Sophie de Condorcet (born 1764 in Meulan, died 8 September 1822 in Paris), best known as Madame de Condorcet, was a prominent salon hostess from 1789 to the Reign of Terror, and again from 1799 until her death in 1822. She was the wife, then widow, of the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who died during the Reign of Terror. Despite his death, and the exile of her brother Marshal Emmanuel, Marquis de Grouchy between 1815 and 1821, she maintained her own identity and was well-connected and influential before, during, and after the French Revolution.
As a hostess, Madame de Condorcet was popular for her kind heart, beauty, and indifference to a person's class or social origins. Unlike her fellow-Girondist hostess Madame Roland, Madame de Condorcet's salons always included other women, notably Olympe de Gouges. De Condorcet was also a writer and a translator in her own right, highly educated for her day, completely fluent in English and Italian [6]. She produced influential translations of Thomas Paine and Adam Smith.
Contents |
Born Marie-Louise-Sophie de Grouchy, daughter of Francoise Jacques Marquis de Grouchy (a former page of Louis XV) by his intellectual wife Marie Gilberte Henriette Freteau, Sophie de Grouchy, in 1786, married the famous mathematician and philosopher Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (17 September 1743-28–29 March 1794).[1][2] Then 21 or 22, she was an acknowledged beauty; he was 42 and Inspector-General of the Mint and a prominent French Academician. Although there was a twenty-year age difference, the two shared many intellectual interests, and had a strong and happy marriage.
After her marriage, Madame de Condorcet started a famous salon at Hôtel des Monnaies in Paris, opposite the Louvre, and later at the Rue de Lille in Paris, that was attended by, among many others, many foreign visitors including Thomas Jefferson, [7] British aristocrats Charles Stanhope, 3rd Earl Stanhope, David Murray, 2nd Earl of Mansfield and the 7th Viscount Stormont, the economist Adam Smith, the Marquis de Beccaria, Turgot, the writer Pierre Beaumarchais, the pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, the writer and hostess Germaine de Staël and many French philosophers. This salon played an important role in the rise of the Girondin movement that stressed the rights of women.
Sophie de Condorcet allowed the Cercle Social — an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women — to meet at her house. Its members included women's rights advocate Olympe de Gouges who had published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. It has been argued that Sophie de Condorcet's own interest in women's rights were responsible for her husband's arguments for greater rights for women in the ten-page essay "Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité" (3 July 1790). Unfortunately, this essay had little influence in its day, being overshadowed by the more passionate essays by British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who visited Paris from 1791 to 1793) and de Gouges; the latter for certain attended Madame de Condorcet's salons.
The Condorcets had a daughter Louise Alexandrine de Condorcet, called Liza or Eliza, who was born in 1790. Eliza survived the French Revolution, along with her mother.
Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft mentions their sad history. The Marquis de Condorcet denounced the new Jacobin constitution which had no safeguards of the kind envisaged by him and the Girondins, and then fled into hiding with a female friend for eight months. His wife visited him secretly. Along with his friends, she encouraged de Condorcet to continue to write while in hiding. During this period, 1793–1794, he composed his most famous work— Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind). He also wrote Avis d'un Proscrit à sa Fille for his young daughter.
After the Marquis was proscribed 3 October 1793, he asked his wife to divorce him in 1793 to protect their family assets for their daughter. (A web-blog on Sophie de Condorcet claims that Cabanis urged this measure on the husband and wife, and that the divorce was applied for on 14 January 1794). The Marquis lost his nerve, and fled his friend's roof believing that his presence had been detected. He approached other friends who refused to shelter him and then ordered a twelve-egg omelette for breakfast in a village.[8] The suspicious peasants there handed him over to the authorities, and he was found dead after the first night in prison. Although he might have died of hardship or other natural causes, most historians today believe that he poisoned himself, possibly with the help of his sister-in-law's lover Cabinis.[3][4] According to Tomalin, Sophie de Condorcet was not informed about his death until several months later.
Madame de Condorcet had his last works published posthumously, starting with the Sketch or Equisse in 1795.[5]
Sophie de Condorcet was rendered penniless by her husband's proscription and his death which came before their divorce. Her financial circumstances compelled to support not only herself and her then-four year old daughter Eliza, but also her younger sister, Charlotte de Grouchy. Madame de Condorcet was obliged to open a shop to survive, and put aside her writing and translation work.
After the end of the Jacobin Terror a few months later in second year of Thermidor (July 1794), de Condorcet published a translation of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) in 1798, adding eight letters, Lettres sur la Sympathie, commenting upon this work. This became the standard French translation for the next two centuries. De Condorcet's eight letters on sympathy[6] were however ignored by historians of economic thought, and were just recently translated into English (Brown, 2008). In 1799, de Condorcet also arranged to publish her husband's Éloges des Academiciens, and was finally able to revive her salon at the former home of another salon hostess Madame Helvétius at Auteuil (Guillois 1897, pp. 94, 177).
De Condorcet worked with her brother-in-law, the philosopher and doctor Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (who had married her sister Charlotte some time between 1794 and 1800), and with Joseph Garat to publish her husband's complete works in 21 volumes between 1801 and 1804.[9] She adhered to the end to her husband's political views, and under the Consulate and Empire, her salon became a meeting place for those opposed to the autocratic regime. Sophie de Condorcet survived the French Revolution, the Directory, and the era of Napoleon, to witness the revival of reaction under the restored Bourbons.
De Condorcet remained active as a salon hostess, and in promoting her late husband's political views, and while she never remarried, she did establish a long-term relationship with the French historian Claude Charles Fauriel (21 October 1772 - 15 July 1844) that lasted until her death. Fauriel's Wikipedia entry states that he gave up all his energies to love, friendship and learning, and that the salon of Madame de Condorcet was a rallying point for dissenting republicans.
Sophie de Condorcet died in Paris on the 8th of September 1822.[10] Even at the end, she was determined to preserve Condorcet's memory through his works, and was preparing to bring out a new edition.[11] According to Tomalin, Madame de Condorcet had the will and intelligence, but not the stamina, to lead the French women's rights movement.
The de Condorcet daughter Eliza (or Liza, or Elisa), survived to marry in 1807 an exiled Irish revolutionary, Arthur O'Connor (1763/5-1852, born in Mitchelstown, in County Offaly).[12][13] He was later called General Condorcet-O'Connor, and was almost as old as Eliza's late father. He achieved some standing with Napoleon. By strange coincidence Eliza's maternal uncle Grouchy had commanded the army forces in the abortive invasion of Ireland of 1796-1797.
Eliza and Arthur Condorcet-O'Connor's efforts took over where Eliza's mother had left off,[14] publishing Eliza's father's works in twelve volumes in 1847-1849. According to one website, Eliza and Arthur left descendants who have served as officers in the French army until recently.[15]
