Birth
Born in Picardy
Born at Ribemont in northern France, a mathematician who turned his gifts to politics and reform.
Words
“The time will come when the sun will shine only on free men who know no master but their reason.”
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Condorcet brought mathematics to politics, studying how groups make decisions and uncovering the paradoxes that still bear his name. He argued early and bravely for the rights of women and of enslaved people, and for free public education as the engine of equality. Hunted during the Terror by the revolution he had championed, he wrote his last book in hiding: a sweeping sketch of human progress, confident that knowledge would lift the species toward justice even as the state closed in on him. He was found dead in a cell days after his capture.
