Condorcet, JEAN ANTOINE NICOLAS DE CARTAT, MARQUIS DE, an eminent French author, was born, the son of a cavalry officer, in the little town of Ribemont, near St Quentin, in the department of Aisne, on September 17, 1743. In childhood he breathed the closest atmosphere of clerical and aristocratic exclusiveness, with the result of making him in after-years the enemy of all privilege and a thoroughgoing sceptic. Condorcet, after distinguishing himself in the Jesuit school at Rheims, began his mathematical studies at the age of thirteen, at the College of Navarre in Paris. His success was rapid and brilliant; and the high approval of Clairaut and D'Alembert determined his future. His Essai sur le Calcul Integral (1765) obtained for him a seat in the Academy, and he became perpetual secretary in 1777. He took an active part in the Encyclopédie. On the outbreak of the Revolution he made eloquent speeches and wrote famous pamphlets on the popular side, was sent by Paris to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, and in 1792 became president of the Assembly. He voted that the king should receive the most severe punishment except death, and as deputy for Aisne in the National Con- vention, he voted usually with the Girondists. Accused and condemned by the extreme party, he found refuge in the house of a generous lady, Madame Vernet, for eight months; but driven to change his place of concealment, he was recognised and arrested. Imprisoned in the gaol of Bourg-la-Reine on the 7th April 1794, he was found dead the next morning, whether by disease or poison was never known.
His profession of faith, in a letter to Turgot, which was written when he left college at seventeen years of age, lays stress on moral sympathy as the source of all virtue. His constancy in moral principle was fitly associated with perfect consistency in politics. He raised a great commotion by his attempt to apply the calculus of probabilities in the domain of jurisprudence, and of the moral and political sciences. In his Progrès de l'Esprit Humain, written in hiding, he insisted on the justice and necessity of establishing a perfect equality of civil and political rights between the individuals of both sexes, and proclaimed the indefinite perfectibility of the human race. Complete editions of his works have been issued in 1804 (21 vols.) and 1849 (12 vols., containing a biography by Arago). See Morley's Critical Miscellanies, Comte's Philosophie Positive, and Flint's History of the Philosophy of History.