 Feminist, abolitionist, and, in his final years, a democratic republican, Condorcet acted in public life to expand the claims of justice, morality, and human rights. Friend, protégé and ally of Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, disciple of Voltaire, collaborator of the Encyclopédie, perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, member of the French Academy and numerous European academies, renowned mathematician and author of biographies of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and Voltaire and many other prominent intellectuals of his time, he also participated actively in the world of political affairs—first under Turgot’s short ministry (1774–1776), and then again during the French Revolution. Before the Revolution, he published essays on the application of the theory of probability to popular voting, on the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention; and he actively polemicized on behalf of Turgot’s attempted reforms of economic and political life. He was perhaps the only one of the contributors to Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie to live long enough to participate in the French Revolution, helping to draft the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen [Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen]. Tragically, he was also one of the Revolution’s most prominent casualties: Participant in the preparations for the Convocations of the Estates General, elected representative to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and later to the National Convention, he wrote a report on public  instruction[6]  and drafted a constitution for France embodying his ideal voting procedures, which was never adopted. The year 1793 was a fateful one for Condorcet. He came under an order of proscription by the Convention in 1793 following his publicly voiced objections to the scrapping of his draft constitution in favor of a hastily prepared version supported by the increasingly dominant Jacobin faction of the Convention, his protests over press censorship and the arrests of the Girondins, and his scathing comparisons of the Jacobins of 1793 to the royalists of 1791. After eight months in hiding, during which time he wrote his unfinished Esquisse [Sketch] (which included the section published first in 1804 as Fragment on the New Atlantis, or Combined Efforts of the Human Species for the Advancement of Science), he fled Paris but was arrested on March 27, 1794, and imprisoned in Bourgla-Reine, where he was found dead in his prison cell on March 29—the cause of his death remains unknown. In the florid phrasing of one of his nineteenth-century admirers: