The Condorcets & Constitutional Revolution

This is the first part of a longer essay I first developed in law school and have recently been rewriting. I read this version on Friday to a room of Nieman Fellows, so I thought I’d share it here. It's about two of my favorite philosophers, their tragic love story, and what they have to teach us as our nation enters a new constitutive moment.

Part I: Ahead of Their Time:

Paris, March 1794; 21 Rue des Fossoyeurs - Gravedigger’s Street: Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet — revolutionary scientist, philosopher and legislator — had been in hiding from the Reign of Terror for months when he sat down to write a letter to Eliza, his four year old daughter: “My child, if as a baby you were sometimes comforted by my loving care, I hope you will place your trust in this advice, and that it will help you to be happy.”¹

Not two years ago he had helped depose King Louis the XVI and served as President of the National Convention on the first day of the French Republic.² Now, Nicolas’ gentle guidance jumped from the virtues of work and education to the dangers of greed and egoism, and encouraged Eliza to cultivate empathy and stay true to herself. It all came down to a simple idea: “you will find that life in society is more pleasant and, dare I say, more convenient, if you live for others. Only then do you truly live for yourself.”³

***

Paris, March 1794: Place de la Revolution: Sophie de Grouchy, Marquise de Condorcet - revolutionary feminist, abolitionist and journalist - was in disguise. Hood up, revolutionary ribbon in place, she did her best to lose herself, and anyone trailing her, in the crowd assembling to watch the guillotine.⁴

Looking up at the scaffold where many of her friends had died, Sophie grappled with the forces which drew her and countless others to witness the horror and tragedy of the executions, concluding that it came down to “our need to be moved” and the “power a large crowd has to arouse our emotions.”⁵

The faces of many walking to their deaths would have been intimately familiar to her - with her property seized, Sophie made ends meet by drawing keepsake portraits of the condemned for their families.⁶ Fragments provided by Eliza, decades later, suggest that what Sophie went through during the terror, with her home and work under constant surveillance, was profoundly traumatic, and had a long term impact on her mother’s health.⁷

As Sophie made her way through the square, she also would have seen, looming over the crowd, France’s first statue of liberty, on a plinth which until recently had held a statue of the King.⁸ The irony, that the statue which represented her and Nicolas’ greatest triumph now presided over the betrayal of their enlightenment ideals, would not have been lost on her.

***

Sophie was raised in the Château de Villette, a grand complex of palaces and gardens known as Little Versailles. It was there she learned greek and latin alongside her younger brother and sister, there her mother burned her books after she declared her atheism, and there she and Nicolas were married, in 1786, with the Marquis de Lafayette as their witness.⁹

The newlyweds soon began holding salons at the Paris Mint, where Nicolas worked and lived, and founded a series of abolitionist, feminist, and democratic-republican clubs and journals.¹⁰

One abolitionist work opened with this dedication: Tho’ not of your colour, my friends, I have ever considered you as my brethren…Were we to ‘seek a man’ in America, it is not among the Whites we should find him.” Thomas Jefferson translated this essay into English by hand, so we can imagine that the insult landed.¹¹

In 1790, a few months after Eliza’s birth, they published an essay on the Emancipation of Women which reviewed example after example of female courage and genius, and made the simple case that, “either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones.”¹²

In 1791, after Sophie and Eliza went out to a Jacobin protest and were nearly caught in the Champ de Mars massacre, the Condorcets joined forces with Tom Paine to launch a journal, “The Republican”, calling for a democratic republic based on universal suffrage. Sophie edited the paper, translated Tom’s works and published her own under the pen name, “La Verite.” Truth. Their efforts paid off, Nicolas was elected to the legislature, helped enact the suspension of the monarchy, and chaired the National Convention’s Constitutional Committee, which Paine also sat on.¹³

Their Constitution, an upgraded version of Franklin and Paine’s Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, featured a unicameral parliament, executive council, ranked choice voting, progressive taxation, and vested ultimate sovereignty in national referendums administered through hundreds of provincial citizens assemblies.¹⁴

Ahead of its time, and arguably ours, it was this Constitution that got Condorcet sentenced to death when he dared to speak out against Robespierre’s tyrannical alternative.¹⁵

March 1794 was the last time Sophie and Nicolas saw each other. His last testament, which he scrawled on the inside of a book before fleeing an impending raid, speaks of Sophie’s “courage throughout this long persecution” and asks that Eliza “be brought up to love freedom and equality.” He died two days later in a prison in Bourg de l’Egalite - Town of Equality.¹⁶

A few months later, the violent fever over Paris broke, and the reign of terror ended with Robespierre’s execution.

***

Sophie and Eliza survived, thanks in part to Emmanuel de Grouchy, Sophie’s younger brother, who enlisted in the revolutionary army early and made general in 1793 alongside Napoleon. Sophie met Napoleon in 1797, and when the latter indicated that he did not appreciate “women who occupy themselves with politics” she responded that, “in a country where women have their heads cut off, it is natural that they want to know why.”¹⁷

A year later, Sophie published her authoritative translation of Adam Smith, . In her introduction, she has the “temerity” to qualify Smith’s invisible hand. While Smith took sympathy as a given, granted by divine design, Sophie makes the case that “the disposition we have to feel as others do” has a source: our social nature and “the sentiment of natural equality.” She warns that “a wicked system of legislation,” can undermine our social instincts by “allowing the gradual concentration” of wealth, which keeps men “estranged from one another.”¹⁸

Sophie spent the following years editing and publishing her husband’s complete works - 21 volumes. She maintained a salon which emerged as a center for anti-Napoleonic organizing, and in 1815, her brother played a key role in Napoleon’s loss at Waterloo. Sophie passed away in 1822.¹⁹

***

As for Eliza, she married an Irish revolutionary named Arthur O’Connor. A United Irishman, Arthur fought to extend voting rights to Catholics as a member of the Irish House of Commons, and helped lead a republican revolution in 1798. He also published an “appeal to the women of Ireland” in 1797 which addressed women as the “actuating principle” of political change, and promoted “the idea of female politicians.”

Arthur fled to France in 1802, and met Eliza through Emmanuel, who had been briefly deployed to Ireland. He and Eliza were married in 1807, played a key role alongside Emmanuel in the revolution of 1830, and published the second edition of Condorcet’s complete works in 1847. The following year, the Revolution of 1848 established the second French Republic.

***

It was said of Sophie that she remained true to herself through the revolution, and that this was her glory.²⁰ May we all be as brave in the revolutions to come, and let us strive to preserve peace, and avoid needless tragedy.

1. Advice to Eliza, March 1794. Originally published in Volume 1 of the Oeuvres Complètes de Condorcet. This translation is from Condorcet, Political Writings, Lukes and Urbinati, pg. 196.

2. As detailed in Condorcet, Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre by Jean-Francois Robinet (1893)Condorcet served on the Extraordinary Commission of the National Assembly convened to respond to Paris’ petition to depose the King in August 1792, and drafted many of the acts and addresses effectuating its abolition. Condorcet’s election as Vice President of the National Convention and service as President on the first day of the French Republic, September 22nd, 1792, is documented in Volume 52 of the Archives Parlementaires.

3. Condorcet, Political Writings, Lukes and Urbinati, pg. 203.

4. Sophie’s clandestine visits to the Place de la Revolution were described by her daughter decades later, in Biographical Notes on Mme. de Condorcet, a short fragment written by Eliza Condorcet O’Connor in 1841 and published in 1893 in Condorcet, sa vie, son oeuvre, 1743-1794 by Jean-Francois Robinet.

5. Sophie’s Letters on Sympathy, published in 1798, but likely written during the terror, show her grappling with, “what leads the multitude to crowd around the scaffold, where they sometimes to see tortures in all their horror that nearly always melt them and make them weep? The human heart is somehow drawn to what agitates it and moves it.“

6. Sophie worked out of a little shop at 352 Rue Saint Honore, just a few blocks from the Place de la Revolution. As described by Guillois in his 1897 biography, Marquise de Condorcet : sa famille, son salon, ses amis, Sophie would also sometimes, “venture into the hideouts where the proscribed were concealed and into the dungeons to reproduce the features of the unfortunate condemned.”

7. In her Biographical Notes on Mme. de Condorcet, Eliza writes that, “What she had suffered in 1793 and 1794 had profoundly altered her health. She could not speak of it without an extreme emotion ‘which always made her ill’.”

8. A contemporary painting, An Execution on the Place de la Révolution by Pierre-Antoine Demachy provides a faithful depiction of the statue, the guillotine, and the crowd.

9. See La Marquise de Condorcet : Sa Famille, Son Salon, Ses Amis by Antoine Guillois, 1897 for more detailed accounts of each of these events.

10. These clubs included the abolitionist Societe des Amis des Noirs (founded in 1788); the feminist Cercle Sociale, which met regularly at the Condorcet’s home as early as 1787, but was founded as the Amis de la Verité in 1790; The Republican a journal founded in 1791, and more, as detailed further in Condorcet: Un Intellectuel en Politique by Elisabeth and Robert Badinter (1988).

11. Jefferson’s Notes from Condorcet on Slavery. The editors of the Jefferson Papers note that the manuscript is “undated; entirely in TJ’s hand and, since it has numerous deletions and interlineations, evidently translated by him in the course of transcription.”

12. This translation is from Condorcet, Political Writings, Lukes and Urbinati, pg. 157.

13. See Condorcet: Un Intellectuel en Politique by Elisabeth and Robert Badinter (1988).

14. See Plan de Constitution, in Volume 12 of the Oeuvres Complètes de Condorcet.

15. See Aux Citoyens Francais Sur La Nouvelle Constitution June, 1793, Extrait du Moniteur du 10 Juillet, 1793 and Decret de la Convention Nationale du 3 Octobre, 1793 all found in Volume 12 of the Oeuvres Complètes de Condorcet.

16. The Testament was first published by Sophie in 1798. This translation is from Condorcet, Political Writings, Lukes and Urbinati.

17. This anecdote is recounted in Volume 2 of Madame de Staël: Her Friends and Her Influence in Politics and Literature by Charlotte Julia Blennerhassett (1889, pg. 350).

18. All quotations from De Grouchy, Letters on Sympathy, 1798. These letters were addressed to Condorcet, and published as an introduction to De Grouchy’s French translation of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1798.

19. See La Marquise de Condorcet : Sa Famille, Son Salon, Ses Amis by Antoine Guillois, 1897.

20. “Madame de Condorcet remained who she had been at the dawn of 1789. This unity of her life constitutes her true glory.” La marquise de Condorcet : sa famille, son salon, ses amis by Antoine Guillois, 1897.