Marquis de Condorcet

Marquis de Condorcet was a French mathematician, philosopher, and revolutionary whose work on probability, voting theory, and human progress placed him at the centre of the late Enlightenment, and whose death in a Bourg-la-Reine prison cell in 1794 marked the Terror's reach into its own former allies. He was born Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat in Ribemont, Picardy, in 1743.

Educated by the Jesuits at Reims and the College of Navarre in Paris, he showed early gift for mathematics, publishing his Essai sur le calcul integral in 1765 to praise from Jean d'Alembert. Election to the Academy of Sciences followed in 1769, and he served as the Academy's permanent secretary from 1776, expanding its eulogy tradition into a vehicle for advancing scientific method.

His 1785 Essai sur l'application de l'analyse a la probabilite des decisions rendues a la pluralite des voix introduced what is now called the Condorcet jury theorem and the Condorcet paradox in voting cycles, foundations of modern social-choice theory. Equally striking in his lifetime were his arguments for the abolition of slavery, the political and educational equality of women, and free public schooling.

Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and the National Convention in 1792, he drafted a liberal constitution that was rejected in favour of the Jacobin version. Denounced in 1793, he hid in Paris and wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind from memory before fleeing. He was arrested in March 1794 and found dead in his cell two mornings later.

The name Nicolas, the saint's name he carried within his given string, comes from the Greek Nikolaos, combining nike, meaning victory, with laos, meaning people. He answered to the title Condorcet from his family seat in the Dauphine, and he wrote to the end as if popular victory through reason were still on its way.