Condorcet: Writings on the United States

Introduction: Condorcet and America

Condorcet (1743–94), the last of the great figures of the French Enlightenment , was a fervent américaniste, one of the most prominent among the many French intellectuals who greeted American independence with unmitigated approval.1 His writings on the United States are in some measure a reflection of their time. Late eighteenth-century France, particularly the progressive intelligentsia known as the “philosophes”—the rationalist, liberal , reform-minded intellectuals (writers, philosophers, scientists, members of the academies, enlightened administrators, etc.) who most actively championed the values of the Enlightenment—responded to the American Revolution with an enthusiasm that prompted the publication, during the period extending from the beginning of the rebellion in the colonies to the start of the French Revolution, of a rich body of literature on the United States. This corpus comprises essentially two types of texts: accounts written by firsthand observers of American society (volunteers, officers in the French expeditionary force, travelers, diplomats, etc.), and works more purely political or philosophical in nature, whose authors as a rule had no direct knowledge of the United States but relied instead on written or secondary sources for their information. The most important firsthand accounts of America of the period include St. John de Crèvecœur’s Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784, a substantially revised French version of his 1782 Letters from an American Farmer); Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale (1786) (Travels in North America) by the marquis de Chastellux, an officer in Rochambeau ’s army; and Nouveau voyage dans les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale (1791) (New Travels in the United States of America), an account of his 1788 trip to the United States by Brissot de Warville, the future Girondin leader. Representing the more purely political works are the chapters on colonial America and the American Revolution in Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et introduction: condorcet and america 2 S introduction politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (1770–80) (A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies),2 Mably’s Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des États-Unis d’Amérique (1784) (Remarks Concerning the Government and the Laws of the United States of America), and Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale (1788) (Historical and political researches on the United States of North America) by the Italian entrepreneur and diplomat, friend and neighbor of Jefferson in Virginia, Filippo Mazzei.3 Condorcet’s writings on the United States belong to this latter group of texts, political works by authors who, with the notable exception of Mazzei, had never traveled to America. Nevertheless, Condorcet, who had a good knowledge of English, was very well-informed about American reality. To be sure, like most French philosophes, he was ideologically predisposed to be pro-American and to idealize the United States as a new philosophical promised land. At the same time, he had a thorough factual knowledge of recent American history. Numerous sources of information were at his disposal , namely, the travel literature by French authors listed above; books and newspapers from England or the United States; and American political documents, which were disseminated in France very rapidly—as early as 1777, French translations of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and several of the state constitutions were being published , and in 1787, the proposed text of the Federal Constitution was first translated, only two months after it had been signed.4 For further information , he could consult friends who had been to America, like Lafayette, Mazzei, or Brissot, and his American contacts in Paris. Franklin made visits to France in 1767 and 1769, before returning to Paris for a stay of nearly ten years (1776–85), and Condorcet knew him well. Both were members of the Royal Academy of Sciences. Condorcet was even closer to Jefferson, who lived in Paris between 1784 and the autumn of 1789 and succeeded Franklin as ambassador to France, and to Tom Paine, who first came to Paris in 1781 and spent much time in France from 1787 on. Paine, who had been granted French citizenship, served in the National Convention with Condorcet in 1792/93, and both were elected to its committee charged with drafting a new constitution.5 As a member of the American Philosophical Society, Condorcet also had access to colleagues in the United States with whom...