Lettres d'un bourgeois de New-Haven à un citoyen de Virginie, sur l'inutilité de partager le pouvoir législatif entre plusieurs corps
Contributions
- Un bourgeois de New-Haven (Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet)
- author
- Jacques-François Froullé
- publisher
Related resources
Notes
Four letters by Condorcet inserted into Mazzei's work, pp.267-371.
In 1785, the marquis de Condorcet was made an honorary citizen of "New Haven dans la Nouvelle Yorck" as reported by the Journal de Paris. Condorcet took his Americanization seriously and signed his most important pre-revolutionary pamphlets as, "un bourgeois de New-Haven, "un citoyen des Etats-Unis" or "un républicain". While he was passionately pro-American he was equally passionately against the idealized vision of noble savages and sturdy yeomen represented by the members of the Société gallo-américaine and was an active participant in polemics about the United States. In these polemics he first developed his theory of social progress, hoping that America might provide a model to Europeans for deriving a new kind of politics from abstract principles of justice and natural rights. Through the application of reason, he argued that enlightened citizens could develop a new "science of legislation". America, for Condorcet, was a kind of mental experiment. "Having never travelled far from Paris, except for one visit to Voltaire's estate in Ferney, near Geneva, he remained free to design the country he wanted in his imagination" (Darnton, pp.122-23).
For more on Condorcet and America, see Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth (2003).