Condorcet and Modernity

PRELUDE: 1743–1774

Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet, nicknamed ‘the condor’ by his friends, was born on 17 September 1743 in the garrison town of Ribemont in Picardy. His father, Antoine, was a cavalry captain of modest means whose noble lineage can be traced back to early medieval times. He was killed on manoeuvres at Neuf-Brisach a few weeks after Condorcet's birth, and Condorcet spent his childhood until the age of eleven in rural Picardy more or less tied to the apron-strings of his mother, Marie-Magdeleine Gaudry, whom he adored. Fiercely protected by his mother, who by all accounts was as superstitious and emotional as she was pious and possessive, the young boy remained exclusively under her influence for the first nine years of his life. The uneventful blandness of these well-cossetted, formative years, during which Condorcet received little in the way of formal education, but on which he would look back with great affection later on, is relieved only by the graphic account that survives in the biographies of a young boy decked out in the white dress of a girl devoted to the cult of the Virgin that his mother insisted that he should wear, no doubt to the great amusement of other boys in the town.

The idyll ended, and dresses were replaced by breeches, when Condorcet's uncle, the Bishop of Lisieux, arranged for his nephew to enter the Jesuit College in Reims in 1756.