Born at Ribemont, in Picardy, 1743.
A member of a very ancient and noble family: being her only surviving
son, his mother devoted him to the Virgin, making him wear girl’s
clothes until the age of eleven.
He became one of the most illustrious mathematicians and philosophers
of France. He was not quite twenty-two when he presented his celebrated
essay, “Sur le calcul intégral” before the Academy. He was elected
member of the Academy of Science after composing an eulogy on the death
of La Fontaine in 1771.
During the next fifteen years he published many books of historical and
philosophical interest.
Turgot inspired Condorcet with a taste for political economy.
In 1789, notwithstanding his great position in the world of literature
and politics, Condorcet was not elected a member of the States-General.
But in 1791 he was a Deputy for Paris in the second Assembly. He voted
against the execution of Louis XVI.
Condorcet was shortly after denounced as an Academician, a conspirator,
and an enemy of the people. He was also accused of having attacked the
“sublime efforts of the Committee of Public Safety,” and on October 3
the Convention ordered his arrest. For a time various friends concealed
the illustrious refugee in their houses, but he was obliged to fly
on April 6, 1794, from his last hiding-place. Hunger drove him into
a baker’s shop to buy bread, where the whiteness of his hands, the
fineness of his linen, and the fact that he was carrying a volume of
Horace excited suspicion, and he was arrested. He committed suicide the
same night in prison, swallowing poison contained in a ring. He was
fifty years of age.
Condorcet was one of the most illustrious of Frenchmen, a true
friend of liberty, a gentleman, an honest man, an elegant speaker, a
brilliant writer, and a distinguished geometrician; he fell a victim,
with many others almost equally distinguished, to the fury of those
revolutionary demagogues who deprived France of most of the benefits
she might have received from the Revolution of 1789.