Voltaire's Candide (1759): Satire, Optimism and Enlightenment

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism) is a short satirical novel by the French writer Voltaire, published in January 1759. Through the misadventures of a naive young man, it ridicules the philosophical idea that this is “the best of all possible worlds” and attacks war, religious fanaticism, slavery and abuse of power. Banned almost at once, it became an immediate bestseller and is still the most widely read work of the European Enlightenment.

Voltaire before Candide

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, born in Paris on 21 November 1694 into a prosperous middle-class family. He made his name as a poet and dramatist, but his sharp wit repeatedly got him into trouble. He was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717–1718 for verses insulting the regent, and again briefly in 1726 after a quarrel with a nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan.

He then spent more than two years in England (1726–1728). He admired English religious tolerance, freedom of the press, Newton’s science and Locke’s philosophy, and wrote about them in his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733), published in French in 1734 as the Lettres philosophiques. The French authorities had the book burned.

During the 1730s and 1740s Voltaire lived mainly at Cirey in eastern France with the mathematician Émilie du Châtelet. After her death in 1749 he spent nearly three years at the court of Frederick II of Prussia, an experience that ended in a bitter quarrel in 1753. Unwelcome in Paris, he settled near Geneva in 1755 at a house he named Les Délices, and in late 1758 bought the estate of Ferney, just across the French border.

The target: philosophical optimism

The “optimism” of the subtitle was a specific philosophical position, not a cheerful mood. In his Theodicy (1710), the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that God, being perfect, must have created the best of all possible worlds; evil exists only because it is necessary for the greatest overall good. Christian Wolff systematised these ideas, and Alexander Pope expressed a similar view in his Essay on Man (1733–1734) with the line “Whatever is, is right.”

Voltaire had once been sympathetic to such views, but events turned him against them. The Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, followed by fire and a tsunami, killed tens of thousands of people. Voltaire responded with his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster (1756), asking how anyone could claim such suffering was for the best. Jean-Jacques Rousseau replied in a long letter of August 1756 defending Providence.

The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 added more evidence of human folly. In March 1757 the British admiral John Byng was executed by firing squad for failing to do his utmost at the Battle of Minorca, despite efforts by Voltaire and others to save him. All of this fed into the novel.

Writing and publication

Voltaire wrote Candide mainly in 1758, probably at Les Délices, though the exact dates of composition are uncertain. He arranged for it to be printed in great secrecy by his Geneva publisher Gabriel Cramer, with copies sent to Paris, Amsterdam, London and elsewhere so that editions appeared almost simultaneously in January 1759.

The book was presented as a translation from the German by a “Doctor Ralph”, and Voltaire denied writing it, although almost everyone recognised his style. Publicly he treated it as a trifle with which he had nothing to do. The Geneva authorities condemned it in late February 1759 and the Paris police tried to seize copies, but demand was enormous. More than a dozen editions appeared in 1759 alone, and it was soon translated into English and Italian. The Catholic Church added it to the Index of Forbidden Books in 1762.

In 1761 Voltaire issued a revised edition with a long new passage in chapter 22 satirising literary and social life in Paris.

The story

The novel has 30 short chapters. Candide grows up in the castle of Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where his tutor, the philosopher Pangloss, teaches that all is for the best. When Candide is caught kissing the baron’s daughter Cunégonde, he is kicked out of the castle.

He is pressed into the army of the “Bulgars”, a thin disguise for the Prussians, and witnesses a pointless massacre in a war against the “Abares”. He survives a shipwreck and the Lisbon earthquake, after which the Portuguese Inquisition holds an auto-da-fé, a public ceremony of punishment, to prevent further earthquakes; Pangloss is hanged and Candide flogged.

Candide flees to South America with Cunégonde and his resourceful servant Cacambo. He visits the Jesuit state in Paraguay and stumbles into El Dorado, a peaceful, wealthy utopia without priests, courts or prisons, which he nevertheless leaves. In Surinam he meets an enslaved man who has lost a hand and a leg in a sugar mill; the man tells him that this is the price at which Europeans eat sugar. The scene is one of the earliest and sharpest attacks on slavery in popular European literature.

Returning to Europe with the pessimist scholar Martin, Candide passes through France, England, where he sees an admiral shot “to encourage the others”, and Venice. Finally he finds Cunégonde, now old and ugly, and settles on a small farm near Constantinople with the surviving characters, including Pangloss, who somehow survived his hanging. After meeting a Turkish farmer who lives contentedly by working his land, Candide closes the book with the words “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (“We must cultivate our garden”).

Themes and style

Candide is a conte philosophique, a philosophical tale, in which the plot is deliberately fast and improbable. Characters die and return, fortunes are made and lost in a paragraph, and horrific events are reported in a flat, cheerful tone. The contrast between the violence described and the calm voice describing it is the source of much of the satire.

The targets are many: war and its glorification, the Inquisition and religious hypocrisy, colonial violence and slavery, aristocratic pride, the Jesuits, literary critics and philosophers who explain suffering away. Voltaire does not replace optimism with complete despair, since Martin’s pessimism is also shown to be inadequate. The final advice to work one’s garden suggests a modest, practical response to an imperfect world.

The El Dorado episode is the novel’s one picture of a good society. Its people worship God without priests or persecution, have no prisons or law courts, and honour science in a great palace of mathematics and physics. Candide leaves it because he wants to rejoin Cunégonde and show off his wealth in Europe, a choice that itself comments on human restlessness.

Reception and influence

Candide sold in very large numbers by the standards of the time, perhaps 20,000 copies or more in its first year according to common estimates, and it has never gone out of print. It made “Panglossian” an English word for unrealistic optimism.

The book shaped the Enlightenment’s image of itself as a campaign against fanaticism. In the 1760s Voltaire put this attitude into practice, notably in the Calas affair, when he fought to clear the name of a Protestant executed in Toulouse. He returned to Paris in triumph in February 1778 and died there on 30 May 1778. In 1791 revolutionary France moved his remains to the Panthéon.

Later adaptations include Leonard Bernstein’s musical Candide (1956), with a book originally by Lillian Hellman, and countless editions illustrated by artists ranging from Jean-Michel Moreau in the 18th century to Paul Klee in the 20th.

Myths and facts

Myth: Voltaire wrote Candide in three days. This story circulated later, but there is no reliable evidence for it. The novel was probably written over several months in 1758.

Myth: Voltaire said he would defend to the death your right to say something he disapproved of. The sentence comes from Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s 1906 book The Friends of Voltaire, as her summary of his attitude. It is not a quotation from Voltaire.

Myth: Candide simply mocks hope and happiness. The novel attacks a particular philosophical argument that explained away suffering. Its ending recommends useful work, not despair.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1694, 21 November: François-Marie Arouet, later Voltaire, is born in Paris.
• 1710: Leibniz publishes his Theodicy, the main philosophical source of the optimism Voltaire later mocks.
• 1755, 1 November: The Lisbon earthquake destroys much of the Portuguese capital.
• 1756: Voltaire publishes his Poem on the Lisbon Disaster; the Seven Years’ War begins.
• 1757, 14 March: Admiral John Byng is executed at Portsmouth.
• 1759, January: Candide is published in Geneva, Paris and other cities.
• 1759, February–March: Authorities in Geneva and Paris condemn the book.
• 1761: A revised edition adds new material to chapter 22.
• 1762: Candide is placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.
• 1778, 30 May: Voltaire dies in Paris.

Why it matters

Candide turned a technical philosophical debate into a fast, funny story that anyone could read. It condensed the Enlightenment’s attack on fanaticism, cruelty and complacency into a few memorable scenes, and its closing call to cultivate our garden is still quoted as a guide to living in an imperfect world.