like Condorcet, had no other force than that of disciplined reason and
principle. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in with
oceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention and
irrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments were
loyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises of
this overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell and mere
goodwill does not tell. Exaltation reaches a pitch at which the physical
sensibilities are so quickened as to be supreme over the rest of the
nature; and in these moods it is the man gifted with the physical
quality, as mysterious and indescribable as it is resistless, of a
Marat, to take a bad example, or a Danton, to take a good one, who can
'ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.' Of this quality Condorcet
had nothing. His personal presence inspired a decent respect, but no
strong emotion either of fear or admiration or physical sympathy. His
voice was feeble, his utterance indistinct; and he never got over that
nervous apprehension which the spectacle of large and turbulent crowds
naturally rouses in the student. In a revolution after the manner of
Lord Somers he would have been invaluable. He thoroughly understood his
own principles, and he was a master of the art, so useful in its place
and time and so respectable in all places and times, of considering
political projects point by point with reference to a definite framework
of rational ideas. But this was no time for such an art; this was not a
revolution to be guided by reason, not even reason like Condorcet's,
streaked with jacobinical fibre. The national ideas in which it had
arisen had transformed themselves into tumultuous passion, and from this
into frenzied action.
Every politician of real eminence as a reformer possesses one of three
elements. One class of men is inspired by an intellectual attachment to
certain ideas of justice and right reason: another is moved by a deep
pity for the hard lot of the mass of every society: while the third,
such men as Richelieu for example, have an instinctive appreciation and
passion for wise and orderly government. The great and typical ruler is
moved in varying degrees by all three in modern times, when the claims
of the poor, the rank and file of the social army, have been raised to
the permanent place that belongs to them. Each of the three types has
its own peculiar conditions of success, and there are circumstances in
which some one of the three is more able to grapple with the obstacles
to order than either of the other two. It soon became very clear that
the intellectual quality was not the element likely to quell the tempest
that had arisen now.
Let it be said, however, that Condorcet showed himself no pedantic nor
fastidious trifler with the tremendous movement which he had contributed
to set afoot. The same practical spirit which drove him into the strife,
guided him in the midst of it. He never wrung his hands, nor wept, nor
bewailed the unreason of the multitudes to whom in vain he preached
reason. Unlike the typical man of letters--for he was without vanity--he
did not abandon the cause of the Revolution because his suggestions were
often repulsed. 'It would be better,' he said to the Girondins, 'if you
cared less for personal matters and attended only to public interests.'
Years ago, in his _éloge_ on L'Hôpital, he had praised the famous
Chancellor for incurring the hostility of both of the two envenomed
factions, the League and the Huguenots, and for disregarding the
approbation or disapprobation of the people. 'What operation,' he asked,
'capable of producing any durable good, can be understood by the people?
How should they know to what extent good is possible? How judge of the
means of producing it? It must ever be easier for a charlatan to mislead
the people, than for a man of genius to save it.'[27] Remembering this
law, he never lost patience. He was cool and intrepid, if his
intrepidity was of the logical sort rather than physical; and he was
steadfast to one or two simple aims, if he was on some occasions too
rapid in changing his attitude as to special measures. He was never
afraid of the spectre, as the incompetent revolutionist is. On the
contrary, he understood its whole internal history; he knew what had
raised it, what passion and what weakness gave to it substance, and he
knew that presently reason would banish it and restore men to a right
mind. The scientific spirit implanted in such a character as
Condorcet's, and made robust by social meditation, builds up an
impregnable fortitude in the face of incessant rebuffs and
discouragements. Let us then picture Condorcet as surveying the terrific
welter from the summer of 1789 to the summer of 1793, from the taking of
the Bastille to the fall of the Girondins, with something of the
firmness and self-possession of a Roman Cato.
After the flight of the king in June, and his return in what was
virtually captivity to Paris, Condorcet was one of the party, very small
in numbers and entirely discountenanced by public opinion, then passing
through the monarchical and constitutional stage, who boldly gave up the
idea of a monarchy and proclaimed the idea of a republic. In July (1791)
he published a piece strongly arguing for a negative answer to the
question whether a king is necessary for the preservation of
liberty.[28] In one sense, this composition is favourable to Condorcet's
foresight; it was not every one who saw with him that the destruction of
the monarchy was inevitable after the royal flight. This want of
preparation in the public mind for every great change as it came, is one
of the most striking circumstances of the Revolution, and it explains
the violent, confused, and inadequate manner in which nearly every one
of these changes was made. It was proposed at that time to appoint
Condorcet to be governor to the young dauphin. But Condorcet in this
piece took such pains to make his sentiments upon royalty known, that in
the constitutional frame of mind in which the Assembly then was, the
idea had to be abandoned. It was hardly likely that a man should be
chosen for such an office, who had just declared the public will to be
'that the uselessness of a king, the needfulness of seeking means of
displacing a power founded on illusions, should be one of the first
truths offered to his reason; the obligation of concurring in this
himself, one of the first of his moral duties; and the desire not to be
freed from the yoke of law by an insulting inviolability, the first
sentiment of his heart. People are well aware that at this moment the
object is much less how to mould a king, than to teach him not to wish
to be one.'[29] As all France was then bent on the new constitution, a
king included, Condorcet's republican assurance was hardly warranted,
and it was by no means well received.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] _Oeuv._ i. 71.
[14] _Ib._ i. 73, 74.
[15] _Oeuv._ i. 296.
[16] _Ib._ i. 78.
[17] _Oeuv._ i. 89. Condorcet had 16 votes, and Bailly 15. '_Jamais
aucune élection_,' says La Harpe, who was all for Buffon, '_n'avait
offert ni ce nombre ni ce partage_.'--_Philos. du 18ième Siècle_, i. 77.
A full account of the election, and of Condorcet's reception, in Grimm's
_Corr. Lit._ xi. 50-56.
[18] _Oeuv._ iii. 109, 110.
[19] His wife, said to be one of the most beautiful women of her time,
was twenty-three years younger than himself, and survived until 1822.
Cabanis married another sister, and Marshal Grouchy was her brother.
Madame Condorcet wrote nothing of her own, except some notes to a
translation which she made of Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_.
[20] Montesquieu, Raynal, and one or two other writers, had attacked
slavery long before, and Condorcet published a very effective piece
against it in 1781 (_Réflexions sur l'Esclavage des Nègres_; _Oeuv._
vii. 63), with an epistle dedicated to the enslaved blacks. About the
same time an Abolition Society was formed in France, following the
example set in England.
[21] _Au Corps Electoral, contre l'Esclavage des Noirs._ 3 Fév. 1789.
_Sur l'Admission des Députés des Planteurs de Saint Domingue._ 1789. ix.
469-485.
[22] _Lettres d'un Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat_, ix.
255-259.
[23] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les
Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 263, 283.
[24] _Ib._ ix. 266.
[25] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les
Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 264.
[26] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les
Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, xii. 228, 229, 234.
[27] _Oeuv._ iii. 533. As this was written in 1777, Condorcet was
perhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tells
us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most
ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his
nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was
wretched.--See vol. i. of _Madame de Staël's Considerations_.
[28] _Oeuv._ iii. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a young
mechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel's
chess-player, who would answer all constitutional purposes
perfectly.--_Ib._ 239-241.
[29] _Oeuv._ xii. 236.
III.
When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to
be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a
municipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of their
deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 had mitigated the
loyalty that had even withstood the trial of the king's flight. When the
Legislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakable
element of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of
the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addresses
in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary
chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in
existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative what
Barère afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid,
labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither the
hard force of Napoleon's proclamations, nor the flowery eloquence of
the Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such
circumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagination
and perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor
the other, but only reason--a hard anvil, out of which he laboriously
struck flashes and single sounds.
Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation of
the Assembly, between a hostile court and a suspicious and distrustful
nation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from the
beginning desperate. In December 1791 the Legislative through its
secretary informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king's
measures in the face of the menaces of foreign war.[30] Within eight
months, when the king's person was in captivity and his power suspended,
the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king had
treated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual league
with the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly after
the violent events of the Tenth of August 1792 are not edifying, and
imply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye for
revolutionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but most
momentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr.
Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked--a process
truly called, 'especially in times of swift change, one of the
sorrowfullest tasks poor humanity has.' You might read the _Exposition
of the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed the
Convention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King_,[31] without
dreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out of
distrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king away
from his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated the
very chamber that was thus professing to expound its motives for doing
what the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power,
in fact, was all outside the chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Under
such circumstance it is of no interest to men to learn that 'in the
midst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, took
its oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post; took
the oath to save France, and looked about for means.'[32] Still more
impotent and hollow, because still more pompous, is the address of six
days later.[33] A few days after this, occurred the massacres of
prisoners in September--scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody and
iniquitous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion in
Ireland six years afterwards by English troops.
When the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris rejected
Condorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of the
Aisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and--a
much more important personage--the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soon
to stupefy the Convention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face set
immovable as bronze: 'An individual has no right to be either virtuous
or celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly are
not made to admire anybody.' The electors of the department of the Aisne
had unconsciously sent two typical revolutionists: the man of
intellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. In
their persons the Encyclopædia and the Guillotine met. Condorcet, who
had been extreme in the Legislative, but found himself a moderate in the
Convention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the new
members: 'Better try to moderate them than quarrel.' But in this case,
not even in their ruin, were fire and water reconciled.
On the first great question that the Convention had to decide--the fate
of the king--Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wise
man would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that the
king was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for the
punishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediate
issue, whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or should
be submitted to the people for ratification, he voted as a wise man
should not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people. Such an
appeal must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles,
and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that,
though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previously
laid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that they
were neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How,
he asked, without violating every principle of jurisprudence, can you
act at the same time as legislators constituting the crime, as accusers,
and as judges? His proposal was that Lewis XVI. should be tried by a
tribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body of
the departments.[34] With true respect for Condorcet's honourable
anxiety that the conditions of justice should be rigorously
observed--for, as he well said, 'there is no liberty in a country where
positive law is not the single rule of judicial proceedings'--it is
difficult to see why the Convention, coming as it did fresh from the
electoral bodies, who must have had the question what was to be done
with the imprisoned king foremost in their minds, why the members of the
Convention should not form as legitimate a tribunal as any body whose
composition and authority they had themselves defined and created, and
which would be chosen by the very same persons who less than a month
before had invested them with their own offices. Reading this most
scrupulous and juristic composition, we might believe the writer to have
forgotten that France lay mad and frenzied outside the hall where he
stood, and that in political action the question what is possible is at
least as important as what is compatible with the maxims of scientific
jurisprudence. It was to Condorcet's honour as a jurisconsult that he
should have had so many scruples; it is as much to his credit as a
politician that he laid them aside and tried the king after all.
It is highly characteristic of Condorcet's tenacity of his own view of
the Revolution and of its methods, that on the Saturday (January 19,
1793) when the king's fate was decided against Condorcet's conviction
and against his vote--the execution taking place on the Monday
morning--he should have appealed to the Convention, at all events to do
their best to neutralise the effect of their verdict upon Europe, by
instantly initiating a series of humane reforms in the law among them,
including the abolition of the punishment of death. 'The English
ministers,' he cried, 'are now seeking to excite that nation against us.
Do you suppose that they will venture to continue their calumnious
declamations, when you can say to them: "We have abolished the penalty
of death, while you still preserve it for the theft of a few shillings?
You hand over debtors to the greed or spite of their creditors; our
laws, wiser and more humane, know how to respect poverty and misfortune.
Judge between us and you, and see to which of the two peoples the
reproach of inhumanity may be addressed with most justice."'[35] This
was the eve of the Terror. Well may Comte distinguish Condorcet as the
one philosopher who pursued in the midst of the tempest his regenerating
meditations.
But let us banish the notion that the history of the Convention is only
the history of the guillotine. No chamber in the whole annals of
governing assemblies ever displayed so much alertness, energy, and
capacity, in the face of difficulties that might well have crushed them.
Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemy
from the frontiers, they at once in the spirit of Condorcet's speech,
made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less noble
task of legal reforms and political reorganisation. The unrivalled
ingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts of
compact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. The
civil code was drawn up in a month.[36] Constitutions abounded. Cynical
historians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months that
followed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution; and, so far
as they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills,
their faith was assuredly not according to knowledge. It shows, however,
the fundamental and seemingly ineradicable respect for authority which
their history has engendered in the French, that even in this, their
most chaotic hour, they craved order and its symbols.
Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sièyes, and others, was a member of
the first committee for framing a constitution. They laboured
assiduously from September to February 1793, when the project was laid
upon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet's
composition.[37] The time was inauspicious. The animosities between the
Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and
deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and
terror, Condorcet--at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches
against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the
Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in his
head nor a feeling in his heart--still pertinaciously kept crying out
for the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. The
revolution of the second of June came, and swept the Girondins out of
the Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days were
numbered. 'What did you do all that time?' somebody once asked of a
member of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning and
which lasted until Thermidor in 1794. 'I lived,' was the reply.
Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life as
Danton or Saint-Just cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down among
the men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the
Mountain to the face.
Hérault de Séchelles, at the head of another committee, brought in a new
constitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Of
this, Sièyes said privately, that it was 'a bad table of contents.'
Condorcet denounced it publicly, and, with a courage hardly excelled, he
declared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyed
the integrity of the national representation. The Bill he handled with a
severity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of its
designers. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot, one of those weak and
excitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the intensity,
multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercer
air of such an event as the Revolution is a real poison, rose and in the
name of the Committee of General Security called the attention of the
Chamber to what he styled a sequel of the Girondist Brissot. This was no
more nor less than Condorcet's document criticising the new
constitution. 'This man,' said Chabot, 'has sought to raise the
department of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he has
happened to sit by the side of a handful of _savants_ of the Academy,
it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic.'[38] So a decree
was passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in the
list of those who were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the
Third of October for conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of
the Republic. He was condemned in his absence, and declared to be _hors
la loi_.
This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhood
upwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the common
weal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will best
remember his name, though only a few months intervened between his
flight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enacted
he fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet,
a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and one
of those beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach.
'Is he an honest and virtuous man?' she asked; 'in that case let him
come, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized.' The
same night Condorcet intrusted his life to her keeping, and for nine
months he remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of the
execution of the Girondins condemned on the same day with himself, he
perceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protectress, and made
up his mind to flee. 'I am an outlaw,' he said, 'and if I am discovered
you will be dragged to the same death.' 'The Convention,' Madame Vernet
answered, with something of the heroism of more notable women of that
time, 'may put you out of the law; it has not the power to put you out
of humanity. You stay.' This was no speech of the theatre. The whole
household kept the most vigorous watch over the prisoner thus generously
detained, and for many months Madame Vernet's humane firmness was
successful in preventing his escape. This time--his soul grievously
burdened by anxiety as to the fate of his wife and child, and by a
restless eagerness not to compromise his benefactress, a bloody death
staring him every moment in the face--Condorcet spent in the
composition, without the aid of a single book, of his memorable work on
the progress of the human mind. Among the many wonders of an epoch of
portents, this feat of intellectual abstraction is not the least
amazing.
When his task was accomplished, Condorcet felt with more keenness than
ever the deadly peril in which his presence placed Madame Vernet. He was
aware that to leave her house was to seek death, but he did not fear. He
drew up a paper of directions to be given one day to his little
daughter, when she should be of years to understand and follow them.
They are written with minute care, and though tender and solicitous,
they show perfect composure. His daughter is above all things to banish
from her mind every revengeful sentiment against her father's enemies;
to distrust her filial sensibility, and to make this sacrifice for her
father's own sake. This done, he marched downstairs, and having by an
artful stratagem thrown Madame Vernet off her guard, he went out at ten
o'clock in the morning imperfectly disguised into the street. This was
the fifth of April 1794. By three in the afternoon, exhausted by fatigue
which his strict confinement for nine months made excessive, he reached
the house of a friend in the country, and prayed for a night's shelter.
His presence excited less pity than alarm. The people gave him
refreshment, and he borrowed a little pocket copy of Horace, with which
he went forth into the loneliness of the night. He promised himself
shelter amid the stone quarries of Clamart. What he suffered during this
night, the whole day of the sixth of April, the night, and again the
next day, there is no one to tell.