Candide

About this book

Candide, or Optimism is a short satirical novel by Voltaire, published in French in 1759 under a transparent pseudonym. It follows a naive young man who has been taught that this is the best of all possible worlds as he is thrown out of his home, pressed into an army, shipwrecked, flogged, robbed and repeatedly bereaved across Europe, South America and the Ottoman Empire. The book was condemned by authorities in Paris and Geneva on publication and sold in large numbers anyway.

It has lasted because it is fast and it is funny. Voltaire packs an enormous amount of incident into a small book, and the deadpan speed with which disasters follow one another is the main comic device. Underneath the comedy is a serious quarrel with the philosophical optimism associated with Leibniz, which held that a good God must have created the best world available. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands, had made that position hard for Voltaire to accept, and Candide is his answer.

The story

Candide is raised in the castle of a Westphalian baron and taught by the philosopher Pangloss, who explains that everything is for the best. After a kiss with the baron’s daughter Cunégonde, Candide is kicked out and begins a sequence of travels that take him through the Seven Years’ War, the Lisbon earthquake and the Inquisition, to Buenos Aires and Paraguay, to the hidden country of El Dorado, and back across the Atlantic to Venice and Constantinople.

Along the way he gains and loses companions, keeps meeting people he thought dead, and keeps testing Pangloss’s teaching against what he sees. He also keeps trying to find Cunégonde. The famous final chapter, and its last line about the garden, is where the book settles its argument, and it is better met unspoiled.

Themes and historical context

Voltaire was sixty-four when he wrote Candide and had been Europe’s most famous writer for decades. He had quarreled with the French court, spent time in the Bastille and in exile in England, and been courted and then dropped by Frederick the Great of Prussia. The book reflects that experience: nearly every institution it touches, from the army to the church to the slave trade in Surinam to the literary critics of Paris, is shown as cruel, corrupt or absurd.

The philosophical target is optimism in the technical sense, the doctrine that evil is a necessary part of an overall good design. Voltaire does not replace it with a rival system. The book’s alternative is practical: stop theorizing, and work. Readers have argued ever since about whether the ending is resignation, modest wisdom or a joke at the expense of all philosophy.

Candide also belongs to the picaresque tradition of episodic wandering tales, and to the eighteenth-century fashion for philosophical fiction. It became the best known of Voltaire’s many short “contes” and is the work for which he is most read today.

Who should read it

Candide is about 30,000 words and can be read in an afternoon. The chapters are two or three pages each. The difficulty is contextual rather than linguistic: the satire lands harder if you know a little about the Seven Years’ War, the Jesuits in Paraguay and the Lisbon earthquake, and a few minutes with the Wikipedia article covers that. The violence is constant but stylized, treated as farce rather than realism, and some readers find the cheerful tone around rape, slavery and execution uncomfortable. That discomfort is part of the point.

Edition notes

This Gutenberg edition is an English translation; the catalog record does not name the translator, and this page does not guess. It was produced by Chuck Greif, Fox in the Stars and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.