When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a municipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of their deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 had mitigated the loyalty that had even withstood the trial of the king’s flight. When the Legislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakable element of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addresses in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative what Barère afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid, labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither the hard force of Napoleon’s proclamations, nor the flowery eloquence of the Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such circumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagination and perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor the other, but only reason—a hard anvil, out of which he laboriously struck flashes and single sounds.
Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation of the Assembly, between a hostile court and a suspicious and distrustful nation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from the beginning desperate. In December 1791 the Legislative through its secretary informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king’s measures in the face of the menaces of foreign war.[30] Within eight months, when the king’s person was in captivity and his power suspended, the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king had treated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual league with the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly after the violent events of the Tenth of August 1792 are not edifying, and imply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye for revolutionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but most momentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr. Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked—a process truly called, ‘especially in times of swift change, one of the sorrowfullest tasks poor humanity has.’ You might read the Exposition of the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed the Convention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King,[31] without dreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out of distrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king away from his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated the very chamber that was thus professing to expound its motives for doing what the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power, in fact, was all outside the chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Under such circumstance it is of no interest to men to learn that ‘in the midst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, took its oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post; took the oath to save France, and looked about for means.’[32] Still more impotent and hollow, because still more pompous, is the address of six days later.[33] A few days after this, occurred the massacres of prisoners in September—scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody and iniquitous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland six years afterwards by English troops.
When the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris rejected Condorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of the Aisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and—a much more important personage—the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soon to stupefy the Convention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face set immovable as bronze: ‘An individual has no right to be either virtuous or celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly are not made to admire anybody.’ The electors of the department of the Aisne had unconsciously sent two typical revolutionists: the man of intellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. In their persons the Encyclopædia and the Guillotine met. Condorcet, who had been extreme in the Legislative, but found himself a moderate in the Convention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the new members: ‘Better try to moderate them than quarrel.’ But in this case, not even in their ruin, were fire and water reconciled.
On the first great question that the Convention had to decide—the fate of the king—Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wise man would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that the king was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for the punishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediate issue, whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or should be submitted to the people for ratification, he voted as a wise man should not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people. Such an appeal must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles, and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that, though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previously laid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that they were neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How, he asked, without violating every principle of jurisprudence, can you act at the same time as legislators constituting the crime, as accusers, and as judges? His proposal was that Lewis xvi. should be tried by a tribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body of the departments.[34] With true respect for Condorcet’s honourable anxiety that the conditions of justice should be rigorously observed—for, as he well said, ‘there is no liberty in a country where positive law is not the single rule of judicial proceedings’—it is difficult to see why the Convention, coming as it did fresh from the electoral bodies, who must have had the question what was to be done with the imprisoned king foremost in their minds, why the members of the Convention should not form as legitimate a tribunal as any body whose composition and authority they had themselves defined and created, and which would be chosen by the very same persons who less than a month before had invested them with their own offices. Reading this most scrupulous and juristic composition, we might believe the writer to have forgotten that France lay mad and frenzied outside the hall where he stood, and that in political action the question what is possible is at least as important as what is compatible with the maxims of scientific jurisprudence. It was to Condorcet’s honour as a jurisconsult that he should have had so many scruples; it is as much to his credit as a politician that he laid them aside and tried the king after all.
It is highly characteristic of Condorcet’s tenacity of his own view of the Revolution and of its methods, that on the Saturday (January 19, 1793) when the king’s fate was decided against Condorcet’s conviction and against his vote—the execution taking place on the Monday morning—he should have appealed to the Convention, at all events to do their best to neutralise the effect of their verdict upon Europe, by instantly initiating a series of humane reforms in the law among them, including the abolition of the punishment of death. ‘The English ministers,’ he cried, ‘are now seeking to excite that nation against us. Do you suppose that they will venture to continue their calumnious declamations, when you can say to them: “We have abolished the penalty of death, while you still preserve it for the theft of a few shillings? You hand over debtors to the greed or spite of their creditors; our laws, wiser and more humane, know how to respect poverty and misfortune. Judge between us and you, and see to which of the two peoples the reproach of inhumanity may be addressed with most justice.”’[35] This was the eve of the Terror. Well may Comte distinguish Condorcet as the one philosopher who pursued in the midst of the tempest his regenerating meditations.
But let us banish the notion that the history of the Convention is only the history of the guillotine. No chamber in the whole annals of governing assemblies ever displayed so much alertness, energy, and capacity, in the face of difficulties that might well have crushed them. Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemy from the frontiers, they at once in the spirit of Condorcet’s speech, made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less noble task of legal reforms and political reorganisation. The unrivalled ingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts of compact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. The civil code was drawn up in a month.[36] Constitutions abounded. Cynical historians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months that followed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution; and, so far as they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills, their faith was assuredly not according to knowledge. It shows, however, the fundamental and seemingly ineradicable respect for authority which their history has engendered in the French, that even in this, their most chaotic hour, they craved order and its symbols.
Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sièyes, and others, was a member of the first committee for framing a constitution. They laboured assiduously from September to February 1793, when the project was laid upon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet’s composition.[37] The time was inauspicious. The animosities between the Girondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious and deadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate and terror, Condorcet—at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproaches against their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating the Mountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in his head nor a feeling in his heart—still pertinaciously kept crying out for the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. The revolution of the second of June came, and swept the Girondins out of the Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days were numbered. ‘What did you do all that time?’ somebody once asked of a member of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning and which lasted until Thermidor in 1794. ‘I lived,’ was the reply. Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life as Danton or Saint-Just cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down among the men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood the Mountain to the face.
Hérault de Séchelles, at the head of another committee, brought in a new constitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Of this, Sièyes said privately, that it was ‘a bad table of contents.’ Condorcet denounced it publicly, and, with a courage hardly excelled, he declared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyed the integrity of the national representation. The Bill he handled with a severity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of its designers. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot, one of those weak and excitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the intensity, multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercer air of such an event as the Revolution is a real poison, rose and in the name of the Committee of General Security called the attention of the Chamber to what he styled a sequel of the Girondist Brissot. This was no more nor less than Condorcet’s document criticising the new constitution. ‘This man,’ said Chabot, ‘has sought to raise the department of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he has happened to sit by the side of a handful of savants of the Academy, it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic.’[38] So a decree was passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in the list of those who were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the Third of October for conspiring against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. He was condemned in his absence, and declared to be hors la loi.
This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhood upwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the common weal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will best remember his name, though only a few months intervened between his flight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enacted he fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet, a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and one of those beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach. ‘Is he an honest and virtuous man?’ she asked; ‘in that case let him come, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized.’ The same night Condorcet intrusted his life to her keeping, and for nine months he remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of the execution of the Girondins condemned on the same day with himself, he perceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protectress, and made up his mind to flee. ‘I am an outlaw,’ he said, ‘and if I am discovered you will be dragged to the same death.’ ‘The Convention,’ Madame Vernet answered, with something of the heroism of more notable women of that time, ‘may put you out of the law; it has not the power to put you out of humanity. You stay.’ This was no speech of the theatre. The whole household kept the most vigorous watch over the prisoner thus generously detained, and for many months Madame Vernet’s humane firmness was successful in preventing his escape. This time—his soul grievously burdened by anxiety as to the fate of his wife and child, and by a restless eagerness not to compromise his benefactress, a bloody death staring him every moment in the face—Condorcet spent in the composition, without the aid of a single book, of his memorable work on the progress of the human mind. Among the many wonders of an epoch of portents, this feat of intellectual abstraction is not the least amazing.
When his task was accomplished, Condorcet felt with more keenness than ever the deadly peril in which his presence placed Madame Vernet. He was aware that to leave her house was to seek death, but he did not fear. He drew up a paper of directions to be given one day to his little daughter, when she should be of years to understand and follow them. They are written with minute care, and though tender and solicitous, they show perfect composure. His daughter is above all things to banish from her mind every revengeful sentiment against her father’s enemies; to distrust her filial sensibility, and to make this sacrifice for her father’s own sake. This done, he marched downstairs, and having by an artful stratagem thrown Madame Vernet off her guard, he went out at ten o’clock in the morning imperfectly disguised into the street. This was the fifth of April 1794. By three in the afternoon, exhausted by fatigue which his strict confinement for nine months made excessive, he reached the house of a friend in the country, and prayed for a night’s shelter. His presence excited less pity than alarm. The people gave him refreshment, and he borrowed a little pocket copy of Horace, with which he went forth into the loneliness of the night. He promised himself shelter amid the stone quarries of Clamart. What he suffered during this night, the whole day of the sixth of April, the night, and again the next day, there is no one to tell.