Abstract
Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.
Keywords
This article analyses the concept of democracy in the first half of the French revolutionary decade. The focus is to revisit the term’s initial phase of transformation from an ancient Athenian form of government ruled by a general citizen assembly and magistrates appointed by lot to a modern representative regime essentially based on the mechanism of voting and elections. ‘Democracy’ in the eighteenth century was a term used to refer to what we now call direct democracy, and before the French Revolution instances were rare where adjectives such as ‘representative’ were affixed to make it refer to a polity feasible in large societies. 1 In 1789 it was still natural for contemporaries to understand ‘democracy’ as a political force that stood against, not with, ‘representation’. This is succinctly put by Bernard Manin: ‘what today we call representative democracy has its origins in a system of institutions that was in no way initially perceived as a form of democracy or of government by the people’. 2 The terminology of ‘representative democracy’ would have shocked most eighteenth-century thinkers, who only saw a diametric opposition between the two words constituting the term.
The approach taken by this article is not to place the proponents of ‘democracy’ on a direct line of descent from the Enlightenment ideas that seem, from today’s view, to conform to the notion of representative government or representative democracy. Instead, I wish to take seriously the eighteenth-century usage of the term ‘democracy’ and bring the historical actors’ choice of terminology into relief as a way of historicizing the transformation of words and their implied meanings. Understood in its eighteenth-century sense of the term, democracy, unlike republicanism, was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force. 3 For most of the protagonists of the Atlantic ‘democratic revolution’ who steered the various revolutions in their early stages, ‘democracy’ was hardly the goal. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. Veneration for the culture of antiquity more often than not excluded respect for classical democracy. Thus Voltaire made it clear in his letter to Frederick II that his request for the Prussian king ‘to become the restorer of the fine arts of Greece’ by no means entailed restoring ‘Athenian democracy’. He added: ‘I do not like the government of scoundrels at all’. 4
The first full-fledged theorization of a political project with the name of démocratie représentative happened only after the Thermidor, when a group of democrats elaborated on the legacy of democratic thought developed during the first phases of the French Revolution. Even then, the newly combined notion was stoutly opposed to that of ‘representative government’ espoused most prominently by Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, 5 the Revolution’s most cherished constitutional theorist who regarded ‘democracy’ as a regime in which the people ‘could believe in unlimited powers and kill each other in an act of madness’. Sieyès made it clear that there could be no such thing as ‘representative democracy’: mixing representation with democracy was tantamount to entering ‘a chaos of contradictions’. Democracy gave too prominent a place to the passions, he asserted, and ‘representative government’ was thus the only viable organizing principle of modern republics. 6
In pursuing ‘democracy’ in the 1790s, this article reads the revolutionaries’ writings and speeches within the context of the Enlightenment’s historical anxiety about the fit between modern commercial society and political liberty. 7 I follow the advice given by John Dunn in Breaking Democracy’s Spell and try to avoid the line of Whiggish triumphalism of democratic ascendancy which naïvely assumes that ‘democracy’ is the ‘rule of law’ and ‘good government’. 8 Contemporary debate has indeed much to gain from considering the historical moment when the viability of the long-defamed ‘democracy’ could not be assumed (as it is now) but still had to be strenuously argued for, within a context of intellectual legacy that rendered such arguments extremely implausible but at the same time within a context of revolutionary political conjuncture that granted enormous heuristic ground for competing political visions to contest each other.
The protagonist in this examination is Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, whose thoughts in various fields have attracted historians, political theorists and mathematicians. There already exists a copious amount of research considering him as a mathematician, as a theorist of education, as a constitutional thinker who drafted in 1793 a version of the first radically democratic constitution, and as a probability theorist of collective judgement. Although David Williams’ Condorcet and Modernity is a comprehensive survey of Condorcet’s thought, it deals insufficiently with his political speculations after 1789 in relation to democracy. 9 The same limitations are found in the works of Keith Baker, Catherine Kintzler, Emma Rothschild and the Badinters, even though they are classical works that place Condorcet at the centre of the French Enlightenment. These works focus less on Condorcet’s idea of democracy even when they delve into his ‘democratic’ thoughts on society, education and political economy. 10 Nadia Urbinati’s Representative Democracy provides a dense analysis of Condorcet’s views on democracy. It has the merit of offering valuable considerations on the relation between the people and the representatives, the role of discussion and the importance of thinking in terms of time and immediacy from the vantage point of current politics. Urbinati’s exemplary analysis of ‘representative democracy’ can nonetheless be significantly amended from a historical perspective by placing Condorcet in the context of the predicaments of his own time: namely, how to avoid at once despotism, military government and popular anarchy; in other words, how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society. 11 In an attempt to complement the existing scholarship on Condorcet, this article aims to trace the historical transformation of ‘democracy’ and demonstrate that in the first half of the revolutionary decade Condorcet was the thinker who touched the heart of the problem of his time and who most significantly contributed to the later view of ‘democracy’ as a viable pathway to a precarious yet promising future of inclusive liberty and educational improvement.
Democracy in the Revolution of Natural Rights and Popular Sovereignty
A deeply negative opinion on ‘democracy’ prevailed among Europe’s learned circles before the French Revolution. 12 For a long time, democracy had been ‘a term of abuse, usually yoked with labels such as “rabble”, “herd” or “mob.”’ 13 It was ‘the worst form of government imaginable’. 14 The article ‘democracy’ in Jean-Baptiste-René Robinet’s Dictionnaire universel stated, relying heavily on Montesquieu, that ‘democracy could very rarely guard against these two pitfalls’ of either the ‘spirit of inequality that leads to aristocracy’ or the ‘spirit of extreme equality that leads to despotism of one’. The ‘fate of this government, admirable in its principle’ was to ‘almost inevitably … proceed from a precious liberty to the greatest servitude’ ridden with ‘confusion and disorder’. The ancient history of Greece and Rome and the modern history of Florence and Genoa seemed to prove that ‘popular government was the weakest and the worst of governments’ due to the ‘ignorance … of the common people’ who were made by nature ‘to be governed, not at all to govern others’. 15 Democracy was something that governments ‘degenerate[d] into’. 16 It was ‘an error to argue that liberty existed in democracy [because there were] a thousand tyrants instead of one’. 17
Even as we enter the revolutionary period, ‘democracy’ is still hardly ever used in a positive sense in the minutes of the parliamentary debates in France. In 1789 it was still widely considered to be on par with despotism, as expressed in the paired-up equation of ‘the disorders of the deadliest democracy’ and ‘the abyss of democracy’. 18 ‘Partisans of democracy’ were deemed ‘makers of all disorders’. 19 In 1790 an expression about being ‘throw[n] into democracy’ was employed to designate a political catastrophe. 20 In 1791 we still witness the usage of the term unchanged in phrases like ‘the fanaticism of democracy’. 21 These traits allegedly rendered democracy unfit for any state, but particularly for large, modern and commercial states where the people could be expected to be neither virtuous nor continuously assembled. In 1793 it was once again affirmed, this time by the ‘provisional representatives of Leuven’, that the territory of France had historically proven to be ‘already too immense to form a democracy forever stable and flourishing’. 22 Writings in English from the period carried the same opinion: it was deemed proven by history that democracy was ‘subversive of social order and destructive of happiness’, 23 and democrats were deemed apt to ‘excite troubles’. 24
The ‘Roman’ anxiety was widely shared by the philosophes: the idea that popular rule led to either anarchy or military government, based on the eighteenth-century understanding of the history of Rome, had constantly been evoked to warn against the dangers of democracy. 25 From this perspective, power could not be given to the people because they were prone to hand it over to famous generals. Power had to be divided and limited by careful constitutional arrangements. The common backbone of the numerous theories of ‘representative government’ in the French Revolution was that representation checked ‘democracy’ and thereby checked despotism. 26 The term ‘democracy’ was mostly invoked in order to be refuted, sometimes through a detailed discussion of Montesquieu and Rousseau based on carefully selected quotations. 27
Nonetheless, one of the results of the convergence of the concepts of popular sovereignty and natural right after 1789 was the view that liberty and equality should be expanded to the entire population. To be sure, the traits of modern natural right theories before Rousseau were not inherently liberating: in its ancient Roman, medieval and early modern forms, the natural right argument primarily concerned with the questions of property and war could entail without fundamental difficulty the endorsement of absolute monarchy and slavery, because man was regarded in a sense to be completely free, to the extent that he could even sign away his own freedom. 28 What turned out to be revolutionary about the notions of natural right and natural law in the 1790s was the adaptation of various available intellectual traditions, such as those of Milton, Locke, Rousseau and the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, into the universalist claims of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. 29
The revolutionaries asserted that every person was free and equal from birth, and that the essential parts of this freedom and equality could not be traded away, not even by consent. A significant influence on this formula seems to have been the ‘republican’ notion of liberty that made one argue that obedience to despotism was as grave as outright ‘slavery’ and not merely ‘an alienation of liberty’. 30 To this was added the claim coming from the revolutionaries’ take on Locke and Rousseau that everyone was equal and sovereign since the inception of political society. No matter how insoluble the conundrum arising from this principle of popular sovereignty was, this idea was inscribed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, a document which Georges Lefebvre called the ‘death certificate of the Old Regime’. 31 The idea of equal sovereignty took root in the experiences of the French as they went through the elections of the Estates General, the drafting of cahiers de doléances, the storming of the Bastille, the agitations of the Great Fear in the countryside and the journées that followed. The revolutionary setting was such that Sieyès’s division of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens, grounded in the long-standing customs of quasi-representative institutions of the Old Regime and broadly deemed essential for keeping the ignorant populace at bay, was nevertheless received not without a pinch of salt by radical deputies and journalists. 32 Democratic forces gained unexpected strength as the Revolution unfolded, and this article attempts to show how it happened and in what aspects it can be said to have provided the background to the rise of ‘democracy’ as a political principle for modern states.
These forces were blocked at the door of the mainstream political discourse by the strong argument against democracy rooted in the eighteenth-century understanding of Roman history, namely that democracy would bring about the rise of a Caesar figure and the collapse of the rule of law, and that under modern conditions people could not constantly remain assembled and legislate. Nonetheless, the impetus of 1789 was such that remarkable attempts were made prior to the Terror to overcome this view. The heritage of the Enlightenment was ambiguous, but ‘despite Rousseau’ it did contain much optimism for the progress of society. 33 This provided the working ground to the rise of radical ideas in the first half of the revolutionary decade. The political and intellectual shifts of the Revolution rendered, to some, the usage of the word ‘democracy’ decidedly less utopian or anarchical than it had been before 1789.
Condorcet stands out at this juncture. Considered by Edmund Burke in 1791 as ‘the most furious of the heads of the Jacobin Club’, 34 Condorcet was the rare thinker who conceived of the possibility of implementing ‘democracy’ in large states before the Revolution – against all the main currents of political thinking of his time – by adorning it with representation. 35 Comparing the governments of Venice and Ancient Rome, Voltaire had argued in his Essay on Universal History that Britain possessed the better constitution because it had checks and balances built into the polity through the power of the House of Commons. All the better, Voltaire had remarked, that the British government had nullified the threat of ‘democracy which is suitable only for a small Swiss canton or Geneva’. 36 In the first Kehl edition of Voltaire’s Complete Works in 1784, Condorcet added a footnote of counter-argument to this very paragraph, asserting that ‘democracy is suitable for large states’ if understood not as an Athenian ‘constitution in which the general assembly of citizens legislates directly’ but as a ‘constitution in which all citizens … elect the deputies charged with representing and carrying the general expression of their constituents’ will to a general assembly that in turn represents the nation’. Several layers of representative assemblies would make democracy suitable even ‘to the largest empires’, resulting in an unprecedented ‘consistency’ and ‘unity of views so necessary, that it is impossible to obtain in a durable manner in a federal constitution’. 37
In 1784 this was an idiosyncratic advocacy of ‘democracy’ for large states. Even in 1787 James Madison, in arguing for the superiority that ‘a republic has over a democracy’, affirming that the electoral representation system of a large representative republic would make it ‘more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried’, defined democracy as ‘a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person’. 38 What rendered Condorcet’s novel redefinition of democracy in 1784 comprehensible to the contemporaries, then, was the ‘legicentrist’ formulation that the revolutionaries inherited from the eighteenth century, mainly through Rousseau’s Social Contract. The transformed implementation of ancient ‘democracy’ in the modern world, in which all the citizens could not assemble or stay assembled at one place, was here rendered possible due to Jean Bodin’s and Rousseau’s ‘modern’ distinction between sovereignty and government – a distinction heavily praised by Turgot– and to the subsequent limitation of ‘democratic’ principles to the former. As sovereignty came to be conceptually separated from government, the ‘sovereign people’ could be considered as the ‘sleeping sovereign’. This framework enabled the establishment of a representative government on the rhetoric of ‘democratic principles’ of sovereignty. 39 Still, for the whole period of the revolutionary decade, ‘democracy’ remained a concept heavily burdened with a negative historical verdict, a term that was anathema for moderates and strategically inappropriate for radicals to uphold.
It should be noted that in 1789, Condorcet was of the view that suffrage had to be based on property ownership. His advocacy of democracy in 1784 did not entail universal suffrage. He also believed at this time that what was infinitely more important to the ‘happiness of peoples’ than the ‘form of political constitutions’ was the condition that only ‘very knowledgeable men’ hold the power of decision. 40 Therefore, his optimistic view of ‘democracy’ expressed in the comment on Voltaire was not the same as what most radical revolutionaries would come to understand by the term after the birth of the Republic. But the footnote is a sign that seeds were sown, before the Revolution, that would be watered and nourished after 1789 by various political commentators including Condorcet himself.
1789 and Condorcet
For the vast majority of political actors on the national stage in Versailles and Paris, the general outlook at the first meetings of the Estates General was neither radical nor ‘republican’. Some nobles dreamed of taking the monarchy back to the ‘ancient (feudal) constitution’, and the Third Estate sought to reform the monarchy so that it would match their idea of fair and robust commercial state ruled by law and sustained by healthy finance. What radical visions they held in late 1789 they gained through the sessions and the journées. 41
A small number of radicals nonetheless existed from the beginning of the Revolution. They thought that the events unfolding before their eyes, mostly in Paris but no doubt in many provincial towns and villages as well, should be pushed further. Compared to most of the other deputies and writers, these radicals were much less – we cannot say that they were not – worried about the realization of the Roman version of the ‘ignorant populace’ giving power to victorious generals or manipulative demagogues. They feared more the corrupting tendency of elite oligarchy. They lamented the pains suffered by the people which, in their view, resulted from the despotism of Versailles and the ignorance on the part of the men of knowledge, wealth and power about what really constituted the long-term welfare of society. As an example of this minority view in 1789, Louis-Pierre Dufourny, an active member of the Cordeliers Club, stands out. 42 His Cahiers of the Fourth Order, published in April, was formidably radical for his time. The pamphlet fiercely criticized the inconsistency of the principle of national sovereignty in the face of the exclusion of the poor from representation. Dufourny contended that the ‘three Orders’ did not ‘exactly contain the whole Nation’ and insisted as a corollary that the Fourth Order be given the right to vote in the election process immediately. 43 The ‘current form of convocation [was] incomplete, because it [did] not encompass the universality of the French’. 44 The alleged ignorance stemming from poverty could not be accepted as a reason for excluding the poor from politics. The ‘aim of society’ was to ‘protect the weak’, yet the rich were enjoying all the ‘benefits of commerce’ while the ‘Fourth Order’ had to sell away everything and yet suffered hardship. It was simply not the poor’s fault that they were poor. 45 Dufourny insisted that those without property must be exempt from all tax on earnings – more tax should be imposed on the rich, ‘in proportion to their faculties’ 46 – and that the poor must be taken good care of. One such example of this care was the reform of education, which was until then in the hands of religious authorities and was in Dufourny’s view ‘imperfect’ and badly operated. What was needed was ‘popular’ and ‘national education’ that would enlighten the industrious poor to become true ‘citizens’ and ‘patriots’. 47 On his account, such measures were necessary to give France the ‘collective force’ and the ‘moral power’ that would ‘inspire fear in its enemies and preserve the peace’. 48
However, Dufourny’s radical propositions had few echoes. In contrast, Condorcet’s ideas were vastly more influential. He was a philosophe steeped in the historical anxieties of the Enlightenment thinkers that the replay of Roman collapse must be avoided to preserve modernity from the onslaught of the ‘Dark Age’. However, he was also eager to look for an escape route other than enlightened despotism, constitutional monarchy, or representative government based on restricted franchise. Before the French Revolution, his search for an answer to the anxiety emanating from the history of Rome was manifest in his view on the American Revolution and Britain. Condorcet, who had never visited the United States himself but nonetheless obtained information from his American friends in Paris (such as Thomas Jefferson), assessed the results of the American Revolution in Of the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe (1786). Originally written as a response to the prize contest question posed by Guillaume-Thomas François Raynal on whether the discovery of the ‘New World’ was harmful or useful to mankind, this work argued that America was the guarantor of mankind’s perfectibility, the proof that man could rationally build everything anew on universal principles. America would prove a good trading partner to European states, and its victory in the War of Independence was a bliss that prevented Britain from seizing the whole of North and South America in the near future. America would exert influence back on Europe’s politicians by demonstrating that religious toleration, freedom of the press and enlightenment fostered rather than destroyed peace and security. It proved that the British-style constitutional mechanism was unnecessary and that an equal, agricultural society without distinction of ranks could endure. America, for Condorcet, offered a glimpse of hope that a republic could escape from the vicious circle of rise and fall, the circle of history. 49
It is not difficult to imagine Condorcet’s disappointment at reading the Federal Constitution of 1787; it was reflected in Letters from a Bourgeois of New Haven (1788). He lamented America’s adoption of British bicameralism as much as the great power granted to the president: it seemed to him that in this instance ‘reason’ had been defeated by the historical anxiety that had moved the admirers of the British model to support bicameral legislature and strong executive power. 50 In Ideas on Despotism (1789) he added ammunition to the rejection of the monarchiens’ praise of the British constitution by insisting that the British polity was tainted with despotism because ‘the right of veto of the king and the House of Lords leaves the nation with no legal means to revoke a bad law’, and because ‘the House of Commons, which should, according to the law, represent the nation, does not represent it at all in reality as it is just an aristocratic body, whose decisions are dictated by forty or fifty’ influential members and also because there was ‘no legal way of passing a new law, or of destroying an old one’. 51
Condorcet directly engaged with the monarchiens’ ‘Roman’ anxiety by contending that the much-feared ‘despotism of the mob’ was not ‘a despotism in its own right’ but a force manipulated by ‘other despotic powers oppressing the nation, or the various parties associated with them’. Therefore, the correct means to avoid despotism was not to be found in constitutional ‘dykes’ that offended the rights of man but in treating the specific causes that facilitated it. Condorcet identified three reasons why the mob was dangerous: ease of assembly, ignorance and ferocity. He proposed remedies for these: There are only two ways to reduce the chances of bringing the mob out on to the streets. The first is absolute freedom of trade and industry. In the first place, this would increase the size of the population, while decreasing the size of the mob, weaken worker solidarity, particularly among those corporations holding special privileges in certain places, and, lastly, it would lessen the dislike that the poor, plagued by the laws imposed by those set above them, have for the police. The second way would be to divide every large town into districts, in which people could assemble in an orderly way, and to make these sub-divisions quite small. Small assemblies of citizens, gathering without distinction of rank or profession, are generally the only just and sure way to prevent spontaneous gatherings which disturb the public peace. To lower the level of ignorance, the press must be free and well-organized facilities for public education must be allowed to flourish. … As for ferocity, it is born of ignorance, of poverty, of the harshness of criminal codes and of the insolence of the privileged classes; only when we understand that will we see how this ferocity can be destroyed.
52
For Condorcet even the people’s insurrectionary power, feared and suppressed at all costs by the theorists of authority, could be of use to liberty in extreme cases, because in his view, if coupled with a clearly stated declaration of rights, the fear of revolt or revolution could function as a mental bulwark against the propensity of rulers to bypass the laws and turn to despotism. 53 Thus in 1789 he put much effort into elaborating a version of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. 54
However, while Condorcet blamed the ‘ferocity’ of the mob on the ruling elite, the fear of the uneducated and propertyless had not escaped him. Though he was to change his opinion later on this matter, advocating universal male suffrage in his 1793 Plan of Constitution, he supported limited suffrage in 1789, not by arguing that the spread of knowledge would enlighten the masses and someday render them worthy of political decision-making, but instead by asserting that the property restriction on the franchise ‘derived from the nature of things’ because the nation had to live on that property and it was possible only with the consent of the owner. In 1789 this seemed to be perfectly compatible with the ‘principle of equality’ for him. 55
Condorcet insisted from the onset of the elections for the Estates General that it was in the interest of the Third Estate to elect as their representatives the more enlightened and able nobles, in part meaning Condorcet himself, as long as it could be assured that those individual nobles objected to the privileges and the ‘complexity of taxes’ which would in his eyes strip liberty of its ‘real’ essence. 56 Notwithstanding his defeat at the election in Mantes, 57 Condorcet was irrevocably enlisted in the reformist cause and plainly expressed his commitment to the fast-rising opposition principles: the supremacy of the legislature (Estates General) over the administration (‘ambitious ministers’) was manifest in his writings of 1789; he made it clear that the legislative power ‘in its entirety … belonged to the nation’ since the ‘general will was the law’; having been established only to protect the citizens’ rights, he asserted, society ‘exclusively and fundamentally rule[d] itself at all times’ and had ‘the right to reject any power that [did] not emanate from [the society]’. 58 In thinking about principles and their actual implications he went further than many of his contemporaries, widely touching on the issues of the equality of women, Jews and African slaves in the Caribbean colonies. 59 For him humans as sentient beings had equal rights to political citizenship regardless of sex and skin colour, traits that betrayed ‘no fundamental differences’ but only socially constructed ones. 60
But Condorcet was also anxious to keep the implications of his bold ideas within what he considered to be the limits of the rule of law, safe from the actual reach of the unpredictable ‘populace’, especially that of Paris. He advocated several measures to this end: Paris should become a part of a larger département instead of becoming a special capital zone; 61 indirect election was to be preferred to direct election because the results would be more rational and even the right to vote itself could be represented; 62 highly complicated and crucial matters, including the first constitution of the Revolution, should be decided by the national representatives and not put to the people for ratification for the time being, since the ‘majority of the citizens [were] not enlightened enough to judge a plan of constitution’ yet. 63
However, in his characteristic gradualism combined with progressivism, manifested in his discussion of the transition mechanism towards the eventual abolition of slavery in Reflections on the Slavery of the Blacks (1781) and to be systematized later in a broader view in Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), 64 Condorcet believed that the people could be educated in the long term or if necessary somewhat more quickly so that they could take part in the affairs of the state. He thereby elaborated numerous education projects after 1789, of which the most significant feature was an insistence on the simple instruction of reading, writing and calculation to form a wide base of citizens and the assertion that higher education had to be free from the government’s direction so that the minds of the students could grow up to be truly free. 65
The scientific basis of Condorcet’s views on education and political participation was his social mathematics. Given that each citizen voted according to his or her own individual judgement – not en bloc or by factional preferences – and that the probability of each voter making the ‘correct’ judgement on the truth value of a proposition or on the comparative merits of possible alternatives was higher than that of making the ‘wrong’ judgement, Condorcet argued that voting would increase rather than decrease the probability of the entire voting assembly making the ‘correct’ judgement by a majority vote. At stake was whether the people could find by vote the correct ‘answer’ to a relevant question rather than whether the people could find the means to aggregate their ‘interests’. Condorcet’s ‘political arithmetic’ was concerned with the collective judgement of probable truths and not with the collective bargaining of clashing interests. On this account, popular education to enhance the vast majority of citizens’ ability to make independent and ‘correct’ judgements was of paramount importance to make liberty and equality ‘real’. 66
This shows where Condorcet stood in 1789. He was then moving towards the radical path that he had been inclined to before the Revolution, but he was equally imbued with the worries of his contemporaries even as he refuted them. He tried to devise plans – usually elaborate mixtures of theory and technicality – that he hoped would stave off both despotism and anarchy. As such, the anguished philosophe proposed measures to ‘re-establish order and put a stop to anarchy’. For Condorcet the primary cause of ‘anarchy’ was ‘the false opinion’ that the ‘tumultuous will of the inhabitants of a city, a town, a village and even a neighbourhood’ was law. The remedy would come from emphasizing the role of representation in a popular government. The people had to be taught that they could ‘act only through the representatives’ who, elected by them and responsible to them, could become ‘neither their oppressors nor their masters’. 67 At the same time, the people’s trust had to be earned as well as imposed: state finances needed to be kept transparent and free from the ‘disorder [which was] the first step towards corruption, [which is] slavery in disguise’. In this spirit, he proposed in April 1791 the name ‘National Treasury’ and argued in February 1792 that the executive power should be ‘absolutely separated … from the administration of public treasury’. 68 He also insisted that the electoral process be effectively representative: for example, tiny villages should not be given separate electoral boundaries but be combined to form a larger electoral unit because otherwise one or two powerful landlords would inevitably be elected in small villages. 69
With proper political representation, Condorcet affirmed, France could avoid the ‘Roman’ trap of popular government. On 1 July 1791, in the direct aftermath of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes, Condorcet read a republican manifesto in the Cercle social, in the Palais Royal. The speech was published as Of the Republic, or Is a King Necessary for the Protection of Liberty? By publicly attaching him to the republican cause, this pamphlet earned him after his election to the Legislative Assembly the image of an ‘extremist’ in the overwhelmingly ‘monarchist’ legislature, for which the final stage of election was held after the King’s flight but was carried out by ‘electors’ chosen before the event. 70 In this work Condorcet countered the widely accepted thesis that hereditary monarchy was the only form of government that could effectively check the usurpation of the ambitious politicians and generals supported by fame. He argued that the organization of the large French territory into départements and their equal political representation in Paris could prevent the rise of ephemeral yet dangerous national heroes. Political education by participation and a free press would keep the people from falling prey to demagoguery and tyranny. In this way, he believed, France would put an end to the vile ‘circle of vicissitudes’. 71 Condorcet’s friends nonetheless witnessed his belief tragically betrayed two years later when Paris seemed to rule the nation and when his arrest warrant was issued as the Girondins fell. Still, Condorcet himself maintained an optimism about the future of mankind energetically expressed in his Sketch.
The significance of all this speculation is that already in 1789 Condorcet had exerted himself to defy, if somewhat nervously, the traditional rejection of ‘popular government’. This laid the foundation on which he built his political vision in the following years. Historically, his political thought has a threefold importance: it reflected the political radicalization of France since Varennes; it influenced the republican opinion before the Terror through several means including his ‘Jacobin’ (more specifically, ‘Girondin’) 72 activities and the publication of journals such as La Chronique de Paris, Le Républicain, La Chronique du mois and Journal d’instruction sociale; and it left a profound mark on the immediate intellectual legacy of the first years of the Republic that would be transmitted to and appropriated by post-Thermidorian politics. 73
We have now examined Condorcet’s response to the historical anxiety of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution. By contemplating the fit between ‘democracy’ and modern commercial states through the lens of ‘representation’, he articulated the possibility of staving off the danger dictated by the cycle of history. 74 On this basis, we now proceed to a closer examination of the transformation of ‘democracy’ leading up to 1794 in the political thought of the revolutionaries.
Democracy and Representation in the First Years of the Republic
Since 1790 many radicals had gathered around the Cordeliers Club, among whom Louis-Charles de Lavicomterie and Pierre-François-Joseph Robert proved to be early republicans and argued in favour of ‘democracy’ in a large state backed up with representative institutions whose members were always subject to recall and legislation subject to popular ratification. Their works were not widely influential, but this way of using the condemned term attracted some criticism, such as that from Jacques-Pierre Brissot. This has been sufficiently handled in Rachel Hammersley’s work on the political thought of the Cordeliers and Raymonde Monnier’s work on republicanism in the French Revolution. 75 Robert’s argument, however, lacked a response to the built-in historical anxiety of the eighteenth century that would make it persuasive to his contemporaries. His democracy with representation was simply democracy for large states: it was neither ‘tempered’ nor ‘modern’. 76 The same can be said about Lavicomterie’s argument for a ‘represented democracy’. 77 The radicals of the Cordeliers built a set of arguments that could later be used, as a part of a different whole, by other republicans; but they themselves did not answer the crucial questions of their century in the language of the mainstream discourse. In a sense their arguments can be considered as having established a pioneering precedent for political arguments that simply assumes the equation of liberty with democracy instead of strenuously arguing for it. But at the same time this rendered their projects fundamentally irrelevant to the dominant political discourse of the era.
By the time of the Republic’s birth, popular involvement in the revolutionary process had asserted the legitimacy of broad political participation. With the advent of actual ‘universal’ male suffrage adopted in the election of the National Convention, the combination of democracy and representation in political thought gained more visible support. 78 In 1792 Thomas Paine employed ‘representation’ not against the Athenian ‘democracy’ but as a tool for its adaptation in the modern world. He contended that representation rendered the democratic republic a solution for all and that no monarchical element was needed to make a republic viable in the modern world since America demonstrated that ‘representation engrafted upon democracy’ could ‘exclude at once the ignorance and insecurity of the hereditary mode and the inconvenience of the simple democracy’. 79 Paine’s design pointed to a representative system with democratic principles in its foundation. This, however, did not transform the concept of ‘democracy’ itself to mean a viable representative regime for large states, as Condorcet had done in 1784. Rather, it still displayed the strength of the directness and immediacy attached to the notion of democracy. So, for Paine, ‘representation’ had to be ‘engrafted upon democracy’ in order to avoid the ‘inconvenience of the simple democracy’, and here democracy itself still very much signified the Athenian constitution and served as an explicative term to uphold the advantages of representative republic in relation to hereditary monarchy. It shows that the range of meaning carried by ‘democracy’, when pronounced alone, still excluded representation even in the republican juncture of 1792. 80
As for Condorcet, he presented to the Convention the famous Plan of Constitution on 15 and 16 February 1793, just a few months before the journées of 31 May–2 June which saw the fall of the Girondins and the decree of 8 July that ordered his arrest. Condorcet declared in his report for the Plan: (1) that in France there was no longer the need to preserve a hereditary monarch; (2) that France had no good reason to become a republican federation; (3) that the size of France however required a ‘representative constitution’ to retain unity; and (4) that France needed to supply its constitution with the ‘censure du peuple’ to protect the integrity of popular sovereignty from the possible usurpation of the representative legislative body. 81 This censure would be exercised from the bottom up all over the country, and most importantly ‘the meeting of citizens in the primary assemblies should be considered as a means to reconcile peace with liberty rather than as a danger to public tranquillity’. 82 It is argued, rightly, that this was the point where Condorcet earned himself denunciations from the Montagnards who saw in these provisions an attempt to neutralize the Parisian sans-culottes’ hold on the Convention and incapacitate the people’s insurrectionary ‘right’. 83 However, those passages also need be understood as the continuation of his reply (presented in the previous section) to the anxiety over democracy shared by the successive generations of the Enlightenment and the majority of the revolutionaries ever fearful of the ‘populace’ and ‘perfect equality’. There is insufficient evidence to throw light on exactly how Condorcet came to advocate universal suffrage. Even while fully taking into account the fact that by early 1793 the Revolution had reached the stage at which it was no longer feasible to argue for the return to restricted suffrage, it is fair to remark that it was not unnatural for Condorcet to have designed his Plan to include male suffrage, given his deep involvement in the revolutionary projects for popular education which was part and parcel of his social mathematics.
In June, Condorcet argued in favour of ‘progressive taxation’ on revenues, which he asserted was a ‘duty’ of the rich to the patrie since ‘grave inequality of riches’ was detrimental to the moral and political sustenance of free states. However, excessive tax could also hinder the growth of commerce, industry and agriculture by demoralizing the propertied classes. The imposition of a moderate degree of progressive taxation was therefore both ‘just’ and ‘useful’ in sustaining a level of economic equality that would make liberty more than a name and without which ‘even the equality of rights [could] not be complete and real’; in short, progressive taxation was necessary to ensure the long-term development and ‘common prosperity’ of the Republic. This was the means of ‘preserv[ing] by wisdom that which we have acquired by enthusiasm’. 84 Condorcet’s support for progressive taxation demonstrates that he did not have an unambiguously optimistic belief in the natural progress of humanity towards equality. 85 Rather, for Condorcet, inequality could immediately cause the decline of the Republic. Human perfectibility in this regard had to be guided by positive actions such as moderately egalitarian state policies (in addition to the oft-evoked ‘education’ and ‘free trade’) aimed at reducing – if we use Jean-Fabien Spitz’s terms – ‘excessive inequalities’ through the abolition of ‘artificial inequalities’ such as aristocratic privileges and trade barriers. More needed to be done than a ‘divorce between egalitarian discourse and aristocratic reality’ à la 1789. 86
Condorcet, who had written in 1784 that the term ‘democracy’ could be made to designate large empires founded on representative principles, said all this in 1793 without ever using the word in the relevant speeches and writings. He did not always shun the term, but at crucial moments he did: there was still a strategic unease associated with the radical republican philosophe employing the term. A profound transformation of the term, however, was happening, and this was manifest when Maximilien Robespierre stated in his National Convention speech on 5 February 1794 that the goal of the Revolution was the ‘peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality’ and argued that ‘democratic government’ was the best way to reach it, better than ‘a king, an arrogant senate, a Caesar, a Cromwell’. 87 Robespierre employed the term ‘democracy’ itself to designate a representative government that did not hinder the political agency of the people in matters ‘that they can do well’. In this regard the speech was an attempt to transform the meaning of ‘democracy’, absorbing ‘representation’ into the boundary of ‘democracy’ itself, and in the process defining a new, radical species of representative regime. And it was important for the Incorruptible to detach this new type of government from the flaw traditionally attached to the notion of democracy, namely, in Robespierre’s words, that it would ‘lead the people back into despotism’. By arguing that democracy without representation had ‘never existed’, he implied that Athens and Sparta had in fact possessed some sort of representative regimes named, significantly, ‘democracy’. The term was transformed, and this transformation would ambiguously and insecurely survive the Terror in the political imaginary of the democrats under the Directory. 88
The Legacy of the Change
Robespierre’s speech is a good example of how far the concept of democracy had travelled since 1789, even though many of its supporters were still anxious and uncomfortable as to how it would be understood by others. The Revolution offered the arena for ‘the first experiment with democracy’, as François Furet argued, but even the concept itself – not to mention the countless upheavals in political practice and the changes they caused in the contextual sphere of political thought – remained fluid, rendering anachronistic his confident assertion that ‘pure democracy culminated in government by the Terror’. 89 For many, though not for everyone, the idea of democracy underwent a drastic change during the first half of the Revolution, and it entailed answering the questions related to the politico-intellectual predicaments of the eighteenth century. During the radicalization between 1789 and 1794, Paine, Robert and Robespierre did face the given rejection of democracy directly, but none of them addressed its denunciations associated with Athenian assemblies and Roman generals as directly as Condorcet did. On the other hand, they felt more affinity with the actual ‘sovereign people’ than Condorcet did, as exemplified by Robespierre’s assertion that ‘virtue is natural to the people’. 90 They feared le menu peuple less, and this factor itself would become a contribution to the theories of democracy elaborated under the Directory.
The post-Thermidorian political scene made Condorcet a sort of ‘Socratic figure against the Terror’ who, even while sacrificing his own life on the altar of humanity as a consequence of being persecuted by an allegedly anticipated anarchical tyranny, transmitted the hope of improvement (by popular education and advances in science) and the Enlightenment to the surviving revolutionary generation. 91 The legacy of Condorcet was not monopolized by the moderates and the Idéologues during the Directory. Some radicals including Pierre-Antoine Antonelle, Pierre-Joseph Briot and Félix Le Peletier hailed Condorcet as their intellectual hero. In 1796 Le Peletier, in a belated but sympathetic eulogy, placed him with the likes of ‘Mably, Rousseau, Helvétius and Diderot’. 92 As for Briot, the radical republican in the Council of Five Hundred, he had been a firm supporter of the Girondins but was converted to the Montagnard position in June 1793. 93 However, regardless of all that, in 1798 Briot recalled the plans for republican education proposed by Condorcet, who had ‘established veritable principles’ from which ‘the sound and philosophical ideas’ on education could be retrieved. 94 The case of Condorcet and his legacy shows us that it is right to assert with Marisa Linton that no clear-cut ideological dichotomy between the ‘Jacobins (or more correctly, Montagnards)’ and the ‘Girondins’ existed, 95 and with Bernard Gainot and Pierre Serna that the legacy of the pre-Terror republicanism in the Directorial debates on democracy and representation cannot be explained by constructing direct lineages based on an imagined ‘primogenitary’ classification of ‘liberal’ Girondin thought and ‘radical’ Montagnard thought. 96 The case is that, pace Jonathan Israel’s rigid dichotomy, there does not seem to have existed a well-defined set of ‘Girondin’ or ‘Montagnard’ political thought apart from the sometimes converging but otherwise differing views of the many members of these factions, and even then political actors changed their allegiances as they observed the scene. The point is to first examine the individuals closely and understand them in context. 97
The legacy of Condorcet travelled far into the early nineteenth century. Henri Saint-Simon believed himself to be following, if critically, the footsteps of Condorcet in searching for a ‘social organization’ that conformed to the historical stage reached by mankind. 98 Jefferson, with ‘a deep admiration for his philosophe friend’, was much inspired by Condorcet in building his own perspectives on the future of democracy and representative government. 99 In a 1804 speech Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Chaussard, an érudit who had been a democrat during the Directory, called Condorcet ‘a genius equal to Aristotle’. 100 In 1807 Arthur O’Connor married Condorcet’s daughter, Eliza, and wrote his name as ‘Arthur Condorcet O’Connor’ afterwards. 101 He edited the Œuvres of Condorcet which remains authoritative and has been consulted throughout this article. Germaine de Staël in 1818 regarded Condorcet’s irreligion as awkwardly stubborn but still lamented that his condemnation by the Revolutionary Government had been ‘the decimation of the glory of France’. 102 Benjamin Constant argued in 1819 that he was following in the footsteps of Condorcet in emphasizing the unbridgeable gap between the liberty of the ‘Ancients’ and that of the ‘Moderns’. 103 Mary Shelley included him in her famous volumes of biographies in 1839 as one of the ‘most eminent French writers’ in history. 104
Condorcet was neither a good orator nor an effective leader, but unless one looks at his revolutionary years in a teleological light one comes to see that he was one of the handful of radicals who offered detailed and serious responses to the anti-democratic views of the eighteenth century founded on the Enlightenment narrative of European history and the widespread understanding of Roman history. The responses of Condorcet, Paine, Robespierre and several other radical republicans to these challenges before 9 Thermidor were to imagine democracy with representation and to base their arguments on the idea that the equal natural rights of liberty and autonomy dictated that monarchy had to be thrown away and a form of government better suited to promoting and protecting these rights had to be found. 105 For Condorcet it was important to ensure that whatever the form of government was it was chosen freely and not forced onto a people; but he also believed that peoples, when freed from the obscurantism of the clergy and the nobility under hereditary monarchs, would come to recognize the benefit of natural rights and the democratic republic. The future of Europe envisaged by Condorcet was one of autonomous, independent and (after a period of sufficient progress) eventually democratic nations that would remain in mutual respect and peace. 106 His vision of political representation and rational politics that would put an end to regarding humanity as ‘the patrimony of a dozen families’ 107 and make Europe ‘free, peaceful and fortunate’ 108 could well have vanished with the downfall of the Revolutionary Government of the Year II and the backlash of the Thermidorian propaganda. However, it found followers, more restrained by the experience of the Terror but equally more committed, in the seemingly unlikely context of the French Republic under the Constitution of the Year III. 109
Footnotes
Author's Note
Minchul Kim is now affiliated to Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Manuela Albertone, Nathan Alexander, David A. Bell, Rachel Hammersley, Marisa Linton, Pierre Serna, Amy Westwell, Richard Whatmore and the two anonymous reviewers for European History Quarterly for their insightful comments and suggestions. This research was financially supported by the Kim Hee-Kyung Scholarship Foundation for European Humanities.