Part 21

The weakness of the unfortunate king, who yielded to the new state of things only on compulsion, and turned his eyes towards the emigrants and foreign potentates as deliverers, still hoping for a restoration to absolute power, caused the moderate party of girondists to abandon the cause of royalty altogether, and to believe that there was no possibility of confirming the blessings which they believed that their country reaped from the revolution, nor of protecting the nation from invasion, and the re-establishment of absolutism armed with foreign soldiers for the execution of vengeance, except in the dethronement of the king and erection of a republic. The flight of Louis to Varennes put the seal of conviction on these opinions. It was believed that he fled only to return with the Austrians and the emigrants, armed to exterminate the friends of liberty. Condorcet pronounced on this occasion a violent speech against monarchy, and followed up his attack by a series of bitter articles in a paper called "The Republican." His popularity increased greatly through this course. He was designated by the jacobins as governor of the dauphin, but Louis refused to ratify the nomination. [Sidenote: 1791. Ætat. 47.] He was also appointed commissioner of the treasury; which, at his desire, changed its name to the national instead of the royal treasury; and he was elected member of the new representative assembly by the electors of the city of Paris itself. He drew up the article of "The National Assembly" in the "Chronicle," on this occasion, to enlighten his colleagues on the state of the nation, and the measures proper to be taken for its security.

In all his speeches and projected decrees he mingled the most determined opposition to such acts and establishments as he believed to be hostile to the liberty of his country, with mildness and justice towards individuals. Thus, on the 25th of October, he made a speech on the subject of emigration, which at the time that it was delivered excited the warmest applause, and the printing of it was voted. In this discourse, he drew a line between the emigrants who left their country for the sake merely of withdrawing from the political disturbances, and those who entertained the nefarious project of exciting foreign powers to invade France, and meditated carrying arms themselves against their countrymen. He denounced the connivance of the court with the intrigues at Coblentz. He showed the necessity of firm measures, and asserted that an unasked pardon held out to the emigrants gave birth to contempt merely among the haughty nobles who expected a speedy triumph over a class of men whom they despised. A few days after, the mountain party attacked his purposed decree as insufficient and feeble, and it was abandoned.

This alliance with foreign governments and the complicity of the court with the emigrants, roused a spirit in France, at first noble and heroic, till, led away by base and sanguinary men, grandeur of purpose merged into ferocity, and heroism became a thirst of blood such as mankind had never displayed before towards men of the same colour and language as themselves, and can be compared only to the conduct of the Spaniards in the newly discovered world.

But the first burst of generous indignation against the traitors who carried arms against their country, and the crowned foes who denounced the actual government of France as rebellious, to be punished by the devastation and subjection of the nation, found an echo in every patriotic heart not misled by enthusiasm for royalty. On the 27th of December Vergniaud proposed an address to the French people, which was greatly applauded though not adopted. Two days after Condorcet presented his declaration, which was received with triumphant and unanimous acclamations. This declaration is dignified and firm, and shows the just as well as generous spirit which animated the greater portion of the assembly, till the panic engendered by the advance of the armies threw the power into the hands of the ferocious minority. "At the moment when, for the first time since the acquirement of liberty,"--thus ran his manifesto,--"the French people may find themselves reduced to exercise the terrible right of war, her representatives owe to Europe and to all humanity a declaration of the motives that have guided the resolutions of France, and an exposition of the principles that will rule their conduct. The French nation renounces the entering on any war with a view of making conquests, and will never employ her force against the liberty of any country. Such is the sacred vow by which we have allied our welfare to the welfare of every other nation, and to which we will be faithful. France will take up arms with regret but with ardour, to insure her own safety, her internal tranquillity; and will lay them down with joy when she no longer fears for that liberty and equality which are become the only elements in which Frenchmen can live." When, soon after, the country seemed menaced by civil war, the departments regarding with fear and jealousy the proceedings in Paris, Condorcet again ascended the tribune to propose an exposition of their conduct, as due, not to the calumniators of the revolution, but to those timid and mistaken men, who, at a great distance, were led away by false and fabricated accounts. He then read an address which contained the history of the labours of the assembly and an exposition of its principles. The address was voted by acclamation, and ordered to be printed and distributed in the departments.

The integrity of Condorcet raised him high in the esteem of his countrymen; as springing from the class of nobles, his disinterestedness could not be doubted. He loved his country, he loved reason and knowledge, and virtuous conduct and benevolent sentiments. He was, with all this, a determined republican. His favourite theory being the perfectibility of mankind, he rejected that view of human nature which inculcates the necessity of ruling the many by the few, and sinking the majority of his fellow-creatures in ignorance and hard labour; he wished all to be enlightened as to their duties, and all to tend equally to the improvement of their intellectual and moral nature. These theories, if they be mistaken, emanate from benevolent and just feelings. They made him a democrat, because the very corner-stone of royalty and aristocracy is the setting apart a class of men to possess the better gifts of fortune and education, and the reduction of the rest to a state of intellectual dependence and physical necessity.

[Sidenote: 1792. Ætat. 48.]

When the king exercised his veto, and put a stop to the measures considered necessary by the assembly for the safety of France, Condorcet, even as early as the month of March, represented the monarchical power as at open war with the nation, and proposed that the king should be considered as having abdicated. His view met with few co-operators at that crisis, and was set aside. He busied himself, at the same time, in forming a plan of national education, and brought forward a system on a more philosophical and comprehensive scale than had hitherto been meditated. It was his design to secure to the human race, to use his own expressions, the means of satisfying their necessities, and securing their welfare; of knowing and exercising their rights, and of understanding and fulfilling their duties; giving scope to all to carry their industry to a state of perfection, and to render themselves capable of the social functions which they were called upon to exert; to develope to their extent the talents given them by nature; and thus to establish in the nation a real equality, so to meet the political equality established by law.

The system of instruction which was to realise so blessed a state of society he considered as properly placed in the hands of government. He looked forward, indeed, to the time when public establishments for education would become superfluous and even detrimental; but this would only be when right reason prevailed, and it was no longer necessary for the wiser few to labour to destroy the prejudices and mistakes of the ignorant many; when superstition should be no more; and when each man should find in his own knowledge, and in the rectitude of his mind, arms sufficient to combat every species of imposition.

Condorcet looked on virtue as capable of exact demonstration, as conducive to public and individual happiness, and on man as a sufficiently reasonable being to follow its dictates, if sufficiently enlightened, without the aid of religion or the coercion of punishment. He regarded the passions as capable of being controlled by the understanding. He, benevolent and conscientious, practising no vice, carefully extirpating from his mind all that he believed to be error, was to himself a mirror in which the whole human race was reflected. Also, like all the French politicians of that day, he wished to treat mankind like puppets, and fancied that it was only necessary to pull particular strings to draw them within the circle of order and reason. We none of us know the laws of our nature; and there can be little doubt that, if philosophers like Condorcet did educate their fellows into some approximation to their rule of right, the ardent feelings and burning imaginations of man would create something now un thought of, but not less different from the results he expected, than the series of sin and sorrow which now desolates the world. It is not for this that we would throw a slur over the upright endeavours of the pious and the good to improve their fellows; but we do over any endeavour of government to bind the intellect in chains. It was, therefore, in some degree, for the best, that his views were not followed out. When his plan for national education and a national society of arts and sciences, charged with the duty of overlooking and directing public instruction,--for the purpose not only of enlightening the present generation, but of preparing the human species for an indefinite advance in wisdom and virtue,--when this plan was presented by the chief Girondists to the court, a friend of Condorcet, struck with dismay at the degree of power that would accrue to the rulers, said, "If they adopt your plan, our freedom is destroyed." "Fear nothing," replied Condorcet, "ignorance and vanity will make them reject it." Unfortunately, the treaty carried on by the Girondists with the court on this occasion injured their popularity. The French were at a crisis that demanded that their rulers should think only of measures and acts adapted to it. The mountain party felt this, and acted for the day, and thus succeeded in overthrowing their rivals, who philosophically and calmly legislated for future generations, while their single object ought to have been to save the living one from the foreign foe and their own evil passions.

The manifesto of the duke of Brunswick was the first cause of the madness which was soon to make France an example of the crimes that may be committed by a people in the name of liberty. When first this manifesto spread indignation and fear through France, Condorcet made himself conspicuous by a speech proposing an address to the king to express the discontent of the assembly at his lukewarm disapprobation of the actions of the emigrants, and his want of energy in repulsing the offers of foreign potentates to deliver him from the hands of his subjects and the shackles of the constitution which he had accepted. The subsequent dethronement of the king and establishment of a republic were events after his own heart. [Sidenote: 1792.] A commission had been named, during the first days of August, to examine the question of the abolition of monarchy, and Condorcet was named reporter. He considered it, in the first place, necessary to explain to the people the grounds on which he went, and drew up a paper which he called "Instruction préparatoire sur l'Exercise du Droit de Souveraineté;" in which he expounded, that as foreign potentates had denounced every Frenchman who defended the liberties of his country as rebels to be punished by death, and as the monarch treacherously weakened their powers of defence against the foe, so was it right and necessary that the nation should take the sovereignty into their own hands. When the events of the 10th of August had sealed the fate of the unhappy Louis, Condorcet proposed a declaration of the motives that led to his being set aside, which, while it strongly accused the monarch and his court of betraying the cause of the people, was animated by a spirit of fairness, moderation, and dignity, that did honour to the cause which he espoused.

Condorcet's popularity was now at its height and he was courted even by the jacobins and the mountain party. He was invited by several departments to represent them in the new convention. Madame Roland accuses him of pusillanimity: perhaps her accusation is partly founded on the fact that at this moment of fierce rivalship and strife between the Girondists and Mountain, he rather strove to conciliate the latter than to drive the struggle to extremities. He had a high esteem for the talents of Danton, and often remarked, with regard to the jacobins, that it were better to moderate than to quarrel with them. He was named at this time one of the committee to draw up a constitution, and his labours were chiefly employed on this object.

Looking upon the king as the treacherous enemy of the new state of things in France, and therefore, according to his reasoning, of France itself, he did not hesitate to name Louis a traitor during the debate that followed the monarch's trial; but he did not vote for his death. "All different degrees of punishment for the same offence," he argued, "was an offence against equality. The punishment of conspirators is death; but this punishment is contrary to my principles, and I will never vote it. I cannot vote for imprisonment, for no law gives me the power; I vote for the heaviest punishment established in the penal code that is not death." He afterwards voted for the reprieve for the king until the peace; but the struggle of the Girondists to save the monarch's life was, as is known, useless.

In drawing up a constitution the philosopher thought more of future generations than the present: he considered France as ground cleared of all encumbrance, on which to raise an edifice of government designed in strict accordance to justice and the permanent welfare of mankind: to continue the metaphor, he gave no heed to the more than inequalities of soil,--the gulfs and chasms produced by the earthquake-revolution. His report of the labours of the committee, together with the speech he made on presenting it, was, however, received at first with acclamation, and ordered to be printed. The jacobins disapproved tacitly in the commencement, but by degrees they raised accusations against Condorcet on account of the limited power which he committed to the people. Underhand disapprobation was spread abroad, but did not become so current, but that the committee of public safety applied to him to draw up a manifesto, which the convention wished to address to every nation and government, with regard to the violation of the law of nations in the persons of four deputies delivered up by Dumouriez to the Austrians: they admired him as a writer, and believed that their cause would be eloquently and well defended by his pen. He wrote with great fervour both against Lafayette and Dumouriez, as having betrayed the cause of their country, and appealed against the conduct of Austria to the interests and sense of justice of every free country.

[Sidenote: 1793. Ætat. 49.]

Even on the approach of the 31st of May, notwithstanding his intimacy with Roland and other Girondists on whom the Mountain party were about to seize, Condorcet continued to be consulted and employed by the committee of public safety. Those of the girondists who, foreseeing the anarchy that must ensue from the triumph of the jacobins, considered their overthrow of more immediate importance than the repulsing the foe from the soil of France, disapproved of Condorcet's working for their enemies: he kept apart from both, while he laboured for the cause of the republic, and remarked that his friends were offended because he did not break with the committee of public safety; and the committee, on the other hand, desired that he should refrain from all intercourse with his friends. "I endeavour," he added, "that each party shall think less of itself and a great deal more of the commonwealth." He began to perceive, however, that it was impossible any longer to use measures of conciliation with Robespierre, but he hoped to restrain him by fear: the latter, however, triumphed. The 31st of May brought with it the decree of arrest of twenty-two Girondists: Condorcet was not among them. He might by silence and prudence have continued for some time longer to sit in the convention; but he saw with indignation the empty benches on which his friends used to appear, and the growing power of a ferocious oligarchy. He denounced the weakness of the convention, and the tyranny exercised over it by a few ambitious and resolute men, in a letter to his constituents, which was denounced and sent for examination to the committee of public safety. From this moment the jacobins marked him out also for a victim; and the ex-capuchin Chabot denounced him for having written against the new constitution of 1793; which superseded the one he had drawn up: he was summoned to the bar, and a decree of arrest passed against him.

The sanguinary characters and tenets of the leading jacobins had already made him say that no one was sure of six months of life, and he considered the decree of arrest synonymous to a sentence of death. He escaped pursuit, and concealed himself. A generous woman, before unknown to him, and who has never revealed her name to the world, gave him refuge in her house. Denounced on the 3d of October, as Brissot's accomplice, there was no doubt that had he been taken he had shared the fate of the deputies who were guillotined in the month of November; but his place of concealment was not suspected, and he remained in safety till the August of the following year. [Sidenote: 1794. Ætat. 50.] During this long seclusion, he projected occupation in writing. At first, he meditated detailing the history of his political career; but he reflected that his many labours for his country were irrefragable documents; and, more attached to opinions which he considered pregnant with the welfare of mankind, than to facts which were but the evanescent forms of change, he applied himself to developing his theories in an "Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind." This is his most celebrated work. It is full of error and even of intolerance; still the clearness of the views, the enthusiasm with which he developes them, the order, precision, and the originality of his theories, render it remarkable. He glances over the past, and argues that each succeeding epoch in the history of mankind has brought moral improvement and increase of knowledge. There are two views to be taken of human nature. Condorcet insists that the moderns have more knowledge and wisdom and moral power than the ancients. He founds this opinion on the great progress made in scientific truths, and does not hesitate also to oppose French literature to the Greek, as demonstrating the advance of the human intellect in every branch. He compares also the states, wars, and crimes of antiquity with modern society and institutions, and deduces that we are more virtuous, more humane, and more reasonable than preceding generations.

No greater poet has appeared since Homer composed the Iliad,--no more acute philosopher than Aristotle,--no more virtuous character than Socrates, nor sublimer hero than Regulus. By standing on ground reached by the ancients, the mass may climb higher than the masses that went before; but, in making progress, we do not develope more genius and sagacity, but rather less, than those who prepared our way. It is to be doubted, therefore, whether mankind can progress so as to produce specimens superior to Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, Regulus, and many others who adorned antiquity.

But it cannot be doubted, on the other hand, that progress has been made in the general diffusion of knowledge and in the amelioration of the state of society. Philosophers ought, therefore, not to dream of removing the bounds of human perfection, such as we find it among the best, but in bringing the many up to the standard of the few, and causing nations to understand and aim at wisdom and justice with the same ardour as individuals among them have been found to do.

Condorcet developed his views of human perfection while the principle of evil was making giant inroads in France, and blood and terror were the order of the day. Separated from all dear to him, his wife and child, and not daring himself to see the light of heaven, he did not lose the cheerfulness of his temper, nor mourn vainly over his disasters. In this situation, he wrote an epistle to his wife in the character of a Pole exiled to Siberia in 1768. In this are to be found a couplet since often quoted relative to political victims,--

"Ils m'ont dit, 'Choisis d'être oppresseur ou victime:' J'embrassai le malheur, et leur laissai le crime."

A couplet peculiarly applicable to him who would have been gladly received by the violent party, and had the way open to him to rule, instead of being sacrificed as a victim. He declares in this poem that the anticipation of a violent death did not alter the serenity of his soul, and speaks of the occupations that banished ennui from his solitary place of refuge.

He was soon to lose this shelter: a newspaper fell into his hands in which he read the decree that outlawed him, and denounced the pain of death against any one who should harbour one of the proscribed. He instantly resolved no longer to endanger his generous hostess,--she endeavoured to dissuade him from this fatal step, but in vain: he disguised himself as a countryman, and passed the barriers without a passport. He directed his steps to Sceaux, where he hoped to find refuge in the house of a friend; but he was absent in Paris, nor expected back for three days, and Condorcet was obliged to hide in the neighbouring quarries. After several days spent miserably in this spot, hunger forced him to enter the little inn of Chamont. The avidity with, which he ate the food placed before him, and his squalid appearance, drew the attention of a member of the committee of public safety of Sceaux, who happened to be present. He was asked for his passport, and, not having one, was arrested and interrogated. No ready he hung on the lips of the worshipper of truth, and his unsatisfactory answers, and a Horace found in his pocket with marginal notes in pencil, contributed to reveal his name. He was taken to Bourg-la-Reine. Such was his state of exhaustion that he fainted at Châtillon, and it was found necessary to mount him on a vine-dresser's horse. On his arrival at Bourg, he was thrown into a dungeon, and forgotten by the jailor for the space of twenty-four hours, when he was found dead; some suppose from the effects of poison; but the probabilities are that he died of exhaustion, hunger, and cold.