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The Terror
The period of Jacobin-controlled violence during the French Revolution (September 1793 – July 1794) during which Condorcet was condemned, hid on the Rue des Fossoyeurs, and died — the archetypal case of the Enlightenment devouring its own theorists.
The Terror was the period during which the Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre and Saint-Just, used the Revolutionary Tribunal and the guillotine to suppress political opposition. Between 16,000 and 40,000 people were executed, depending on how broadly one counts. The Girondins — Condorcet's political faction — were purged in June 1793 and systematically eliminated across the following months. Condorcet was condemned in absentia, hid for eight months, and died in a cell shortly after his arrest. The Terror is the catastrophic event against which the Sketch for a Historical Picture was composed, and the specific historical evidence that tested the thesis of indefinite perfectibility to its limits.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Condorcet's response to the Terror was not denial. He had watched it happen, he had seen his friends guillotined, and he was hiding from it as he wrote. His response was analytical: the Terror was a catastrophe of a specific