Swiss geologist and meteorologist (1727–1817)

De Luc came from an Italian family, which had moved to Switzerland from Tuscany in the 15th century; he was born in the Swiss lakeside city of Geneva. He initially concentrated on commercial activities with science as a side line but, in 1773, after the collapse of his business, he moved to England where he devoted himself to science. He was appointed as reader to Queen Charlotte retaining that post until his death.

In a series of letters Sur l'histoire de la terre (On the History of the Earth) addressed to Queen Charlotte in 1779, James Hutton in 1790, and Johann Blumenbach in 1798, De Luc, following in the tradition of Thomas Burnet, tried to write a history of the Earth that took account of the advances in geology yet was still compatible with the Creation as described in Genesis.

De Luc proposed that the Earth itself was old though the flood was recent. The flood was caused by a collapse of the existing lands causing their inundation by the oceans and the emergence of the present continents. As these had been the prediluvial ocean floor it was only reasonable to suppose that they should contain marine fossils. De Luc thus explained one of the puzzles facing early geologists – the presence of marine fossils in the center of continents.

De Luc opposed Hutton's fluvial theory that such major terrestrial features as valleys are the result of the still continuing action of the rivers. He pointed out that many valleys contain no rivers, that rivers far from eroding actually deposit material, and that there seems to be no relation between the size of the river and the valley it is supposed to have created. His main objection was over downstream lakes, for in this case, when the enormous amount of material eroded from the valley is considered, De Luc argued that the lake should have been filled in long before. Hutton's unsatisfactory answer was that such infilling does take place but that the lakes are much younger than the rivers. This issue was not finally resolved until the crucial role of glaciation was established by Louis Agassiz some fifty years later.

De Luc was also a major figure in meteorological research. His two works, Recherches sur la modification de l'atmosphère (1772; Studies on Atmospheric Change) and Idées sur la météorologie (1786–87; Thoughts on Meteorology), made important suggestions for advances in instrumental design. His most important achievement was his formula, in 1791, for converting barometric readings into height, which provided the first accurate measurements of mountain heights.

(b Brussels, bapt 10 Sept 1631; d Paris, 28 Oct 1681). Nephew of (1) Philippe de Champaigne. His uncle sent for him, following the death of his own son, to be his pupil and assistant. The earliest paintings attributed to Jean-Baptiste, such as a double portrait (1645; Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen) that he executed in collaboration with Nicolas de Platte Montagne, show that he had been an apt student. In 1658 his uncle reluctantly allowed him to make an 18-month stay in Italy; while there, he was deeply impressed by the paintings of Raphael

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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The French thinker Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), expressed the spirit of the Enlightenment in reform proposals and writings on progress. He was the only philosophe to participate in the French Revolution.

Born in Ribemont in Picardy on Sept. 17, 1743, the Marquis de Condorcet was educated at the Jesuit college in Reims and later at the College of Navarre in Paris. He excelled in mathematics and in 1765 wrote the Essay on Integral Calculus. In 1769 he became a member of the Academy of Science, later becoming its perpetual secretary, and in 1782 was elected to the French Academy. He married Sophie de Grouchy in 1786, and their home became one of the famous salons of the period.

Prior to the French Revolution, Condorcet wrote biographies of A.R.J. Turgot and Voltaire and essays on the application of the theory of probabilities to popular voting, on the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, and on the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. In 1791 he was elected to the Legislative Assembly and later to the National Convention, where he continued to manifest his liberal and egalitarian sentiments.

In the report of the Committee on Public Education, Condorcet advocated universal primary school education and the establishment of a self-regulating educational system under the control of a National Society of Sciences and Arts to protect education from political pressures. However, the Legislative Assembly was hostile to all autonomous corporate structures and ignored Condorcet's plan. His proposal for a new constitution, establishing universal male suffrage, proportional representation, and local self-government, was similarly set aside by the Jacobin-dominated National Convention, which considered it too moderate.

Condorcet's moderate democratic leanings and his vote against the death penalty for Louis XVI led to his being outlawed by the Jacobin government on July 8, 1793. He went into hiding in the home of a close friend, Madame Varnet, where he wrote the Sketch of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, his most famous and most optimistic work. This capsulized history of progress presented a set of intellectual and moral goals toward which men ought to work, and it was based on the utilitarian conviction that invention and progressive thought arise out of social need. According to Condorcet, the future progress of reason had become inevitable with the invention of the printing press and the advances in science and criticism. Rather than emphasizing the role of the solitary genius as the agent of progress, the Sketch stressed the dissemination of useful knowledge among the masses.

After 8 months of hiding, Condorcet fled Paris but was arrested on March 27, 1794, and imprisoned in Bourgla-Reine. On March 29 he was found dead in his cell. His identity was unknown, and it is ironic that this critic of classical education was eventually identified by a copy of Horace's Epistles that he had been carrying at the time of his arrest.

Further Reading

The best biography of Condorcet is Jacob Salwyn Schapiro, Condorcet and the Rise of Liberalism (1934; new ed. 1962). There is an excellent analysis of Condorcet's philosophy in Frank Edward Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (1962). Ann Elizabeth Burlingame, Condorcet: The Torch Bearer of the French Revolution (1930), is still useful.

(1743-94) French scientist, revolutionary, and political theorist. Born into the aristocracy, and originally intended to be a priest or a soldier, Condorcet escaped both by becoming a mathematician and soon being taken under the wings of powerful patrons associated with the Academy of Sciences in Paris and with the Encyclopédie. His professional career was made in the Academy, whose permanent secretary he became. In the 1760s he established himself as a leading mathematician with his work on integral calculus. Condorcet was associated with Voltaire and other figures of the French Enlightenment in their campaigns against the legal system, which had led to the persecution and judicial murder of religious dissidents. This led him towards his grand project of applying probability theory to social science in the shape of his jury theorem.

In Condorcet's view, social science should be studied with the same tools as engineering or biology. Probability was the key to all the sciences. For example, a naval engineer cannot design an unsinkable ship, but can design one that would sink only in the most improbably violent storm—say, one that occurred only once in every 400 years. Analogously, a designer of jury systems cannot design one that will never convict an innocent suspect. But if a jury system is set up in which the reliability of each juror—the probability that the juror will make the correct observation on whether the accused is guilty or not—is known, the probability that an innocent person will be convicted can be held down to an acceptable level by requiring a majority of a certain number of jurors to convict. Condorcet was the first to apply the advances in probability theory made by Thomas Bayes (see Richard Price) and the Bernoulli family to social science.

Condorcet's probability theory had an uneasy relationship with his theory of voting. His chief work is the Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (Essay on the application of mathematics to the probability of majority decisions, 1785). This is so difficult that even the meaning of the title is hard for the non-specialist to understand. The first clear exposition of it was by Black in 1958, and the Essai was not fully understood until the 1980s. In it, Condorcet tries to select the voting procedure that is most likely to select the ‘correct’ result. This is open to the objection that, generally, there is no such thing. In a jury trial, the accused either did or did not commit the crime as charged. There is a correct answer to this question, which the jury tries to find. But there is no correct answer to the question ‘Which party should govern Britain for the next five years?’; there are merely interests and opinions. However, Condorcet's method led him to a discovery which, although it all but made his own approach unworkable, came to create the entirely new subject of social choice, nearly 200 years after Condorcet's death. This was the discovery of majority-rule cycles. When there are at least three voters and at least three options, it is always possible that option A beats B by a majority, B beats C, and C beats A, all at the same time. Condorcet proposed ways of identifying what he regarded as the ‘true’ majority winner whether or not there was a cycle among the winning options (see Condorcet winner).

Condorcet is also well known for his Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (Sketch of a history of the progress of the human mind, 1795). The philosopher of the Enlightenment, in hiding from the murderous politicians of the revolutionary Terror who were soon to claim his life, paints a serene picture of the progress of humanity from superstition, religion, and barbarism to mathematics, probability, and enlightenment. Widely regarded as the most tragi-comic product of the French Enlightenment, the Esquisse is gaining renewed attention as its connection with Condorcet's scientific work is understood. It was the unacknowledged precursor of Comte's similar work. Condorcet was also one of the first feminist political writers.

Condorcet was first involved in practical politics as a trusted aide of Turgot during the latter's brief ministry. He returned to politics as the French Revolution progressed. The height of his power was as a leading member of the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention in 1792-3. He drafted a report on public instruction that was immediately overtaken by wars and riots, but came to inspire the centralized and uniform French school system as it has remained to this day. And he wrote a constitution for France embodying his ideal voting procedures. This was debated in early 1793, and Condorcet's voting procedures were actually implemented in neighbouring Geneva (with chaotic results). But in June 1793 the Girondin members of the Convention were expelled at the demand of rioting members of the commune of Paris. Condorcet was not a Girondin, but he joined them in defeat by complaining that the victorious Jacobins had scrapped his constitution in favour of one written by Robespierre which failed to understand the theory of voting. This sealed Condorcet's fate. He was expelled from the Convention, hid in the house of a brave Parisian landlady, escaped from there in order to avoid her being guillotined for harbouring an outlaw, was arrested when he turned up, starving, in a village inn which happened to be run by an informer for the Committee of Public Safety, and was found dead in prison the next day.

Condorcet's ideas were more influential than his contemporaries recognized. Through his close friendship with Jefferson, he tried to influence the American constitution-making process. In this, as in other areas, his true stature is only now emerging.

For more information on Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat marquis de Condorcet, visit Britannica.com.

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas, marquis de (1749-94). ‘The last of the philosophes’, as Michelet called him, was a mathematician and scientist who involved himself in Revolutionary politics and perished by it, leaving an exemplary statement of Enlightenment beliefs. This level-headed rationalist has acquired a tragic aura from the fact that his most famous work was written in the shadow of imminent death.

He came of a noble Picardy family, studied with the Jesuits, and soon showed remarkable mathematical gifts. This brought him to the attention of d'Alembert, who introduced him to the salons and the world of the philosophes, notably Turgot. In 1769 he entered the Académie des Sciences, and in 1773 published his Éloges des académiciens morts depuis l'an 1666 jusqu'en 1699, a sequel to the work of Fontenelle and a pioneering text in the history of science. He was made Secrétaire Perpétuel of the Academy in 1776, and composed further éloges.

In 1774 he was appointed to a post in the ministry of finance by Turgot, whose economic reforms he defended in a series of pamphlets. On his patron's fall he returned to mathematical work, concentrating on probability theory, which he wanted to see applied to social science and politics. In 1782 he was elected to the Académie Française, and began to devote himself increasingly to political activity, notably on behalf of women and blacks. In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy, who was 20 years his junior.

Condorcet had supported the American Revolution; in 1789 he welcomed the Revolutionary movement in France. He joined the Jacobin club, and was elected to the Assemblée Législative and the Convention, where his position was close to that of Brissot and the Girondins. In 1792 he presented an important project for the reform of public education, and thereafter worked on a revised constitution, which was never implemented. After the Girondins' fall, his arrest was ordered; he went into hiding for eight months and was found dead in his cell, probably by suicide, on the day following his arrest.

During his last months Condorcet wrote the work for which he is now remembered, the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain, the outline of a projected magnum opus. Setting out a vision of humanity's progress in ten époques, it is at the same time ‘philosophical history’, history of science, and a political profession of faith. Against religious obscurantism and political oppression, human progress is traced equally in science and in morality; for Concorcet better science meant a better society. The ninth époque, a tableau of Enlightenment from Descartes to the Revolution, is followed by a tenth which paints a golden future; man's perfectibility, aided by the new mathematical science, will allow progress to continue indefinitely. The Esquisse is the best 18th-c. exposition of the new doctrine of progress, and a poignant testament of the ‘age of reason’.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• K. M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (1975)
• E. and R. Badinter, Condorcet, un intellectuel en politique (1988)

Condorcet, Marquis de (1743-94) French mathematician and social theorist. Condorcet was educated by Jesuits, and became the permanent Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, for which he was qualified by his mathematical writings, in 1776. The eulogies (Éloges) for dead members that he composed are quintessential documents of the French Enlightenment. Condorcet believed in the progress and perfectibility of mankind, aided by the application of mathematical methods to the moral and political sciences. His Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions (‘Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions’, 1785) was an early example of a long French tradition of mathematical treatment of the social sciences (see also inverse methods, Laplace, rule of succession, voters' paradox). His other major work is the optimistic, indeed visionary, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795, trs. as Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795), often cited as being one of the targets of Malthus.

(märē' zhäN äNtwän' nēkôlä' kärētä' märkē' də kôNdôrsā') , 1743–94, French mathematician, philosopher, and political leader, educated at Reims and Paris. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1769 and of the French Academy in 1782. His work on the theory of probability (1785) was a valuable contribution to mathematics. Condorcet took part in the French Revolution, but, opposing the extremes of the Jacobins, he was condemned and died in prison. His best-known work is Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795; tr. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1955). In that work Condorcet traced human development through nine epochs to the French Revolution and predicted in the 10th epoch the ultimate perfection of man.

Bibliography

See studies by K. M. Baker (1982), L. Rosenfield (1984), and E. Rothschild (2001).

Condorcet, Marie-Jean Caritat, Marquis De (full name Marie Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat; 1743–1794), French Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician, and radical politician during the French Revolution. Scion of a provincial noble family (he was raised by his pious widowed mother in the Picardy region of northern France), Condorcet was arguably the most important member of the last generation of Enlightenment philosophers.

First educated by the Reims Jesuits, whose physical and psychological cruelty he detested, he nevertheless was a brilliant student. In 1758 he entered the College of Navarre of the University of Paris, celebrated for mathematics and experimental physics. Condorcet was mentored by Girault de Kéroudon, a gifted teacher of natural philosophy who encouraged his talent for abstract mathematics. Condorcet defended his thesis in 1759 before the great mathematician d'Alembert (1717–1783), who became his second mentor. His first major mathematical paper was accepted in 1764 by the Academy of Sciences (which accepted him in 1769) and brought him quick recognition from the scientific community.

Condorcet's life, however, was not limited to pure mathematics. From 1770 on, he was one of the philosophers trying to reshape the French state. With Julie de l'Espinasse, the celebrated salon hostess, d'Alembert introduced him to the community of the encyclopedists. Condorcet was elected to the Académie Française in 1782 and in 1786 married his beloved Sophie de Grouchy. Convention attributes his ferocious sense of injustice and his dedication to secular public schooling to the intolerance of his noble relatives and the cruelty of the Jesuits, but they also came from his pitiless logical analysis of the events around him. A protegé of Turgot, finance minister of Louis XVI, Condorcet worked tirelessly to reform the financial system of France according to the principles of free trade; following Voltaire, he argued against the injustice of the French legal system and for the abolition of slavery and capital punishment. In the 1780s the violent struggles between the parlements and the monarch led him to develop a "Political Arithmetic": mathematically argued papers on topics of public import. The last gasp of the Enlightenment, rationalizing the interactions between political agents, it was an antithesis to Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws or Rousseau's Social Contract. "Concerning Elections" argues, for example, that elections should create statistical consensus concerning the logic of judicial propositions, this democracy depending on a public education grounded in a perfected language forcing people to react according to logic and not personal interest.

During the French Revolution, Condorcet was an active public figure. In the final years of the ancien régime, his refusal to compromise philosophical principles for political expediency had made him many enemies. His international reputation nevertheless enabled him to serve various finance ministers and to be a member of the Committee on Public Instruction, which produced the first systematic proposal for the secular public schooling he considered the bedrock of a functioning republic. He supported the abolition of titles and of the monarchy and the creation of a French Republic. Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and the Constitutional Convention in 1792, he wrote a daring constitution that was never adopted, as the Jacobins feared its consequences for their own election prospects.

Detested by the Right as a traitor and by the Left as a threat, Condorcet was finally proscribed by the Committee on Public Safety in July 1793. Hidden by an elderly widow in Paris, ill, and in a state of moral dejection, he wrote, at Sophie's request, his most famous work, the Sketch of a Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Spirit, a brilliant history of intellectual development in the great Enlightenment tradition of Buffon, and a vision of unlimited human social progress. In March of 1794, fearing the house was to be searched, he fled to the countryside. He was captured and found dead two days later in his cell. Some believe he was murdered; still others believe he committed suicide or that, suffering from exposure, he died of a stroke.

A martyr to the Terror, Condorcet was nonetheless a founding father of republican France. Many of his political principles made their way into later constitutions. The French civil service, as heart of the state, owes its soul to his idea that civil servants function correctly when their education induces them to perceive the logical procedures shared by all human beings and to put them into the service of that same totality, the public. The balance between individual liberty and the particularly French notion of "solidarity" here finds its source in Condorcet's mathematization of social and political concepts.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Condorcet, Jean Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de. Arithmétique politique: textes rares ou inédits (1767–1789). Edited by Bernard Bru and Pierre Crépel. Paris, 1994.

——. The Political Theory of Condorcet. Translated by Fiona Sommerlad and Iain Mc Lean. Oxford, 1989–1991.

——. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Translated by June Barraclough; with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire. London, 1955. Translation of Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain.

——. Sur les élections et autres texts. Paris, 1986.

Secondary Sources

Badinter, Elisabeth, and Robert Badinter. Condorcet. Un intellectuel en politique. Paris, 1988. This is the classic modern biography of Condorcet in French.

Baker, Keith Michael. Condorcet, From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago, 1975. The standard work in English on Condorcet.

—WILDA CHRISTINE ANDERSON

(1363-1429)

French theologian and chancellor of the University of Paris. De Gerson was the author of many works, including the Examination of Spirits, which contains rules for distinguishing true revelations from false, and the popular Astrology Reformed.

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