Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743-94)

Condorcet, one of the Enlightenment’s most important intellectuals, contributed to the French Revolution (1789) with his writings and social reform programs. However, it was the backlash of that same Revolution that felled him, when the Montagnards issued a warrant of arrest against him (1793), for betraying the revolutionary spirit by proposing a constitutional monarchy. His flight and the threat of the guillotine would have weakened the spirit of any man in such a precarious state of health as Condorcet. Instead, he continued to work on his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, preserving intact the optimism of the Enlightenment and seeing in the evolution of scientific and technological knowledge the source of the indefinite progress of mankind. Despite his defeat, when Condorcet died in prison, he still believed that the Revolution was necessary to free societies from the darkness of the Ancien Règime