
with a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smote in the
name of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power with
noble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in the
heart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never known
since, simply because this ruler knew nothing about _principes_ or the
Rights of Man. However, Nemesis comes. By and by Condorcet found himself
writing a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior in
lawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August.[12]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Oeuv. de Condorcet_ (12 vols. 1847-49), ix. 489.
[2] _Ib._ i. 220.
[3] _Oeuv._ i. 201. See Turgot's wise reply, p. 202.
[4] Sept. 1770. Voltaire's _Corr._ vol. lxxi. p. 147.
[5] _Oeuv._ i. 41.
[6] _Oeuv. de Turgot_, ii. 817.
[7] _Oeuv._ i. 228.
[8] _Ib._ i. 232.
[9] _Oeuv._ i. 29.
[10] Letters to Condorcet (1774). _Oeuv._ i. 35.
[11] _Éloge de Franklin_, iii. 422.
[12] _Réflexions sur la Rév. de 1688, et sur celle du 10 Août_, xii.
197.
II.
The course of events after 1774 is in its larger features well known to
every reader. Turgot, after a month of office at the Admiralty, was in
August made Controller-General of Finance. With his accession to power,
the reforming ideas of the century became practical. He nominated
Condorcet to be Inspector of Coinage, an offer which Condorcet
deprecated in these words: 'It is said of you in certain quarters that
money costs you nothing when there is any question of obliging your
friends. I should be bitterly ashamed of giving any semblance of
foundation to these absurd speeches. I pray you, do nothing for me just
now. Though not rich, I am not pressed for money. Entrust to me some
important task--the reduction of measures for instance; then wait till
my labours have really earned some reward.'[13] In this patriotic spirit
he undertook, along with two other eminent men of science, the task of
examining certain projects for canals which engaged the attention of the
minister. 'People will tell you,' he wrote, 'that I have got an office
worth two hundred and forty pounds. Utterly untrue. We undertook it out
of friendship for M. Turgot; but we refused the payment that was
offered.'[14] We may profitably contrast this devotion to the public
interest with the rapacity of the clergy and nobles, who drove Turgot
from office because he talked of taxing them like their neighbours, and
declined to glut their insatiable craving for place and plunder.
Turgot was dismissed (May 1776), and presently Necker was installed in
his place. Condorcet had defended with much vigour and some asperity
the policy of free internal trade in corn against Necker, who was for
the maintenance of the restrictions on commercial intercourse between
the different provinces of the kingdom. Consequently, when the new
minister came into office, Condorcet wrote to Maurepas resigning his
post. 'I have,' he said, 'declared too decidedly what I think about both
M. Necker and his works, to be able to keep any place that depends upon
him.'[15] This was not the first taste that Maurepas had had of
Condorcet's resolute self-respect. The Duke de la Vrillière, one of the
most scandalous persons of the century, was an honorary member of the
Academy, and he was the brother-in-law of Maurepas. It was expected from
the perpetual secretary that he should compose a eulogy upon the
occasion of his death, and Condorcet was warned by friends, who seldom
reflect that a man above the common quality owes something more to
himself than mere prudence, not to irritate the powerful minister by a
slight upon his relation. He was inflexible. 'Would you rather have me
persecuted,' he asked, 'for a wrong than for something just and moral?
Think, too, that they will pardon my silence much more readily than they
would pardon my words, for my mind is fixed not to betray the
truth.'[16]
In 1782 Condorcet was elected into the Academy. His competitor was
Bailly, over whom he had a majority of one. The true contest lay less
between the two candidates than between D'Alembert and Buffon, who on
this occasion are said to have fought one of the greatest battles in the
not peaceful history of the Academy, for mighty anger burns even in
celestial minds. D'Alembert is said to have exclaimed, we may hope with
some exaggeration, that he was better pleased at winning that victory
than he would have been to find out the squaring of the circle.[17]
Destiny, which had so pitiful a doom in store for the two candidates of
that day, soon closed D'Alembert's share in these struggles of the
learned and in all others. He died in the following year, and by his
last act testified to his trust in the generous character of Condorcet.
Having by the benevolence of a lifetime left himself on his deathbed
without resources, he confided to his friend's care two old and faithful
servants, for whom he was unable to make provision. This charge the
philosopher accepted cheerfully, and fulfilled to the end with pious
scrupulosity. The affection between Condorcet and D'Alembert had been
warm and close as that of some famous pairs of antiquity; a natural
attraction of character had clothed community of pursuit and interest
with the grace of the highest kind of friendship. Even Condorcet's too
declamatory manner only adds a certain dignity to the pathetic passage
with which he closes the noble _éloge_ on his lost friend.[18] Voltaire
had been dead these five years, and Turgot, too, was gone. Society
offered the survivor no recompense. He found the great world tiresome
and frivolous, and he described its pursuits in phrases that are still
too faithful to the fact, as 'dissipation without pleasure, vanity
without meaning, and idleness without repose.' It was perhaps to soften
the oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that in 1786 Condorcet
married.[19]
Events were now very close at hand, in comparison with which even the
most critical private transactions of Condorcet's life were pale and
insignificant. In the tranquil seasons of history, when the steady
currents of circumstance bear men along noiseless, the importance of the
relations which we contract seems superlative; in times of storm and
social wreck these petty fortunes and private chances are engulfed and
lost to sight. The ferment was now rapidly rising to its intensest
height, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to the
burning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly ten
years ago he expressed his preference for political activity over the
meditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into the
Revolution with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixed
and unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that the
great ones whom he had known, the immortal Voltaire, the lofty-souled
Turgot, had been carried away by the unkind gods, before their eyes had
seen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign of
justice on the earth. The gods after all were kinder than he knew, for
they veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of '89 the spectres of '93.
History might possibly miss most of its striking episodes, if every
actor could know the work to which he was putting his hand; and even
Condorcet's faith might have wavered if he had known that between him
and the fulfilment of his desires there was to intrude a long and
deplorable period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision which
then presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime; and just as,
when some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it is
a consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship,
so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring social
dreams, the wreck of the aspiration is not total nor unrecompensed. The
next best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to have
sought them.
During the winter of '88 and '89, while all France was astir with
elections and preparation for elections for that meeting of the
States-General, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a long
night of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could best serve
the movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides of
their duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of the
subjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which his
countrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery and
the slave trade.[20] With a terseness and force not always
characteristic of his writings, he appealed to the electors, while they
were reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forget
the half-million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefully
torn away from them, and whose need of justice was more urgent than
their own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingenious
protest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingo
plantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly inconsistent
it was with every idea of a free and popular chamber that men should sit
as representatives of others who had never chosen them, and that they
should invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the same
instant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed natural
rights of mankind in their own country.[21]
Of general precepts he never tired; one series of them followed another.
To us many of them may seem commonplace; but we should reflect that the
election of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, and
Condorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of political
inexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because he
will follow his own interest and not yours; but at the same time beware
of choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, because
you need ability quite as much as you need probity. Do not choose a man
who has ever taken sides against the liberty of any portion of mankind;
nor one whose principles were never known until he found out that he
wanted your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat of
soul; because what you want is not heat but force, not violence but
steadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man's actions from the
accidents of his life; for one may be the enemy or the victim of a
tyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by a
candidate's solicitations; but at the same time, make allowance for the
existing effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decided
opinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation; those
who are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity for
the misfortunes of the people; those who speak of justice and reason, to
those who speak of political interests and of the prosperity of
commerce. Distrust those who appeal to sentiment in matters that can be
decided by reason; prefer light to eloquence; and pass over those who
declare themselves ready to die for liberty, in favour of those who know
in what liberty consists.[22]
In another piece he drew up a list of the rights which the nation had a
claim to have recognised, such as the right to make laws, to exact
responsibility from the ministers of the crown, to the protection of
personal liberty, and to the legal administration of justice by regular
judges. These rights he declared it to be the first duty of the Assembly
to draw up in a chart that should be the chief corner-stone of the new
constitution. Then he proceeded to define the various tasks to which he
conceived that the legislative body should forthwith apply itself; and
among them, be it said, is no mention of any of those projects of
confiscation which circumstances so speedily forced upon the Assembly
when it met.[23]
Though many of these precepts designed to guide the electors in their
choice of men are sagacious and admirable, they smack strongly of that
absolute and abstract spirit which can never become powerful in politics
without danger. It is certain that in the spring of '89, Condorcet held
hereditary monarchy to be most suitable to 'the wealth, the population,
the extent of France, and to the political system of Europe.'[24] Yet
the reasons which he gives for thinking this are not very cogent, and
he can hardly have felt them to be so. It is significant, however, of
the little distance which all the most uncompromising and most
thoughtful revolutionists saw in front of them, that even Condorcet
should, so late as the eve of the assembly of the States-General, have
talked about attachment to the forms of monarchy and respect for the
royal person and prerogative; and should have represented the notion of
the property of the Church undergoing any confiscation, as an invention
of the enemies of freedom.[25] Before the year was out, the property of
the Church had undergone confiscation; before two years had gone he was
an ardent Republican; and in less than twelve months after that he had
voted the guilt of the king.
It is worth while to cite here a still more pointed example of the want
of prevision, so common and so intelligible at that time. Writing in
July 1791, he confutes those who asserted that an established and
limited monarchy was a safeguard against a usurper, whose power is only
limited by his own audacity and address, by pointing out that the extent
of France, its divisions into departments, the separation between the
various branches of the administration, the freedom of the press, the
multitude of the public prints, were all so many insurmountable barriers
against a French Cromwell. 'To anybody who has read with attention the
history of the usurpation of Cromwell, it is clear that a single
newspaper would have been enough to stop his success. It is clear that
if the people of England had known how to read other books beside their
Bible, the hypocritical tyrant, unmasked from his first step, would soon
have ceased to be dangerous.' Again, is the nation to be cajoled by some
ambitious general, gratifying its desire to be an empire-race? 'Is this
what is asked by true friends of liberty, those who only seek that
reason and right should have empire over men? _What provinces, conquered
by a French general, will he despoil to buy our suffrages? Will he
promise our soldiers, as the consuls promised the citizens of Rome, the
pillage of Spain or of Syria?_ No, assuredly; it is because we cannot be
an empire-nation that we shall remain a free nation.'[26] How few years,
alas, between this conclusive reasoning, and the pillage of Italy, the
campaign in Syria, the seizure of Spain!
Condorcet was not a member of the Assembly in whose formation and
composition he had taken so vivid and practical an interest. The first
political functions which he was invited to undertake were those of a
member of the municipality of Paris. In the tremendous drama of which
the scenes were now opening, the Town-hall of Paris was to prove itself
far more truly the centre of movement and action than the Constituent
Assembly. The efforts of the Constituent Assembly to build up were tardy
and ineffectual. The activity of the municipality of Paris in pulling
down was after a time ceaseless, and it was thoroughly successful. The
first mayor was the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet's defeated competitor
at the Academy. With the fall of the Bastille, summary hangings at the
nearest lantern-post, October insurrection of women, and triumphant and
bloody compulsion of king, queen, and Assembly to Paris from Versailles,
the two rivals, now colleagues, must have felt that the contests for
them were indeed no longer academic. The astronomy of the one and the
geometry of the other were for ever done with; and Condorcet's longing
for active political life in preference to mere study was gratified to
the very full.