Rue des Fossoyeurs
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 AI Story
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 immediate evidence refuted the thesis. The thesis was advanced anyway — not from naïveté, since Condorcet was the subtlest political mind of his generation, but because the evidence he cited was drawn from the trajectory of millennia rather than from the catastrophe of any single year.
The Rue des Fossoyeurs is the location from which this volume takes its moral template. Edo Segal's foreword names the detail that stops him: the man who saw furthest into our future wrote from a hiding place, listening for soldiers on the stairs. The specific courage of making a constructive argument while the immediate circumstances refute it is the stance this volume commends to readers facing the AI transition — not from similar physical danger, but from the analogous intellectual situation of trying to think clearly about the future while the ground moves.
Condorcet left the hiding place on March 25, 1794, reportedly because he feared his continued presence would endanger Madame Vernet if he were discovered. He wandered for three days and was arrested at an inn in Clamart after ordering a twelve-egg omelette — the order the tavern-keeper took as evidence of aristocratic habits. He died in his cell in Bourg-la-Reine on March 29, 1794, under circumstances that have never been definitively established.
The manuscript survived because Sophie de Condorcet — the Eliza Segal mentions in the foreword — smuggled it out of the hiding place and ensured its publication in 1795. The specific domestic courage of the woman who made the manuscript's survival possible is a structural lesson: the ideas survive because someone builds the structure that allows them to outlast the catastrophe.
Origin
The address 15 Rue des Fossoyeurs was later renamed 15 Rue Servandoni. The building still stands, and a plaque commemorates Condorcet's residency there during his final productive months.
The episode is documented in Sophie de Condorcet's memoir of her husband's final period, in the correspondence surrounding the Sketch's posthumous publication, and in the extensive biographical literature that has built up around the Condorcet story.
Key Ideas
The most productive period came during the greatest threat. Eight months of hiding produced the defining statement of his philosophy.
Madame Vernet's risk made the work possible. Structures of protection built by individuals allowed the ideas to survive.
Sophie de Condorcet carried the manuscript out. The survival of the ideas depended on specific people building specific structures at personal cost.
The circumstances are inseparable from the argument. The defense of perfectibility was made by a fugitive from his own political project.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Sophie de Condorcet, preface to the 1795 edition of the Esquisse
- Elisabeth Badinter and Robert Badinter, Condorcet: Un intellectuel en politique
- David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity
- Keith Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics