Discourse on the Office of the Emperor. January 25, 1792 (Discours sur l’office de l’Empereur. 25 janvier 1792) – Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet

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Discours sur l’office de l’Empereur, prononcé à l’Assemblée nationale le 25 janvier 1792 is a political speech by the French mathematician, philosopher and revolutionary deputy Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794). Delivered before the Legislative Assembly in Paris on 25 January 1792, it addresses France’s relations with the Holy Roman Emperor during the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars. It was printed officially the same year, and it is among the clearest statements of Condorcet’s views on foreign policy and the international rights of peoples.

Author and Political Position

Condorcet is best known as a mathematician and Enlightenment thinker. He was educated in the school of Voltaire and d’Alembert and is counted among the most important intellectual figures linking the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He served as permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1776, was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and later became its president, and then sat in the Convention in 1792. He represented Paris in the Legislative Assembly from 6 September 1791, and he was associated with the Girondin current. Contemporary accounts note that he served as a secretary of the Assembly.

In the Legislative Assembly he was one of the prominent figures of the left. The Assembly’s best-known leaders on that side were Brissot, Condorcet and Vergniaud. Elected for Paris, he broke with the moderate liberals over curtailing the power of the monarchy, and he joined Brissot and Thomas Paine in calling for the end of the monarchy and a republican constitution. The speech on the Emperor belongs to this phase of his career, when his activity as a deputy ran alongside his work on public instruction, on assignats and on the review of the first legislature’s labours.

Historical Context: The Emperor and the Revolution

The “Emperor” of the title was Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor and brother of Marie-Antoinette. By early 1792 relations between Revolutionary France and the Empire had deteriorated over several issues. One was the status of the German princes who held lands in Alsace and Lorraine. These “princes possessionnés” retained fiefs enclaved in the kingdom of France following the annexations of Alsace and Lorraine, and the treaties stipulated that these possessions depended on the law of the Holy Roman Empire rather than French law. The abolition of feudal rights by the Revolutionary assemblies thus raised questions of treaty obligation and international law. The affair of the Alsatian princes, like that of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin, showed that the new France no longer accepted the old order of things and found itself in conflict with traditional law.

A second issue was the presence of French émigrés on German soil and the Declaration of Pillnitz of 1791. Leopold issued that declaration chiefly to satisfy the French émigrés who had taken refuge in his territories and were calling for foreign intervention. In December 1791 Louis XVI warned the Electors of Trier and Mainz that he would treat them as enemies unless armaments in their territories were dispersed by 15 January, and on 16 January 1792 he informed the Assembly that the émigrés had been expelled from the electorates, acknowledging Leopold’s good offices.

The debates of January 1792 culminated on the day of Condorcet’s speech. The decree of 25 January 1792, which concluded the debates, was an aggressive injunction to the Emperor and did not ease international tension. It invited the Emperor to renounce any treaty or convention directed against the sovereignty, independence and security of the nation. It was not yet a declaration of war, and Leopold II in practice temporized. The Digithèque of the Université de Perpignan, which reproduces documents on the Alsatian princes, records the decree on Austria’s hostile dispositions of 25 January 1792 and notes that Condorcet proposed addressing to the French people and to foreign nations an exposition of the motives behind the decree the Assembly had just passed.

The Speech and Its Place in Condorcet’s Thought

The Discourse was printed by the Imprimerie nationale in Paris in 1792. The Condorcet inventory’s chronology cites the historian Cahen’s description of it as a “minute and exact exposition” of Condorcet’s foreign policy. The title reflects a concern with defining the proper role, or “office”, of the imperial dignity in relation to the Empire’s members and to France, rather than treating the quarrel as a simple clash of dynasties.

Condorcet’s reasoning on foreign affairs rested on principles that he developed in several texts of the same period. A manuscript draft preserved in the Musée d’histoire de la justice, des crimes et des peines, titled “Sur le droit des peuples à disposer d’eux-mêmes” (1792), is described by its editors as containing ideas found again in the Discourse on the Office of the Emperor, as well as in the draft statement of motives for the declaration of war of 20 April 1792. That draft argues that men united in society only to secure the full and peaceful enjoyment of the rights arising from their nature, and that equality is one of these rights and alone suffices to guarantee all the others. It holds that if a people has recovered its rights, the rulers of other nations who united to strip it of its liberty would be enemies not of that people alone but of the whole human family. Applied to Alsace, the same reasoning denies that Germany has the right to demand that Alsatians “remain under the yoke of feudalism.” These are the principles that frame Condorcet’s approach to the Alsatian princes and to the Emperor’s claimed role as protector of the Germanic body.

Publication and Textual History

The speech was published in 1792 as an official imprint of the National Assembly. In the posthumous editions of Condorcet’s writings it was collected with his other political pieces of the period. The standard bibliographic listing records it in the 1804 Œuvres de Condorcet (edited by Garat and Cabanis), volume 17, page 199, and in Arthur O’Connor and François Arago’s 1847 Œuvres, volume 10, page 281. The 1847 volume 10 consists essentially of political pamphlets, official speeches and journal articles from 1790 to late 1792, drawn from a chronological rearrangement of volumes 15, 16 and 17 of the 1804 edition. The speech also appears in the Archives parlementaires of the Revolution.

In the 1847 arrangement it sits among other writings of early 1792, including “De l’influence d’un monarque et d’une cour sur les mœurs d’un peuple libre” and the series of articles on the revision of the first legislature’s work published in the Chronique du mois.

Aftermath and Significance

The decree of 25 January and the debates around it did not produce the peace they ostensibly sought. The demand placed on the Emperor pushed the Holy Roman Empire toward Prussia, leading to the agreement of 16 February 1792. Leopold II died on 1 March 1792, and his son Francis II succeeded him as emperor in July. The Legislative Assembly declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. That same day Condorcet’s own report on public instruction was interrupted when the king, on Dumouriez’s proposal, came to the Assembly to propose the declaration of war.

For historians of political thought, the Discourse is valuable as evidence that Condorcet, usually remembered for his theory of progress, his work on voting and his advocacy of education and equal rights, also articulated a coherent position on international relations. That position was grounded in the rights of peoples, the legitimacy of revolutionary change within a nation, and the limits of imperial and dynastic claims over a people that had reclaimed its sovereignty. The text is therefore usually read together with his other writings of 1792 on war, on the rights of nations and on the monarchy, which chart his movement toward republicanism in the months before the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792.