Nicolas de Condorcet

Nicolas de Condorcet was a mathematician, permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, and the last of the philosophes, who welcomed the Revolution, drafted a constitution and a plan for public education, and voted against the king’s death. Proscribed by the Jacobins, he wrote in hiding the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, the fullest statement of the Enlightenment’s faith in progress, and died in a cell the day after his capture. The Political Writings the lists assign include it with his essays on the rights of women and against slavery, and his work on voting and probability.