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Candide

A comic tale of war, shipwreck and earthquake, aimed at the doctrine that ours is the best of all possible worlds.

by Voltaire155 passages held

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Original title
Candide, ou l'Optimisme
First published
(aged 65)
Original language
French

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Overview

By the end of 1759, the year it appeared, Candide had gone through more than twenty editions and sold somewhere between twenty and thirty thousand copies, although Geneva's Grand Council and the authorities in Paris had banned it within weeks. In 1762 the Vatican added it to its Index of forbidden books. Its title page named no author and claimed the book was translated from the German of a Doctor Ralph. The tale's case is simple: the world is not the best one possible, and a philosophy that says so has stopped looking at it. The idea it mocks came from Leibniz, the German philosopher who had argued that God, choosing among every possible world, must have chosen the best, so that each evil serves a larger good. On 1 November 1755 an earthquake destroyed Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of people. In 1756 Voltaire answered with a poem on the disaster, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau replied that August in a long letter defending Providence. Candide is Voltaire's second and far sharper answer, and it takes the form of a comic adventure. Pangloss, the tutor who teaches that all is for the best, goes on explaining while the story drags him and his pupil Candide through war, shipwreck, the Lisbon earthquake itself, an auto-da-fé staged by the Inquisition and a spell as a galley slave. Real events pass through it too: in Portsmouth harbour Candide watches the British shoot one of their own admirals, as they had shot Admiral John Byng in March 1757. Voltaire sets no rival system against Pangloss. The travellers end on a small farm outside Constantinople, where Candide decides that they must work their garden.

Key concepts

What is the optimism that Candide sets out to ridicule?

The doctrine, drawn from Leibniz, that God chose the best of all possible worlds, so that every evil is a necessary part of the good of the whole. Pangloss reduces it to a formula, all is for the best, and applies it to each disaster as it happens. The tale never argues against it in the abstract; it keeps setting the formula beside a particular body in pain until the formula sounds obscene.

Why does Pangloss say noses were made to wear spectacles?

Because he reasons backwards from whatever exists to the purpose it must serve: noses exist, spectacles sit on them, so noses were made for spectacles, as legs were made for stockings. It parodies the claim that everything has a sufficient reason and an end. Once every fact counts as proof of design, nothing can ever count against the system, and that immunity is the tale's real objection to it.

What is El Dorado, and what does it prove in the tale?

A hidden kingdom in South America where gold and jewels lie in the road, there are no lawcourts and no prisons, every head of a family is a priest, and nobody prays for anything, only gives thanks. It shows that a reasonable society is imaginable, and then how little that helps: it is reached only by accident, and Candide leaves it of his own accord, wanting to be rich where riches count.

What does the naive hero of a philosophical tale do?

He tests an idea against experience without defending it. Candide has a simple mind and believes what his tutor teaches, so every blow the world deals him lands on the doctrine rather than on a clever reader able to explain it away. The form lets Voltaire argue through events: no one in the tale refutes optimism; the plot does, one disaster at a time.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Best of All Possible Worlds?

If every evil serves a larger good, what can honestly be said to the survivors of Lisbon? The tale never lets its philosopher stop explaining, and never lets the world stop happening to him.

The target is the optimism that descends from Leibniz: a God choosing among all possible worlds must have chosen the best, so every evil is a necessary part of a good whole. Pangloss teaches it in the first chapter and holds to it through the pox, a shipwreck, the earthquake and a botched hanging. Martin, the scholar Candide meets in Surinam, answers that evil outweighs good everywhere. The tale crowns neither. Its charge against Pangloss is that a system has stopped him seeing, and at the end he still maintains it while believing none of it.

  • optimism
  • suffering
  • evil
  • pessimism
  • fortune
  • grief
  • irony
  • satire

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Cruelty With a Clear Conscience

How do people come to flog, burn and enslave others while believing themselves in the right? Every horror in the tale arrives with its justification attached, and the justification is what the satire goes after.

Bulgarian recruiters flog Candide for taking a walk. The Inquisition burns men at Lisbon to keep the earth from shaking again. The British shoot one of their own admirals in Portsmouth harbour as an example to the rest. A slave in Surinam, missing a hand and a leg, tells Candide that this is the price of Europe's sugar. None of these people thinks himself wicked. Against them the tale sets small, unrewarded decencies, like the Anabaptist Jacques, who takes in a beggar and drowns after pulling a sailor from the sea.

  • violence
  • war
  • religion
  • hypocrisy
  • coercion
  • political power
  • slavery
  • justice
  • social status
  • deception
  • compassion
  • charity

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We Must Cultivate Our Garden

Once every system has failed, what is left to live by? The tale answers the problem of evil with an instruction about work, and leaves the reader to decide whether that is wisdom or retreat.

Before the ending, the tale tests the usual answers to unhappiness. El Dorado is a perfect country, and Candide leaves it to be richer than the kings of Europe. The Venetian Pococurante owns every pleasure and enjoys none of them. In the last chapter a dervish refuses to discuss evil at all: when the Sultan sends a ship to Egypt, does he care whether the rats aboard are comfortable? A Turkish farmer says his twenty acres keep off three great evils, idleness, vice and want. Martin concludes that they must work without disputing, and Candide cuts Pangloss's last speech short: we must cultivate our garden.

  • happiness
  • desire
  • pleasure
  • love
  • marriage
  • survival
  • wealth
  • aesthetics
  • human nature

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Within this work

passages held
155
distinct concepts
289
by passages held, corpus-wide
#403

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “optimism” and “suffering”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 93 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
optimismsuffering10
human naturesuffering4
ironysuffering4
sufferingwealth3
ironyoptimism2
religionwar2
sufferingwar2
human natureirony1
human natureoptimism1
human naturereligion1
human naturewealth1
ironyjustice1
ironyreligion1
ironywar1
justiceoptimism1
justicereligion1
optimismreligion1
optimismwar1
religionsuffering1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1734 Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques)

    Written out of the English stay that began in 1726 and published a quarter-century before Candide; it cost Voltaire his place in Paris and set out the programme that his later campaigns pursued.

     EN
  2. 1759 Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme) you are here EN
  3. 1762 The Sermon of the Fifty (Sermon des cinquante)

    Among Voltaire's anti-Christian pamphlets, the one his posthumous editors counted the first to attack the religion directly; the arguments it set down came back in many of the tracts he wrote over the following decades.

     EN
  4. 1763 Treatise on Tolerance (Traité sur la tolérance)

    Voltaire's contribution to his own campaign for Jean Calas, the best known of the wrongly condemned people he defended from Ferney; it appeared two years before the verdict was overturned.

     EN
  5. 1764 Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif)

    An alphabet that kept growing: begun as a single pocket volume, it was enlarged through the 1760s and swollen after Voltaire's death into the combined dictionary his editors assembled.

     EN
  6. 1772 We Must Take Sides (Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action)

    Written at seventy-seven, it turns Voltaire's arguments away from the Church he had attacked in The Sermon of the Fifty and against the atheists of d'Holbach's circle.

     EN
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