He was descended from the ancient family of Caritat, who took their title from Condorcet, a town in Dauphiné. He was educated at the Jesuit college in Reims and at the College of Navarre in Paris, where he showed his first promise as a mathematician. In 1769 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences, to which he contributed papers on mathematical and other subjects.
Condorcet was the friend of almost all the distinguished men of his time and a zealous propagator of the progressive views then current among French men of letters. A protégé of the French philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, he took an active part in the preparation of the Encyclopédie. He was elected to the permanent secretaryship of the Academy of Sciences in 1777 and to the French Academy in 1782 and was a member of other European academies. In 1785 he published his Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions), a remarkable work that has a distinguished place in the history of the doctrine of probability. A second edition, greatly enlarged and completely recast, appeared in 1805 under the title of Éléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux de hasard, à la loterie et aux jugements des hommes.
In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), who was said to have been one of the most beautiful women of her time. Her salon at the Hôtel des Monnaies, where Condorcet lived in his capacity as inspector general of the mint, was quite famous.
Condorcet published his Vie de M. Turgot in 1786 and his Vie de Voltaire in 1789. These biographies of his friends reveal his sympathy with Turgot’s economic theories about mitigating the suffering of the French populace before the French Revolution and with Voltaire’s opposition to the church. Both works were widely and eagerly read and are perhaps, from a purely literary point of view, the best of Condorcet’s writings.
The outbreak of the French Revolution, which he greeted with enthusiasm, involved him in a great deal of political activity. He was elected to represent Paris in the Legislative Assembly and became its secretary; was active in the reform of the educational system; was chief author of the address to the European powers in 1791; and in 1792 he presented a scheme for a system of state education, which was the basis of that ultimately adopted. Condorcet was one of the first to declare for a republic, and in August 1792 he drew up the declaration justifying the suspension of the king and the summoning of the National Convention. In the convention he represented the département of Aisne and was a member of the committee on the constitution. His draft of a new constitution, representative of the Girondins, the more moderate political group during the Revolution, was rejected, however, in favour of that of the Jacobins, a more radical political group whose dominating figure was Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI he voted against the death penalty. But his independent attitude became dangerous in the wake of the Revolution when Robespierre’s radical measures triumphed, and his opposition to the arrest of the Girondins led to his being outlawed.
To occupy his mind while he was in hiding, some of his friends prevailed on him to engage in the work by which he is best known, the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind). Its fundamental idea is that of the continuous progress of the human race to an ultimate perfection. He represents humans as starting from the lowest stage of savagery with no superiority over the other animals save that of bodily organization and as advancing uninterruptedly in the path of enlightenment, virtue, and happiness. The stages that the human race has already gone through, or, in other words, the great epochs of history, are regarded as nine in number.
There is an epoch of the future—a 10th epoch—and the most original part of Condorcet’s treatise is that which is devoted to it. After insisting that general laws regulative of the past warrant general inferences as to the future, he argues that the three tendencies that the entire history of the past shows will be characteristic features of the future are: (1) the destruction of inequality between nations; (2) the destruction of inequality between classes; and (3) the improvement of individuals, the indefinite perfectibility of human nature itself—intellectually, morally, and physically. The equality to which he represents nations and individuals as tending is not absolute equality but equality of freedom and of rights. Nations and men, he asserts, are equal if equally free and are all tending to equality because all are tending to freedom.
As to indefinite perfectibility, he nowhere denies that progress is conditioned both by the constitution of humanity and by the character of its surroundings. But he affirms that these conditions are compatible with endless progress and that the human mind can assign no fixed limits to its own advancement in knowledge and virtue or even to the prolongation of bodily life. This theory explains the importance that he attached to popular education, to which he looked for all sure progress. The book is notable for its intense aversion to all religion, especially Christianity, and to monarchy. Pervaded by a spirit of excessive hopefulness, it contains numerous errors of detail, due to the circumstances in which it was written. Its value lies in its general ideas. Condorcet’s ethical position gives emphasis to the sympathetic impulses and social feelings and had considerable influence upon the French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte. While Condorcet was under proscription as a Girondin, some of the other works he wrote were published by friends and others were issued after his death. Still interested in public affairs and believing that the house in which he had been hiding was watched, he escaped and, after hiding in thickets and quarries for three days, entered the village of Clamart on the evening of March 27, 1794. His appearance betrayed him, and he was taken to Bourg-la-Reine and imprisoned. On the morning of March 29 he was found dead, whether from exhaustion or poisoning is unknown.
Wholly a man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and equal rights for women—including woman suffrage—and the abolition of slavery, Condorcet sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. Rather than elucidate human behaviour, as had been done thus far, by recourse to either the moral or physical sciences, he sought to explain it by a merger of the two sciences that eventually became transmuted into the discipline of sociology.