Habit can so familiarise men with violations of their natural rights that those who have lost them neither think of protesting nor believe they are unjustly treated.

Some of these violations even escaped the notice of the philosophers and legislators who enthusiastically established the rights common to all members of the human race, and made these the sole basis of political institutions.

Surely they were all violating the principle of equal rights by debarring women from citizenship rights, and thereby calmly depriving half of the human race of the right to participate in the formation of the laws. Could there be any stronger evidence of the power of habit over enlightened men than the picture of them invoking the principle of equal rights for three or four hundred men who had been deprived of equal rights by an absurd prejudice, and yet forgetting it with regard to 12 million women?

For this exclusion not to constitute an act of tyranny, we would have to prove that the natural rights of women are not exactly the same as those of men, or else that they are incapable of exercising them.

The rights of men stem exclusively from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reasoning upon them. Since women have the same qualities, they necessarily also have the same rights. Either no member of the human race has any true rights, or else they all have the same ones; and anyone who votes against the rights of another, whatever his religion, colour or sex, automatically forfeits his own.

‘Long since convinced that the human race is infinitely perfectible, and that this process, a necessary consequence of the present state of knowledge and societies, can only be arrested by global physical setbacks, I viewed the task of hastening this progress as one of the most precious occupations, one of the first duties of one who has fortified his reason by study and reflection’ (O.C. I: 574). These words were written in July 1793 by the marquis de Condorcet while in hiding under sentence of death from the Jacobin Terror, separated from his wife and small daughter, and engaged in preparing a grand work entitled Tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain, of which he intended the Esquisse, meaning ‘sketch’, here presented in translation, as a ‘prospectus’. Of the projected work there are only fragments and notes (such as the definitions of ‘liberty’ and ‘revolutionary’ included here), for within months he was found dead in a country prison at the age of fifty.

Denounced by Robespierre as ‘a timid conspirator, viewed with contempt by all parties, ceaselessly working to obscure the light of philosophy with the perfidious hodgepodge of his mercenary rhapsodies’, he was the last of the great French Enlightenment philosophes: at once academician, encyclopedist and revolutionary. He was a mathematician and one of the leading statisticians of his day, an economist, a philosopher and a politician. He made profound and lasting contributions to the analysis of voting and the paradoxes of social choice and thereby to understanding deep and still unsolved problems for the practice of democracy – how to ascertain ‘the will of the people’ – contributions that are still debated and built upon today. As an economist he was both a critic of the stifling, corrupt and arbitrary economic regulations of his time and a proponent of detailed reforms for the constitution of a competitive economic order. As a philosopher he held distinctive and still controversial views about the probabilistic character of human knowledge, about the relations between reason and moral sentiments, and about both the conflict and connectedness of values. He identified the distinctive features of modern despotism before Alexis de Tocqueville and the contrast between ancient and modern liberty before Benjamin Constant.

Whatever the circumstances in which you read these lines, which I am writing far away from you, indifferent as to my own fate but preoccupied by yours and your mother’s, remember that nothing can guarantee that those circumstances will last.

Get into the habit of working, so that you are self-sufi cient and need no external help. Work will provide for your needs; and though you may become poor, you will never become dependent on others.

Even if you never need to use your skills, they will at least prevent you from worrying, bolster your courage and help you face up to the setbacks which fortune may have in store for you.

Knowing that you can do without riches, you will place less store by them. This will help protect you from the unhappiness to which men expose themselves in order to acquire wealth, or for fear of losing it.

Introduction

Man is born with the ability to receive sensations; to perceive them and to distinguish between the various simple sensations of which they are composed; to remember, recognise and combine them; to compare these combinations; to apprehend what they have in common and the ways in which they differ; to attach signs to them all in order to recognise them more easily and to allow for the ready production of new combinations.

This faculty is developed in him through the action of external objects, that is to say, by the occurrence of certain composite sensations whose constancy or coherence in change are independent of him; through communication with other beings like himself; and finally through various artificial methods which these first developments have led him to invent.

Sensations are attended by pleasure or pain; and man for his part has the capacity to transform such momentary impressions into permanent sentiments of an agreeable or disagreeable character, and then to experience these sentiments when he either observes or recollects the pleasures and pains of other sentient beings.

Finally, as a consequence of this capacity and of his ability to form and combine ideas, there arise between him and his fellow creatures ties of interest and duty, to which nature herself has wished to attach the most precious portion of our happiness and the most painful of our ills.

Preamble

Any society which wants to stimulate general interest must explain to the public the reasons why it has been formed and the aims it intends to fulfil; a task which is more important for the Society of the Friends of Negroes than for any other of the many societies this century has nurtured. These other tributes to humanity and benevolence needed simply to be publicised in order to evoke compassion; the unfortunate people who needed help were there, before our very eyes; the help requested was merely financial and could be obtained simply by directing the public’s attention towards the picture of misfortune. The Society of the Friends of Negroes does not have the same advantages: the unfortunate victims we have befriended are being sacrificed far away; the men who could become their true protectors are themselves blinded by cruel prejudice; and no amount of money could ease their suffering. But just because their hardship is linked with powerful political interests, because their chains are made heavier still by the blind force of prejudice and because there are great obstacles to overcome, we must not forget that this time it is not just a small group of people that we are trying to help, but an entire race; part of the world, crushed beneath the weight of its chains, cries out to us for the restoration of its sacred human rights.

To understand the reasons for the formation of the Society of the Friends of Negroes, we need simply think for a moment about the negro slave trade and trace its development through to the present, when its victims are groaning under the yoke of slavery.

I will now set aside the persistent and general facts that prepared the way for the great revolution that it is my purpose to describe and turn to the particular and more recent facts that determined its place, birth, and character.

Of all the nations of Europe, France had long been the most literary. Yet men of letters had never before exhibited a spirit of the sort that emerged around the middle of the eighteenth century, nor had they previously occupied the place in society that they assumed at that time. Nothing like this had ever been seen in France or, I believe, anywhere else.

In France, men of letters did not regularly participate in affairs, as they did in England. Indeed, they had never been so far removed from the world of affairs. They were not invested with authority of any kind and fulfilled no public function in a society already replete with functionaries.

Yet unlike most of their German counterparts, they did not avoid politics entirely or confine themselves to pure philosophy or belles lettres. They took a persistent interest in subjects related to government. In truth, this was their defining occupation. They could be heard, whenever one wished, expounding the origins of society and primitive social forms, the fundamental rights of citizens and prerogatives of authority, the natural and artificial relations among men, the mistakenness or legitimacy of custom, and the essential principles of law.

Nothing is more apt to remind philosophers and statesmen of the need for modesty than the history of the French Revolution, for no event was greater or longer in the making or more fully prepared yet so little anticipated.

Not even Frederick the Great, for all his genius, sensed what was coming. He was in contact with it yet failed to see it. Indeed, his actions were in accord with the spirit of the Revolution before the fact. He was its precursor and, in a manner of speaking, its agent. Yet he did not see it looming on the horizon, and when at last it did show its face, the remarkable new features that would set it apart from a host of other revolutions initially went unnoticed.

Outside of France the Revolution aroused universal curiosity. It made people everywhere think that new times were coming and stirred vague hopes of change and reform, but no one yet suspected what it was to become. Princes and their ministers lacked even the shadowy forebodings that agitated the masses. At first they regarded the Revolution as one of those periodic maladies to which the constitutions of all nations are liable, whose only effect is to afford new opportunities to the policy of their neighbors. If by chance they hit upon the truth about the Revolution, they did so unwittingly.

In no other country of Europe were the regular courts less subservient to the government than in France, but by the same token there were few other countries in which recourse to special courts was more common. These two things were more closely related than one might imagine. The king had virtually no influence on the fate of judges. He could not remove them, transfer them, or even, as a general rule, promote them. In short, he had no hold over them, whether through ambition or fear. He soon came to regard this independence as an impediment to his will. Hence, more than anywhere else, he was driven to deny them jurisdiction over cases directly impinging on royal power and to create alongside the regular courts, for his own private use, a more subservient type of tribunal, one that would offer a certain semblance of justice to his subjects without obliging him to fear the reality.

In countries, including certain parts of Germany, where the regular courts had never been as independent of the government as were the French tribunals of the time, no such precautions were taken, and administrative justice never existed. The prince already wielded enough power over judges that he had no need for commissaires, or commissioners, as French administrative judges were called.

In the wake of the great revolution of the sixteenth century, when the critical spirit had applied itself to the task of distinguishing false from true among the various Christian traditions, bolder and more curious minds had repeatedly dared to contest or reject all of them. The same spirit that had led millions of Catholics to abandon Catholicism in Luther's time impelled a few individual Christians every year to abandon Christianity itself: unbelief followed heresy.

In general terms it is safe to say that by the eighteenth century, Christianity had lost much of its power throughout Europe. In most countries, however, it was neglected rather than violently combated. Even those countries that abandoned religion did so almost regretfully. Irreligion was widespread among princes and clever wits but had yet to penetrate deeply into the middle and lower classes. It was still an intellectual caprice, not a common opinion. In 1787, Mirabeau said that “it is widely believed in Germany that the Prussian provinces are full of atheists. The truth is that although some freethinkers can be found there, the common people are as devoted to religion as in the most devout countries, and indeed there is no shortage of fanatics.” It was deeply to be regretted, moreover, that Frederick II had not authorized the marriage of Catholic priests and, even more, that he had refused to allow those who did marry to keep the income from their benefices, “a measure, I daresay, that would have been worthy of that great man.”

For 140 years, the people had been entirely absent from the political scene, so it was simply taken for granted that they would never be capable of putting in an appearance. Because they seemed so impassive, they were deemed to be deaf. When their fate began to arouse interest, others began to speak in front of them as if they were not there. Apparently, only those situated above the people were supposed to be able to hear what was said, and the only danger to fear was that they might not get the point.

Those who had the most to fear from the people's wrath discussed out loud, and in their presence, the cruel injustices of which the people had always been the victims. They pointed out to one another the monstrous flaws in the institutions that had oppressed the people most. They used their rhetorical skills to depict the people's misery and ill-remunerated labor. By thus attempting to relieve the people, they filled them with fury. I speak not of writers but of the government and its principal agents and of the privileged themselves.

Nothing had yet changed in the form of government, yet most of the secondary laws that govern the lives of individuals and the administration of affairs had already been abolished or amended.

The destruction of the guilds, followed by their partial and incomplete reinstatement, had profoundly altered all existing relations between worker and master. These were not only different but also uncertain and strained. The regulations governing Sunday work were abolished. State oversight was not yet firmly established, and the artisan, placed in a difficult and ambiguous position between the government and the employer, had no idea which of the two could protect him or was supposed to monitor him. The uncomfortable and anarchical state to which the entire urban lower class had been reduced in one fell swoop had immense consequences the moment the people began to return to the political scene.

A year before the Revolution, a royal edict turned the system of justice upside down. Several new jurisdictions were created, a host of others were abolished, and all jurisdictional regulations were changed. Now, in France, as I noted previously, the number of people involved either in judging or enforcing judicial decisions was immense. In truth, the entire bourgeoisie was directly or indirectly dependent on the courts. The immediate effect of the law was therefore to threaten the position and fortune of thousands of families, who suddenly found themselves on a new and more precarious footing.

Of all the maladies that afflicted the constitution of the Ancien Régime and condemned it to perish, I have just described the most mortal. I want now to take another look at the source of this most strange and dangerous malady and show how many other ills stemmed from it as well.

If, beginning in the Middle Ages, the English had lost all of their political liberty and all the local freedoms that cannot survive for long without it, the various classes that make up their aristocracy would more than likely have split apart from one another, as happened not only in France but also, to one degree or another, on the rest of the continent, while at the same time they would have separated themselves as a group from the people. But liberty forced all classes to maintain contact with one another so that when necessary they could find common ground.

It is interesting to observe how the English nobility, driven by ambition, was able to mingle with its inferiors and treat them as equals whenever it saw the need to do so. Arthur Young, whom I quoted earlier, and whose book is one of the most instructive works about old France that exists, tells how one day he happened to find himself at the country home of the duc de Liancourt, to whom he mentioned his wish to question some of the cleverer and wealthier farmers of the region.