[20] Montesquieu, Raynal, and one or two other writers, had attacked slavery long before, and Condorcet published a very effective piece against it in 1781 (_Réflexions sur l'Esclavage des Nègres_; _Œuv._ vii. 63), with an epistle dedicated to the enslaved blacks. About the same time an Abolition Society was formed in France, following the example set in England. [21] _Au Corps Electoral, contre l'Esclavage des Noirs._ 3 Fév. 1789. _Sur l'Admission des Députés des Planteurs de Saint Domingue._ 1789. ix. 469-485. [22] _Lettres d'un Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat_, ix. 255-259. [23] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 263, 283. [24] _Ib._ ix. 266. [25] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 264. [26] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par les Provinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, xii. 228, 229, 234. [27] _Œuv._ iii. 533. As this was written in 1777, Condorcet was perhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tells us repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a most ignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of his nostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he was wretched.--See vol. i. of _Madame de Staël's Considerations_. [28] _Œuv._ iii. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a young mechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel's chess-player, who would answer all constitutional purposes perfectly.--_Ib._ 239-241. [29] _Œuv._ xii. 236. III. When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came to be chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as a municipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of their deputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 had mitigated the loyalty that had even withstood the trial of the king's flight. When the Legislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakable element of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one of the secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addresses in which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentary chambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually in existence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative what Barère afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid, labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither the hard force of Napoleon's proclamations, nor the flowery eloquence of the Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under such circumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imagination and perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one nor the other, but only reason--a hard anvil, out of which he laboriously struck flashes and single sounds.