ted
Condorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of the
Aisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and--a
much more important personage--the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soon
to stupefy the Convention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face set
immovable as bronze: 'An individual has no right to be either virtuous
or celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly are
not made to admire anybody.' The electors of the department of the Aisne
had unconsciously sent two typical revolutionists: the man of
intellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. In
their persons the Encyclopaedia and the Guillotine met. Condorcet, who
had been extreme in the Legislative, but found himself a moderate in the
Convention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the new
members: 'Better try to moderate them than quarrel.' But in this case,
not even in their ruin, were fire and water reconciled.

On the first great question that the Convention had to decide--the fate
of the king--Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wise
man would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that the
king was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for the
punishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediate
issue, whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or should
be submitted to the people for ratification, he voted as a wise man
should not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people. Such an
appeal must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles,
and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that,
though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previously
laid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that they
were neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How,
he asked, without violating every principle of jurisprudence, can you
act at the same time as legislators constituting the crime, as accusers,
and as judges? His proposal was that Lewis XVI. should be tried by a
tribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body of
the departments.[34] With true respect for Condorcet's honourable
anxiety that the conditions of justice should be rigorously
observed--for, as he well said, 'there is no liberty in a country where
positive law is not the single rule of judicial proceedings'--it is
difficult to see