Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, the French mathematician, historian of the sciences, political theorist, and social reformer, was one of the youngest of the Encyclopedists and the only prominent one to participate actively in the French Revolution. He was born in Ribemont in Picardy and was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège de Navarre. Admitted to the Académie des Sciences in 1769 on the basis of his early mathematical writings, he was elected its perpetual secretary in 1776 and ably depicted the progress of the sciences to a wide public in the customary eulogies (Éloges) of deceased academicians, which he presented in this position.

A protégé of Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, for whom Condorcet's election to the Académie Française in 1782 was regarded as a personal triumph, and of Baron de l'Aulne Turgot, who called him to the directorship...