ArcaMax Publishing > Books > Philosophy > The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth > Section 13
The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth

J.B. Bury

Section 13 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER XI

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET

I.

The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the
middle classes during the third quarter of the eighteenth century
was promoted by the influence of fashion. The new ideas of
philosophers, rationalists, and men of science had interested the
nobles and higher classes of society for two generations, and were a
common subject of discussion in the most distinguished salons.
Voltaire's intimacy with Frederick the Great, the relations of
d'Alembert and Diderot with the Empress Catherine, conferred on
these men of letters, and on the ideas for which they stood, a
prestige which carried great weight with the bourgeoisie. Humbler
people, too, were as amenable as the great to the seduction of
theories which supplied simple keys to the universe [Footnote: Taine
said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political science to the
strict application of an elementary axiom which renders all study
unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and assumed
that everybody was capable of judging for himself on the most
difficult problems. As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of
nearly all the leading thinkers were written for the general public
not merely for philosophers. The policy of the Government in
suppressing these dangerous publications did not hinder their
diffusion, and gave them the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770
the avocat general (Seguier) acknowledged the futility of the
policy. "The philosophers," he said, "have with one hand sought to
shake the throne, with the other to upset the altars. Their purpose
was to change public opinion on civil and religious institutions,
and the revolution has, so to speak, been effected. History and
poetry, romances and even dictionaries, have been infected with the
poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly published in the
capital before they inundate the provinces like a torrent. The
contagion has spread into workshops and cottages." [Footnote:
Rocquain, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution, p. 278.]

The contagion spread, but the official who wrote these words did not
see that it was successful because it was opportune, and that the
minds of men were prepared to receive the seed of revolutionary
ideas by the unspeakable corruption of the Government and the
Church. As Voltaire remarked about the same time, France was
becoming Encyclopaedist, and Europe too.

2.

The influence of the subversive and rationalistic thinkers in
bringing about the events of 1789 has been variously estimated by
historians. The truth probably lies in the succinct statement of
Acton that "the confluence of French theory with American example
caused the Revolution to break out" when it did. The theorists aimed
at reform, not at political revolution; and it was the stimulus of
the Declaration of Rights of 1774 and the subsequent victory of the
Colonies that precipitated the convulsion, at a time when the
country had a better prospect of improvement than it ever had before
1774, when Louis XVI. came to the throne. But the theories had
prepared France for radical changes, and they guided the phases of
the Revolution. The leaders had all the optimism of the
Encyclopaedists; yet the most powerful single force was Rousseau,
who, though he denied Progress and blasphemed civilisation, had
promulgated the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, giving it
an attractive appearance of mathematical precision; and to this
doctrine the revolutionaries attached their optimistic hopes.
[Footnote: It is interesting to observe how Robespierre, to whom the
doctrines of Rousseau were oracles, could break out into admiration
of the progress of civilised man, as he did in the opening passage
of his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship
of the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French
Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer
merely speculative; for the American constitution was founded on
democratic equality, whereas the English constitution, which before
had seemed the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was
founded on inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was
waged with weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and
Hebert, the followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples
of Rousseau. In the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the
Jacobin Club shattered the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had
their disciples in Babeuf and the socialists.

A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration
and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in
the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression
in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars
on 14th July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and
arranged by the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and
optimism of the people who gathered to swear loyalty to the new
Constitution were genuine and spontaneous. Consciously or
subconsciously they were under the influence of the doctrine of
Progress which leaders of opinion had for several decades been
insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them that
their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds or
hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of
political subjection and one age of political literature had made
them. The assumption that new social machinery could alter human
nature and create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly
confuted.


Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum
 uenimus in Latium,


but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.

Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the
philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and
exposed by the Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They
had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous
force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored
the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued
the strength of the links which bind generations together. So the
Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the
past, and that a new method of government, constructed on
mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of Burke) "ready
made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of
wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the
brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic
felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended
only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The
illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th
of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the
hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world
were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was
one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a
giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however
far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger
Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace
of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress.

3.

Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not
unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of
civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot
had only left luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but
he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of
the scheme are fully set forth. His principles are to be found
almost entirely in Turgot. But they have a new significance for
Condorcet. He has given them wings. He has emphasised, and made
deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer.
Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was prophesying
under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch
of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should
have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793.
[Footnote: Published in 1795.]

Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of
whom he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of
Voltaire and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion
respectfully. He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place
which he assigned to Providence was that of a sort of honorary
President of the development of civilisation who might disappear
without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference
between his views and those of his friend as to the role of
Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.

A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected
with the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not
believe in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady
reforms under the existing regime would do wonders for France.
Before the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by
its enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing
volume of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most
deeply stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and
confirmed his faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the
exhilaration of the belief that he was living through "one of the
greatest revolutions of the human race," and he deliberately
designed his book to be opportune to a crisis of mankind, at which
"a picture of revolutions of the past will be the best guide."

Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with
brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an
earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants
and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all
have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the
certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social
welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its
direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors
had never done, on the prospects of the distant future.

4.

His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive
changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on
the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications,
the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken
literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a
practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention
of writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his
birth to his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet
reveals that he had no notion of the limitations which confine our
knowledge of the past, and that even if he had conceived a more
modest and practicable programme he would have been incapable of
executing it. His formula, however, is worth remembering. For the
unattainable ideal which it expresses reminds us how many periods
and passages of human experience must always remain books with seven
seals.

Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the
tenth lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and
his epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of
the map of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections
not by great political changes but by important steps in knowledge.
The first three periods--the formation of primitive societies,
followed by the pastoral age, and the agricultural age--conclude
with the invention of alphabetic writing in Greece. The fourth is
the history of Greek thought, to the definite division of the
sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth knowledge progresses
and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the sixth is the dark
age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The significance of
the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the revolution
which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with which the
eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book develop the
vast consequences of this invention. The scientific revolution
effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now closed by
the creation of the French Republic.

The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social
Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and
inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the
clew to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is
the history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by
formulating the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet
insists on "the indissoluble union" between intellectual progress
and that of liberty, virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and
on the effect of science in the destruction of prejudice. All errors
in politics and ethics have sprung, he asserts, from false ideas
which are closely connected with errors in physics and ignorance of
the laws of nature. And in the new doctrine of Progress he sees an
instrument of enlightenment which is to give "the last blow to the
tottering edifice of prejudices."

It would not be useful to analyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his
obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His
slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all
the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social
amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a
millennium is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period
appears as an interruption of the onward march. His inability to
appreciate the historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more
surprising ignorance and prejudice. But these particular defects are
largely due to a fundamental error which runs through his whole book
and was inherent in the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists.
Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which
institutions have played in social development. So far as he
considered them at all, he saw in them obstacles to the free play of
human reason; not the spontaneous expression of a society
corresponding to its needs or embodying its ideals, but rather
machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the masses and
keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress in which
he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the
institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability.
In the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell
into a manifest contradiction when he praised the relative
perfection reached in some European countries in the eighteenth
century, and at the same time condemned as eminently retrograde all
the doctrines and institutions which had been previously in control.
[Footnote: Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This
error is closely connected with the other error, previously noticed,
of conceiving man abstracted from his social environment and
exercising his reason in vacuo.

5.

The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes,
two uses. It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it
should enable us to determine its direction in the future, and
thereby to accelerate the rate of progression.

By the facts of history and the arguments they suggest, he
undertakes to show that nature has set no term to the process of
improving human faculties, and that the advance towards perfection
is limited only by the duration of the globe. The movement may vary
in velocity, but it will never be retrograde so long as the earth
occupies its present place in the cosmic system and the general laws
of this system do not produce some catastrophe or change which would
deprive the human race of the faculties and resources which it has
hitherto possessed. There will be no relapse into barbarism. The
guarantees against this danger are the discovery of true methods in
the physical sciences, their application to the needs of men, the
lines of communication which have been established among them, the
great number of those who study them, and finally the art of
printing. And if we are sure of the continuous progress of
enlightenment, we may be sure of the continuous improvement of
social conditions.

It is possible to foresee events, if the general laws of social
phenomena are known, and these laws can be inferred from the history
of the past. By this statement Condorcet justifies his bold attempt
to sketch his tenth period of human history which lies in the
future; and announces the idea which was in the next generation to
be worked out by Comte. But he cannot be said to have deduced
himself any law of social development. His forecast of the future is
based on the ideas and tendencies of his own age. [Footnote: It is
interesting to notice that the ablest of medieval Arabic historians,
Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century), had claimed that if history is
scientifically studied future events may be predicted.]

Apart from scientific discoveries and the general diffusion of a
knowledge of the laws of nature on which moral improvement depends,
he includes in his prophetic vision the cessation of war and the
realisation of the less familiar idea of the equality of the sexes.
If he were alive to-day, he could point with triumph to the fact
that of these far-reaching projects one is being accomplished in
some of the most progressive countries and the other is looked upon
as an attainable aim by statesmen who are not visionaries. The
equality of the sexes was only a logical inference from the general
doctrine of equality to which Condorcet's social theory is
reducible. For him the goal of political progress is equality;
equality is to be the aim of social effort--the ideal of the
Revolution.

For it is the multitude of men that must be considered--the mass of
workers, not the minority who live on their labours. Hitherto they
have been neglected by the historian as well as by the statesman.
The true history of humanity is not the history of some men. The
human race is formed by the mass of families who subsist almost
entirely on the fruits of their own work, and this mass is the
proper subject of history, not great men.

You may establish social equality by means of laws and institutions,
yet the equality actually enjoyed may be very incomplete. Condorcet
recognises this and attributes it to three principal causes:
inequality in wealth; inequality in position between the man whose
means of subsistence are assured and can be transmitted to his
family and the man whose means depend on his work and are limited by
the term of his own life [Footnote: He looked forward to the
mitigation of this inequality by the development of life insurance
which was then coming to the front.]; and inequality in education.
He did not propose any radical methods for dealing with these
difficulties, which he thought would diminish in time, without,
however, entirely disappearing. He was too deeply imbued with the
views of the Economists to be seduced by the theories of Rousseau,
Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating communism or the
abolition of private property.

Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised
society, Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of
the earth,--a uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the
obliteration of the distinction between advanced and retrograde
races. The backward peoples, he prophesied, will climb up to the
condition of France and the United States of America, for no people
is condemned never to exercise its reason. If the dogma of the
perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by any restrictions, is
granted, this is a logical inference, and we have already seen that
it was one of the ideas current among the philosophers.

Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous
conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a
considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical
science. We need only note this. More interesting is the prediction
that, even if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is
inalterable, the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental
operations will be augmented by the invention of new instruments and
methods.

The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature,
and to have produced a survey of any durable value would have
required the equipment of a Gibbon. Condorcet was not even as well
equipped as Voltaire. [Footnote: But as he wrote without books the
Sketch was a marvellous tour de force.] The significance of his
Sketch lies in this, that towards the close of an intellectual
movement it concentrated attention on the most important, though
hitherto not the most prominent, idea which that movement had
disseminated, and as it were officially announced human Progress as
the leading problem that claimed the interest of mankind. With him
Progress was associated intimately with particular eighteenth
century doctrines, but these were not essential to it. It was a
living idea; it survived the compromising theories which began to
fall into discredit after the Revolution, and was explored from new
points of view. Condorcet, however, wedded though his mind was to
the untenable views of human nature current in his epoch and his
circle, did not share the tendency of leading philosophers to regard
history as an unprofitable record of folly and crime which it would
be well to obliterate or forget. He recognised the interpretation of
history as the key to human development, and this principle
controlled subsequent speculations on Progress in France.

6.

Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no
less ardent believer in human perfectibility. Looking at life and
man from his own special point of view, he saw in the study of the
physical organism the key to the intellectual and moral improvement
of the race. It is by knowledge of the relations between his
physical states and moral states that man can attain happiness,
through the enlargement of his faculties and the multiplication of
enjoyments, and that he will be able to grasp, as it were, the
infinite in his brief existence by realising the certainty of
indefinite progress. His doctrine was a logical extension of the
theories of Locke and Condillac. If our knowledge is wholly derived
from sensations, our sensations depend on our sensory organs, and
mind becomes a function of the nervous system.

The events of the Revolution quenched in him as little as in
Condorcet the sanguine confidence that it was the opening of a new
era for science and art, and thereby for the general Progress of
man. "The present is one of those great periods of history to which
posterity will often look back" with gratitude. [Footnote: Picavet,
Les Ideologues, p. 203. Cabanis was born in 1757 and died in 1808.]
He took an active part in the coup d'etat of the 18th of Brumaire
(1799) which was to lead to the despotism of Napoleon. He imagined
that it would terminate oppression, and was as enthusiastic for it
as he and Condorcet had been for the Revolution ten years before.
"You philosophers," he wrote, [Footnote: Ib. p. 224.] "whose studies
are directed to the improvement and happiness of the race, you no
longer embrace vain shadows. Having watched, in alternating moods of
hope and sadness, the great spectacle of our Revolution, you now see
with joy the termination of its last act; you will see with rapture
this new era, so long promised to the French people, at last open,
in which all the benefits of nature, all the creations of genius,
all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will be utilised, an
era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your
philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised."

It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the
eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most
important of those thinkers who, living into the new period, took
care that the ideas of their own generation should not be
overwhelmed in the rising flood of reaction.
Prev Next All
Printer Friendly Version | Send this page to a friend | Discuss this Book
Your email address is safe with us. View our Privacy policy.

The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan W.S. Gilbert Category: Plays Sections: 50 What's this? Table of Contents		Fiction Non Fiction Short Stories Poetry Plays Sci Fi Religion Biography