Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de  ( born Sept. September 17, 1743 , Ribemont, France—died March 29, 1794 , Bourg-la-Reine )  French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators of the ideas of progress, or the indefinite perfectibility of mankind.


Condorcet was the friend of almost all the distinguished men of his time and a zealous propagator of the progressive views then current among French men of letters. A protégé of the French philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, he took an active part in the preparation of the Encyclopédie. He was elected to the permanent secretaryship of the Academy of Sciences in 1777 and to the French Academy in 1782 and was a member of other European academies. In 1785 he published his Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions), a remarkable work that has a distinguished place in the history of the doctrine of probability. A second edition, greatly enlarged and completely recast, appeared in 1805 under the title of Éléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux de hasard, à la loterie et aux jugements des hommes.

In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), who was said to have been one of the most beautiful women of her time. Her salon at the Hôtel des Monnaies, where Condorcet lived in his capacity as inspector general of the mint, was quite famous.

Condorcet published his Vie de M. Turgot in 1786 and his Vie de Voltaire in 1789. These biographies of his friends reveal his sympathy with Turgot’s economic theories about mitigating the suffering of the French populace before the French Revolution and with Voltaire’s opposition to the church. Both works were widely and eagerly read and are perhaps, from a purely literary point of view, the best of Condorcet’s writings.

The outbreak of the French Revolution, which he greeted with enthusiasm, involved him in a great deal of political activity. He was elected to represent Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became its secretary; was active in the reform of the educational system; was chief author of the address to the European powers in 1791; and in 1792 he presented a scheme for a system of state education, which was the basis of that ultimately adopted. Condorcet was one of the first to declare for a republic, and in August 1792 he drew up the declaration justifying the suspension of the king and the summoning of the National Convention. In the convention he represented the département of Aisne and was a member of the committee on the constitution. His draft of a new constitution, representative of the Girondins, the more moderate political group during the Revolution, was rejected, however, in favour of that of the Jacobins, a more radical political group whose dominating figure was Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI he voted against the death penalty. But his independent attitude became dangerous in the wake of the Revolution when Robespierre’s radical measures triumphed, and his opposition to the arrest of the Girondins led to his being outlawed.




Wholly a man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and equal rights for women—including woman suffrage—and the abolition of slavery, Condorcet sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. Rather than elucidate human behaviour, as had been done thus far, by recourse to either the moral or physical sciences, he sought to explain it by a merger of the two sciences that eventually became transmuted into the discipline of sociology.