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Rue des Fossoyeurs
The Street of the Gravediggers in Paris where Condorcet spent the last months of his productive life in hiding — composing the Sketch for a Historical Picture while the government he helped design hunted him.
From July 1793 until March 1794, Condorcet hid in the home of Madame Vernet at 15 Rue des Fossoyeurs — the Street of the Gravediggers, now Rue Servandoni — in the Saint-Sulpice neighborhood of Paris. He had been condemned as a Girondin by the Jacobin-dominated Convention and faced certain execution if captured. Madame Vernet, a widow who rented rooms to boarders, sheltered him at enormous personal risk, apparently for the entire period without payment beyond what her other lodgers contributed in rent. During these eight months Condorcet composed what became the most influential of his works: the posthumously published Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The circumstances of the Sketch's composition are inseparable from its argument. A philosopher was systematically defending the indefinite perfectibility of the human understanding while the human understanding's most recent political experiment was murdering his friends. Every piece of