CONDORCET (Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat... - Lot 33 - Osenat

CONDORCET (Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat de). Autograph letter to PIERRE BRISSOT. S.l., [summer 1791]. 2 pp. 2/3 in-8, address on the back; marginal lack on the second leaf due to the opening without affecting the text. "I BELIEVE IT VERY IMPORTANT TO HATE TO ROUVE THE JACOBINS and to bring there a discussion on the conventions. They are biased in the Assembly on this article, the best patriots have only a rather uncertain opinion in this respect. If the question is dealt with in the Jacobins, I will read a brief there [which he would do on August 7, 1791]. THE AFFAIR OF THE FALSE ASSIGNATS CAN DO MUCH HARM. I would like to see established in Paris and in some of the principal cities, a public depository of assignats and bank registers as in Amsterdam and London; by this means one could transport a great deal of money, and have a large circulation, without any real movement of assignats. Please see if Mr. Clavière [the Genevan banker and politician Etienne Clavière, future minister of public contributions in France] approves of this idea and if he would like to propagate it. This register and this deposit exist at the caisse d'escompte. But it is a particular caisse, it has little confidence from the public, and moreover it makes the assignats or money deposited worthwhile, and the advantage of what is proposed here is precisely that the assignats do not circulate. In England, the deposited bills are destroyed and replaced by new ones when the depositary comes to withdraw them. This means could frighten us, although by renewing the bills in this way one makes the circulation of those which are false more difficult. THEY SEND, SAYS THE CHEVALIER DE COIGNY NEGOTIER WITH THE PRINCES [Jean-Philippe de Franquetot de Coigny]? AND IN WHOSE NAME? OF THE KING WHO IS SUSPENDED? OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY REPRESENTED BY A COALITION OF NOBLES WHICH IS NOT A NOBLE COALITION! HOW POOR! ALL THE EVIL COMES FROM THE NOBILITY, I BELIEVED MY FORMER COLLEAGUES MORE ADVANCED. It is from the decree of June 19 that they began to deviate from the right path [allusion to the decree of June 19, 1790 abolishing the hereditary nobility]. They never wanted to reduce this decree to a real law; they let things contrary to individual liberty remain in it in the hope that they would provide a means to attack it. I believe that someone should make it clear in the Assembly that this decree must be part of the constitutional articles, and warn them before the plan is presented, because it would be very possible that they would want to pass this plan without discussion, without examination, and that they would not have the credit, under political pretexts, to prevent the omissions they would have made voluntarily from being repaired...". The publicist Pierre Brissot, who had been like the Marquis de Condorcet a member of the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, was a member of the Constitution Committee of the Constituante with the same Condorcet. He would soon be elected to the Legislative and would assert himself as one of the prominent members of the Gironde - he would die guillotined under the Terror.