Candide

Overview

Candide is about a hundred and twenty pages in thirty short chapters, published anonymously in 1759 and condemned within weeks in Paris, Geneva and Rome. Voltaire denied writing it for years, in the face of a prose style nobody could mistake.

The speed is the point. Chapters run two or three pages, events arrive in absurd profusion, characters die and turn up again alive with an explanation, and nobody is given time to feel anything. That relentlessness is a technique: the catalogue of horrors is so fast and so dry that it becomes funny, and the comedy is what makes it bearable and what makes it land.

The target needs stating carefully. Voltaire is attacking philosophical optimism, which in the eighteenth century did not mean cheerfulness but the doctrine that this world, containing everything it contains, is the best arrangement God could have made. Leibniz argued it in the Theodicy; Alexander Pope popularised it in the Essay on Man with the line that whatever is, is right. Pangloss is not a fair portrait of Leibniz, who was subtler and whose claim was about the best total arrangement of compatible goods rather than about noses and spectacles. Voltaire is hitting the version people repeated.

Two real events stand behind it. On All Saints’ Day 1755 an earthquake, fire and tsunami destroyed Lisbon and killed tens of thousands, many of them in church. In 1756 the Seven Years’ War began. Voltaire had already written a poem about Lisbon asking how a philosopher could look at it and say all is well.

What happens

Candide is brought up in a German baron’s castle, in what he is told is the finest of all possible castles, and taught by Pangloss that all is for the best. He kisses the baron’s daughter Cunegonde, is thrown out, and the plot begins.

Press-ganged by the Bulgar army, he is flogged for going for a walk, watches a battle described in the language of a fine spectacle, and walks afterwards through a village where the bodies are arranged with a precision that makes the point. He escapes to Holland, meets a beggar covered in sores who turns out to be Pangloss, and learns that the castle has been destroyed and everyone in it killed.

They sail for Lisbon and arrive in time for the earthquake. To prevent further quakes the authorities hold an auto-da-fe, at which Pangloss is hanged and Candide flogged, and there is another earthquake the same day.

Cunegonde reappears, having been raped, disembowelled, sewn up and sold, and is now shared between a Jewish merchant and the Grand Inquisitor. Candide kills them both and they flee to South America with an old woman who tells her own story, considerably worse than theirs, and who has one buttock, removed and eaten during a siege.

In Paraguay they find Cunegonde’s brother, supposedly dead, now a Jesuit colonel, who refuses to let his sister marry a commoner. Candide runs him through and they run.

Then El Dorado, the centre of the book and the quietest part. A country behind impassable mountains where gold and jewels lie in the road like gravel, there are no priests and no lawsuits, the king makes jokes, and everyone is content. Candide and his servant Cacambo stay a month and leave, taking a hundred sheep loaded with treasure, because Candide wants Cunegonde and because being rich among people who are not rich is better than being equal among the happy.

They lose most of the sheep. In Suriname they meet a slave lying by the road with no left leg and no right hand, who explains the arithmetic: a hand is lost to the millstone and a leg is cut off for running away, and this is the price of the sugar eaten in Europe. This is the passage that made Candide say that if optimism means insisting that all is well when things are badly wrong, he is done with it.

The last third is picaresque and European. A pessimist called Martin joins him and argues the opposite case as flatly as Pangloss argued his. Paris is a swindle. In Portsmouth they see an admiral shot on his own deck, and are told it is done occasionally to encourage the others. In Venice they meet a Venetian nobleman with everything, who finds nothing worth having, and six deposed kings at dinner.

Finally, near Constantinople, everyone is reassembled. Pangloss survived his hanging because the executioner was inexperienced. Cunegonde’s brother survived and is rowing in a galley. Cunegonde herself has become ugly and bad-tempered, and Candide marries her out of obligation. They buy a small farm.

The ending is short and has kept readers arguing for two and a half centuries. They visit a dervish, who tells them to be quiet. They meet an old Turk who takes no interest in the news from the capital and says that work keeps away three great evils, boredom, vice and need. Pangloss delivers one last demonstration that all their sufferings were necessary to bring them to this moment, and Candide replies that this is well said, and that we must cultivate our garden.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting. It takes about two hours and it is built to be taken at speed.

Read it as comedy and let it be funny. Readers who approach it solemnly find the accumulation of atrocity distasteful, which is a misreading of the register; the joke and the horror are the same device.

Know what optimism meant. Without that, Pangloss is simply a fool rather than a satire on a serious philosophical position, and the book loses its target.

Pay attention to El Dorado. It is the only place in the novel where anything works, and Voltaire puts it at the halfway point and has his hero walk away from it. Whatever the book thinks about how to live, it is not that a perfect society is the answer.

Then argue about the last line. Cultivating your garden has been read as quietism and political withdrawal, as a call to practical work against a world that will not be argued into sense, as Voltaire’s own practice on his estate at Ferney where he farmed and ran a watchmaking business and campaigned publicly against judicial murders, and as a joke at the expense of anyone who wants a moral. The text supports several of these and settles none.

Questions it raises

• Is Pangloss a fair target? Leibniz’s actual argument is not the one being mocked. Does that weaken the satire or not matter?
• Martin, the pessimist, is as dogmatic as Pangloss and turns out to be right more often. Does the book endorse him?
• El Dorado is perfect and is abandoned. What is Voltaire saying about utopias, and about what people actually want?
• The slave in Suriname is the one episode with no comedy in it. Why break the register there?
• Does cultivate our garden mean withdraw from the world, or work in the part of it you can reach?
• Voltaire wrote the sharpest attack on explaining away suffering and spent his life campaigning against particular injustices. Are those the same response or two different ones?