The Optimist in Hiding and the Century That Answered Him

In March 1794, in a small room at the Paris house of a woman named Madame Vernet, a man with a warrant out for his arrest wrote a book about the future happiness of humankind. He was the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and a deputy of the Revolution, and the authorities he had served now called him a traitor. He had opposed the execution of Louis XVI and had voted against the Jacobin constitution of 1793. Within weeks he would leave his hiding place, be arrested at an inn and die in prison two days later, before any tribunal could hear him. The book was his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, and it remains one of the strangest optimistic documents ever written.

The Sketch divides human history into ten epochs, from the first small societies to the French Revolution and then into a tenth that had not yet happened. Condorcet admitted that he had good evidence for some of the stages and was only speculating about others. His central claim was that the laws of nature are constant, so that the growth of knowledge follows a pattern that needs no divine hand. Reason, spreading through education and printing, would free people from religious and political domination. Inequality between nations and within them would shrink. He expected the equality of women to be recognised, and he had already helped lead the French Society of the Friends of the Blacks, an abolitionist group.