Nicolas de condorcet biography sampler

Serena Dyer discusses the interesting character and life of Sabine Winn, the Swiss wife of Sir Rowland Winn of Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. Born into a prominent Huguenot banking family, Sabine found adjustment to life as an English aristocrat difficult. Regularly left alone in Yorkshire by her politically ambitious (though unsuccessful) husband, she was left isolated. Troubled by suspicious neighbours, unruly servants and rebellious children, she often referred to Nostell as her prison. However it is how she combatted this isolation and loneliness that make Sabine fascinating. She compiled a culinary and medical recipe book, corresponded with tradespeople, and experimented with new crafts. The records that she left of these activities provide a unique window into the life of a woman trying to man a home for herself in a foreign country.

Introduction:

Condorcet and America

Condorcet (1743–94), the last of the great figures of the French Enlightenment, was a fervent américaniste, one of the most prominent among the many French intellectuals who greeted American independence with unmitigated approval. His writings on the United States are in some measure a reflection of their time. Late eighteenth-century France, particularly the progressive intelligentsia known as the “philosophes”—the rationalist, liberal, reform-minded intellectuals (writers, philosophers, scientists, members of the academies, enlightened administrators, etc.) who most actively championed the values of the Enlightenment—responded to the American Revolution with an enthusiasm that prompted the publication, during the period extending from the beginning of the rebellion in the colonies to the start of the French Revolution, of a rich body of literature on the United States. This corpus comprises ess

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