denounced before the National Assembly by Chabot. He had indeed, with a
view to making at once a _coup_ for his country and for himself, and
though he was now sixty years old and getting deaf, undertaken to bring
into France sixty thousand guns--‘to massacre patriots,’ shouted
unreasonable patriotism. On August 10 his house was searched; on August
23 he was taken to the Abbaye prison, and on August 30 he was freed by
Manuel (his brother _littérateur_, as well as Procurator of the
Commune), just two days before the September massacres. After all, his
star had not yet declined.
After hiding in barns and roaming ‘over harrowed fields, panting for his
life,’ he escaped to England, where very luckily for himself a London
merchant, to whom he was in debt, prevented his returning to Paris and
the guillotine by shutting him up in the King’s Bench Prison. In March,
1793, he did return, ‘to offer my head to the sword of justice, if I
cannot prove I am a good citizen.’ That he did not thus pay for his
imprudence proves that there was as much in that head as had ever come
out of it.
Three months later, Beaumarchais was sent as the emissary of the
Revolutionary Government to fetch those sixty thousand guns
which had been left in Holland. He had many highly dramatic
escapes and adventures; and, being wholly modern in his belief in
self-advertisement, he once more made the most of them. In his absence
the Government which had sent him, by one of those little mistakes which
make its history so vivacious, declared him an _émigré_!
During the Terror he was at Hamburg, in direst poverty and in mortal
anxiety as to the fate of his wife, his daughter, and his sister Julie.
They escaped with their lives; but when Beaumarchais was at last taken
off the list of _émigrés_ and returned to Paris in 1796, he found house
and fortune alike in ruins, his door besieged by creditors, and his
famous garden a wilderness.
He was sixty-four years old and had already done more in his life than a
hundred ordinary men compress into a hundred ordinary careers. And now
he must start afresh!
He saw his daughter married; revived his old social tastes, produced
‘The Guilty Mother,’ and took the keenest interest, both in prose and
verse, in that young Lieutenant of Artillery, Napoleon Bonaparte. He
also published two very anti-Christian letters in praise of Voltaire.
The watchmaker’s son, who had charmed Mesdames at Versailles, was to the
end witty, gay, bold, and practical.
On the morning of May 18, 1799, his friends found him dead of apoplexy.
To die in his bed at last was surely not the least of his clevernesses.
Caron de Beaumarchais was not a very unusual type of character or even
of intellect; but in the use he made of his brains, of his qualities and
of his circumstances, he was a man in a million. His marvellous
enterprise and industry enabled him to build more than one successful
career on very ordinary foundations. His luck, that astonishing luck
which followed him from the cradle to the grave, seems to have prevented
such dangerous qualities as his conceit, his pugnaciousness, and his
love of intrigue and speculation, from bringing their usual fatal
results. Such gifts as a handsome face, a fine figure, a ‘parvenu
grandeur of manner’ and real kindness and generosity, he used to their
utmost advantage. For himself and his contemporaries he was a
brilliantly successful individuality.
For posterity, he is the man who, with a single thrust, pushed open that
door, which by long labour and bitter sacrifice Voltaire and the
Encyclopædists had unbarred, upon the great Revolution and the Day.
X
_CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT_
Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler;
d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm
and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their
talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet
came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to
destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of
his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The
Aristocrat who lost his life through the People to whom he had devoted
it--this was Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet.
Born in 1743, at Ribemont, a town in Picardy, Condorcet belonged to a
noble family highly connected both with the Church and the Army.
His father was a captain of cavalry and designed his son for the same
aristocratic post. But he died when the child was four; and a devout
mother vowed him to the Virgin and _au blanc_,
[Illustration: JEAN-ANTOINE-NICOLAS DE CARITAT, MARQUIS DE CONDORCET.
_From an Engraving by Lemort, after the Bust by St. Aubin._]
dressed him in white frocks like a little girl, so that the luckless
Caritat could neither run nor jump as nature bade him, and owed to his
mother’s piety a weakness in his limbs from which he never recovered.
His first schoolmasters were the Jesuits. What is one to make of the
fact that they had as virgin soil the intellects of at least four of
their mightiest and fiercest opponents--Voltaire, Diderot, Turgot, and
Condorcet?
At eleven, Caritat was under their supervision, with his home influence
pressing him to their way of thought, with an uncle a bishop, and
Cardinal de Bernis a relative. At thirteen, he was sent to Rheims, to be
more completely under their control. At fifteen, he came up to Paris,
and began at the College of Navarre to study mathematics and to think
for himself; and when once a mind has begun to do that, nothing can stop
it.
His treatment of a particularly difficult theme brought him the
acquaintance of d’Alembert, who first saw in the boy, who was to be to
him as a son, a kindred genius, a future colleague at the Academy.
Caritat was only seventeen when he introduced himself to his other great
friend, Turgot, writing him a ‘Letter on Justice and Virtue’ which
already proclaimed this college student a thinker of a high order. An
‘Essay on the Integral Calculus,’ which he presented at the Academy of
Sciences when he was twenty-two, attracted to him the flattering notice
of the famous mathematician, Lagrange. There was in it not only the
ardour of youth and a buoyant fecundity of idea, but a profundity of
learning not at all youthful.
Caritat was now no longer a student, but still lodging in Paris. In
1769, when he was twenty-six, he entered the Academy of Sciences in
opposition to the wishes of all his relatives, who never pardoned him,
he said, for not becoming a captain of cavalry.
The man who ought, by the solemn unwritten laws of the family compact,
to have been a heavy dragoon, was soon acknowledged as one of the finest
original thinkers of his age, the friend of d’Alembert and of Voltaire,
and something yet greater than a thinker--greater than any great man’s
friend--a practical reformer and a generous lover of human-kind.
The character of Condorcet--he who with Turgot has been said to have
been ‘the highest intellectual and moral personality of his
century’--has in it much not only infinitely good, but also infinitely
attractive. Perfectly simple and modest, somewhat shy in the social
world which he himself defined as ‘dissipation without pleasure, vanity
without motive, and idleness without rest,’ among his intimates no one
could have been more gay, witty, and natural. Though his acquaintances
might find him cold, his friends knew well what a tender and generous
soul shone in the thoughtful eyes. If he listened to a tale of sorrow
coldly and critically almost, while others were commiserating the
unfortunate, Condorcet was remedying the misfortune. Though he never
could profess affection, he knew better than any man how to prove it;
and if all his principles were stern, all his deeds were gentle. So
quiet in his tastes that he had no use for riches, wholly without the
arrogance and the blindness which distinguished his class, he had its
every merit and not one of its faults; and he well deserved the title
Voltaire gave him--‘The man of the old chivalry and the old virtue.’
In 1770, when he was twenty-seven, he went with d’Alembert to stay at
Ferney. Voltaire was delighted with him. Here was a man after his own
heart, with his own hatred of oppression and fanaticism and his own zeal
for humanity, with better chances of serving it! The Patriarch did not
add, as he might have added, that this young Condorcet had a thousand
virtues a Voltaire could never compass--that he was pure in life and
hated a lie; that he was wholly without jealousy, without vanity, and
without meanness. Caritat soon worshipped at the feet of a master of
whom his friendship with d’Alembert had already proclaimed him a pupil,
while Voltaire enlisted his guest’s quiet, practical help for the
rehabilitation of the Chevalier de la Barre, for the revision of the
process of d’Étallonde; and honoured him by becoming his editor and
assistant in the critical ‘Commentary on Pascal’ which Condorcet
produced later.
Because his humility was the humility of a just mind and his modesty of
the kind that scorns to cringe, Condorcet’s admiration for his host did
not blind him to his literary faults or make him meanly spare them; and
while it was Condorcet who spoke in warm eulogy of his ‘dear and
illustrious chief’ as working not for his glory but for his cause, it
was also Condorcet who deprecated that production of Voltaire’s
senility, ‘Irène.’ Sometimes the three friends would talk over the
future of France--the two older men who had done much to mould that
future and the young man who had much to do. ‘You will see great days,’
old Voltaire wrote afterwards to his guest; ‘you will make them.’
The visit lasted a fortnight, and was a liberal education indeed.
Three years later, in 1773, Condorcet received the crown of his success
as a mathematician and was made Perpetual Secretary of the Academy of
Sciences, where he wrote _éloges_ of the savants who had belonged to it,
with the noble motto for ever in his mind, ‘One owes to the dead only
what is useful to the living--justice and truth.’
So far, Condorcet had been a mathematician alone. Knowledge might free
and redeem the world--in time; but the time was long. Beneath that quiet
exterior, palpitating through his leisurely, exact studies at the
College of Navarre and the Scientific Academy, there throbbed in this
man’s breast a vaster and fiercer passion than any passion for
learning--the passion for human-kind. Where did young Condorcet come by
that ruling idea of his that opened to him a field of labour which he
must till all his days, unremittingly, before the night cometh when no
man can work--that idea which should steel him to endure, exulting, the
cruellest torments of life and death--‘the infinite perfectibility of
human nature, the infinite augmentation of human happiness’?
The friend of d’Alembert was Condorcet, the geometrician; the friend of
Turgot was Condorcet, the reformer.
In August, 1774, Turgot was made Controller-General. He appointed
Condorcet his Inspector of Coinage at a salary of 240_l._ a year, a
payment which Condorcet never accepted.
The pair had work to do, which only they could do, and do together. The
vexed subject of Trade in Grain--‘for a moment,’ says Robinet, ‘the
whole question of the Revolution lay in this question of Grain’--incited
them to fierce battle for what they took to be the cause of freedom
against the cause of that well-meaning commonplace, Necker. Condorcet
attacked Necker with a rare, fierce malignity, and wrote two stinging
pamphlets on the subject which made him many enemies.
But there were other reforms waiting the doing, less in importance then
and greater in importance now. To curtail the advantages of the
privileged classes, to open for commerce the rivers of central France,
to abolish the slave trade, _Taille_ and _Corvée_, _Vingtième_ and
_Gabelle_, and to make the nobility share in the taxation--these were
the tasks into which this noble put his life and his soul. That every
reform meant loss to himself, that all his interests were vested in the
privileges he sought to destroy, that every human tie drew him towards
the old order, makes his work for the new, more excellent than that of
his fellow-workers. They had nothing to gain; Condorcet had everything
to lose.
In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot
fût chassé, même envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way,
for her own ruin and that of France. Condorcet renounced his
Inspectorship of Coinage; he would not serve under another master.
Turgot’s death in 1781 was the first great sorrow of his life. His other
friend, d’Alembert, won for him a seat in the French Academy in 1782;
and in the next year he too died. Condorcet tended him to the last, with
that quiet and generous devotion which says little and does much.
D’Alembert left to him the task of providing annuities for two old
servants, and Condorcet accepted the obligation as a privilege, and
fulfilled it scrupulously in his own poverty and ruin.
He was now not a little lonely. His relatives still resented his choice
of a profession; his best friends were dead; the great Master of their
party had preceded them. From ‘social duties falsely so called’ Caritat
had long ago freed himself. He was three and forty years old, occupied
in writing that ‘Life of Turgot’ which is a declaration of his own
principles and policy, in contributing to the Encyclopædia, and in many
public labours, when he first met Mademoiselle Sophie de Grouchy.
If the supreme blessing of life be a happy marriage, then Condorcet was
a fortunate man indeed. Mademoiselle was full twenty years younger than
himself, very girlish in face and figure, with a bright cultivated
mind, and a rare capacity for love and tenderness. He found in her what
is uncommon even in happy marriages perhaps--his wife was also his
friend. From the first she shared his work and his love for his
fellow-men, approved of his sacrifices, and was true not only to him,
but to his example of unselfish courage and unflinching devotion, to the
end of her life.
For the moment--for what a brief moment!--their world looked smiling
enough.
Condorcet abandoned himself to his happiness, with the deep passion of a
strong man who has never wasted his heart in lighter feelings. For a
dowry--so essential to a French marriage--he wholly forgot to stipulate.
For the opinion of his friends, who considered a married geometrician as
a sort of freak of Nature, he cared nothing; and when they saw his wife,
and forgave him, their pardon was as little to him as their blame.
The two settled on the Quai de Conti in a house where Caritat had
previously lived with his mother. At that Hôtel des Monnaies Sophie held
her _salon_ (_le foyer de la République_, men called it), where she
received, with a youthful charm and grace, not only her husband’s French
political friends, but also Lord Stormont the English Ambassador,
Wilkes, Garrick, Sterne, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Mackintosh, and Adam
Smith.
Large and shy, with a little awkwardness even in his manner, it was not
Condorcet but his wife who was socially successful. She was the one
woman in a thousand who estimated social success at its low, just value,
and was great in knowing her husband to be much greater.
Only two years after their marriage, in 1788, Condorcet entered the
arena as one of the earliest and most noteworthy of all champions of
Women’s Rights. On the ground of their equal intelligence he claimed for
them equal privileges with men, and ignored the very suggestion that
their bodily weakness and inferiority are reproduced in their minds. He
judged, in fact, all women from one woman. No nobler testimony can be
borne to the intellect and character of the Marquise de Condorcet than
to say that she deserved as an individual what her example made her
husband think of her sex.
It is not a little curious to note that Condorcet, though so wholly
faithful and happy himself in the relationship, thought the
indissolubility of marriage an evil. In later years, he pleaded warmly
for the condemnation of mercenary marriages by public opinion, as one of
the best means of lessening the inequalities of wealth.
In 1790, the profound happiness of his wedded life was crowned by the
birth of his only child, a daughter. Before that, the fierce whirlpool
of politics had drawn him into it, and he had addressed the electors of
the States-General and appeared publicly as the enemy of sacerdotalism
and aristocracy, with all his gospel based on two great principles--the
natural rights of man and the mutable nature of the constitutions which
govern him. He was made member of the municipality of Paris, and in
that, his first public function, flung the gauntlet before his caste and
broke for ever with an order of which the smug selfishness was admirably
typified by a Farmer-General who said to him, ‘Why alter things? _We_
are very comfortable.’
The fall of the Bastille, the insurrection of October, the journey of
the Royal Family to Paris, he had watched with the calm of one who knows
that such things must needs be, who realises the necessity of painful
means to a glorious end. To the monarchy he was not at first opposed. If
the King were but a man! But when in June, 1791, came the ignominious
flight to Varennes, Condorcet rose in a fierce, still wrath and
proclaimed the necessity for a Republic. ‘The King has freed himself
from us, we are freed from him,’ said he. ‘This flight enfranchises us
from all our obligations.’
Nearly all the Marquis’s friends broke with him, and he stood alone.
Before his ripened views on royalty were fully known, it had been
proposed that he should be the tutor of the Dauphin, and to Sophie that
she should be the _gouvernante_. Husband and wife were in different
places when the proposals were made; but, though they had never spoken
with each other on the subject, they declined the offers almost in the
same words. If Condorcet’s friends misunderstood him and parted at the
parting of the ways, his wife never did.
In 1791, he was elected member for Paris in the Legislative Assembly and
became in quick succession its Secretary and its President. As its
President, he presented to it his Educational Scheme, startlingly modern
in its demands that education should be free and unsectarian.
By the order of the Assembly, in 1792, there was burnt in Paris an
immense number of the brevets and patents of nobility--among them the
patent of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet--at the
very moment when at the bar of the tribune Condorcet himself demanded
that the same measure should be adopted all over France. Not one
dissentient voice was raised against the scheme; who, indeed, should
dissent from it when a marquis proposed it? A few months later he was
elected Member of the National Convention for the Department of Aisne,
and the extremist of the Legislative Assembly found himself all too
moderate for the Convention.
Then came the trial of the King.
There was never a time when Condorcet could be called either an orator
or a leader of men. Though he had written most of its official
addresses, he had appeared but little before the Legislative Assembly.
Nervousness caused him always to read any speeches he did make, and a
delicate voice robbed them of their effectiveness. His deeds and his
character earned him a hearing and applause; and sometimes his complete
self-devotion and the white heat of his enthusiasm discounted his manner
and touched his hearers with something of his own deathless passion. But
he was, as d’Alembert said, a volcano covered with snow, and that
audience of his, coarse in fibre, mad for excitement, overwrought,
uncontrolled, must needs see the mountain in flames, vomiting lava and
death.
To be a great orator one must have in a supreme degree the qualities
one’s hearers have in a lesser degree. The thoughtful reason and the
lofty ideals of Condorcet found little counterpart in the parliaments of
the Revolution. A Marat or a Danton for us! Or a Fouquier-Tinville even,
drunk with blood, with his wild hair flung back, and his words shaking
with passion; but not this noble, with the high courage of his caste,
his ‘stoical Roman face,’ his stern truthfulness, his unworldly
enthusiasms. Worse than all, Condorcet never was for a cause, but always
for a principle; and since he followed no party blindly, he was in turn
abused by all.
He proved in his own history that to be a great demagogue it is
essential to be without too fine a scrupulousness and the more delicate
virtues; that successfully to lead the vulgar the first requisite is not
to be too much of a gentleman.
Condorcet, although he had broken with monarchy as a possible form of
government for France, had still no personal feeling against the
monarch. Firmly convinced of his culpability, he was equally convinced
that the Convention was not legally competent to judge its King at all;
and proposed that he should be tried by a tribunal chosen by the
electors of the Departments of France. But to take the judging of its
sovereign from the Convention was to take the prey whose blood he has
tasted from the tiger. When the great moment came, Condorcet was at
Auteuil; he hastened to Paris, and arrived at the Assembly a few moments
before the King.
What a strange contrast was this Marquis--serene in strong purpose, with
his ‘just mind justly fixed,’ great in his compassion for his country
and not without compassion for his King--to that poor Bourbon, ‘who
means well had he any fixed meaning,’ and whom Condorcet himself
described in an admirable but rarely quoted description as standing
before his judges, ‘uneasy, rather than frightened; courageous, but
without dignity.’
On January 15, 1793, to the momentous question if the prisoner at the
bar were guilty, Condorcet answered, ‘Yes:’ he had conspired against
liberty. On the 17th and 18th the vote was taken on the nature of the
punishment to be awarded. Consider the judgment-hall filled with the
fierce faces and wild natures of men who, for centuries starved of their
liberties, had drunk the first maddening draught of power. Consider that
among them this noble alone represented a class they hated worse than
they hated royalty itself, that if he had forsworn it, broken with it,
denied it, he had still its high bearing, its maddening self-possession
and self-control. We vote for death--shall you dare to know better? An
Orleans sitteth and speaketh against his own kin; why not a noble, then,
who owes him nothing? Condorcet rises in his place and pronounces for
exile--the severest penalty in the penal code which is not death. ‘The
punishment of death is against my principles, and I shall not vote for
it. I propose further that the decision of the Convention shall be
ratified by an appeal to the people.’
On Saturday, January 19, 1793, the execution of the King having been
fixed for the Monday, Condorcet implored his colleagues to neutralise
the fatal effect of their decision on the other European Powers by
abolishing the punishment of death altogether. With the Terror then
struggling to the birth in her wild breast, one of the greatest children
of his country begged for the suppression of that penalty as the most
‘efficacious way of perfecting human-kind in destroying that leaning to
ferocity which has long dishonoured it. Punishments which admit of
correction and repentance are the only ones fit for regenerated
humanity.’
In the roar of that fierce storm of human passions, the quiet voice was
unheeded, but not unheard. There were those who looked up at the
speaker, and remembered his words--for his ruin.
How far, up to this point, Condorcet realised his danger is hard to say.
A Louis, with the fatal blindness of kingship, might believe to the last
that his person really _was_ inviolable, that from the tumbril itself
loyal hands would deliver his majesty from the insult of a malefactor’s
death. But a Condorcet?
The immediate result of his part in the King’s trial was that his name
was struck from the roll of the Academies of St. Petersburg and Berlin.
That insult touched him so little that there is not a single allusion to
it in his writings.