Candide

Based on Wikipedia: Candide

The Book That Got Banned Everywhere

In January 1759, a slim satirical novel appeared simultaneously in five European countries. Within weeks, it was banned in Geneva, Paris, and across Catholic territories for blasphemy and sedition. The author's name appeared nowhere on the cover. The publication was so secretive that scholars still argue about which of the seventeen French versions from that year was actually printed first.

The book was Candide, and its anonymous author was the most famous writer in Europe: Voltaire.

Today, Candide is considered Voltaire's masterpiece, frequently included in lists of the Western canon and among the most taught works of French literature. Scholar Martin Seymour-Smith ranked it among the hundred most influential books ever written. But to understand why Voltaire wrote it—and why authorities were so desperate to suppress it—you need to understand the catastrophe that shook Enlightenment philosophy to its foundations.

When Optimism Met Reality

On November 1, 1755, the city of Lisbon was celebrating All Saints' Day when the ground began to shake. The earthquake, estimated between magnitude 8.5 and 9, was followed by a tsunami and fires that burned for days. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people died in one of the deadliest natural disasters in European history.

For the philosophers of the Enlightenment, this posed a profound problem.

The dominant philosophical system of the day was Leibnizian optimism, developed by the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. This wasn't optimism in the modern sense of cheerfulness or positive thinking. It was a formal philosophical argument: God, being omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent, would necessarily have created the best of all possible worlds. Any evil or suffering we observe must somehow serve a greater good we cannot fully perceive. The phrase most associated with this idea became: "All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

How exactly was the destruction of Lisbon "for the best"? Philosophers struggled to square the horror with their theories.

Voltaire did not struggle. He was furious.

Voltaire's Revenge

Before Candide, Voltaire had already attacked Leibnizian optimism directly in his "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster," which sarcastically described the earthquake as one of the most horrible disasters "in the best of all possible worlds." But poetry wasn't enough. Voltaire wanted to demolish optimism through ridicule, and satire was his sharpest weapon.

The result was Candide, subtitled "or, Optimism."

The novel follows a young man named Candide who lives in a German castle under the instruction of Professor Pangloss, a philosopher who teaches that everything happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Candide is expelled from paradise after kissing the Baron's daughter Cunégonde, and the rest of the novel chronicles his increasingly horrific adventures across the world: war, earthquake, shipwreck, betrayal, disease, slavery, and the casual cruelty of human institutions.

Through it all, Pangloss maintains his optimism. Syphilis? A necessary consequence of the New World trade that brought us chocolate. The Lisbon earthquake? All for the best. Pangloss's philosophy is revealed as not just wrong but obscene—a way of excusing suffering rather than addressing it.

A Novel in Three Acts

The thirty chapters of Candide move at breakneck speed, covering more ground than most novels ten times its length. Scholars typically divide it into three geographical sections, each spanning ten chapters.

The first section keeps Candide in Europe, where he witnesses the horrors of war, survives the Lisbon earthquake, and is nearly burned at the stake by the Portuguese Inquisition. He kills two men who have claimed his beloved Cunégonde as a mistress. Throughout, he clings to Pangloss's teachings even as reality contradicts them at every turn.

The middle section takes Candide to the Americas. He encounters the Jesuits in Paraguay, visits the mythical golden city of El Dorado (the novel's only utopia, which he leaves voluntarily), and sees the brutal reality of colonial slavery. In Suriname, he meets Martin, a pessimistic philosopher who becomes his traveling companion—Pangloss's opposite, believing that evil dominates the world.

The final section brings Candide back across the Atlantic, through Paris (which Voltaire portrays as corrupt and superficial), Venice (where he encounters a string of deposed monarchs), and finally to Constantinople. There, Candide reunites with Cunégonde—now old and ugly—and Pangloss, who has survived everything including hanging. They settle on a small farm, and Candide finally rejects Pangloss's philosophy with the novel's famous closing line: "We must cultivate our garden."

The Picaresque Tradition

Voltaire didn't invent this kind of story. Candide belongs to the picaresque genre, a form of novel that follows a roguish but innocent protagonist through a series of episodic adventures that expose social ills. The term comes from the Spanish word pícaro, meaning rogue or rascal.

One clear influence was Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's 1726 satire in which a similarly naive protagonist visits strange lands and is gradually hardened by his experiences. Like Gulliver, Candide starts out credulous and ends up disillusioned. Both books use absurd adventures to make pointed commentary about human nature and society.

Another probable influence was Simplicius Simplicissimus, a German novel from 1669 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Set during the devastating Thirty Years' War, it features a protagonist whose name literally means "simplest of the simple"—much like Candide, whose name derives from the Latin for white or pure. Both characters embody an extreme innocence that contrasts with the violence around them.

Voltaire biographer Alfred Owen Aldridge argues that German stereotypes of the era—"extreme credulousness or sentimental simplicity"—informed both characters. Whether Voltaire actually read Grimmelshausen is unknown, but he admitted familiarity with other bold and satirical German writers.

The Cast of Targets

Candide ridicules almost everything: religion, theology, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers. But Voltaire populates his satire with a specific cast of characters, each representing something he despised.

Professor Pangloss is the most obvious target, a parody of Leibniz himself. His ridiculous explanations for suffering echo the abstract theodicy (philosophical defense of God's goodness despite evil) that Voltaire found morally bankrupt. Even after being hanged, dissected, and left for dead, Pangloss insists that all is for the best.

The Old Woman, Cunégonde's servant, provides perhaps the novel's most devastating counterpoint. She reveals her history: daughter of a Pope, raised in luxury, then subjected to slavery, rape, mutilation, and every imaginable degradation. She tells Candide to ask any passenger on any ship about their life, and if he finds even one who hasn't cursed their existence, he may throw her overboard. No one takes the bet.

Martin the pessimist offers another philosophical position—Manichaeism, the ancient belief that the world is a battleground between equal forces of good and evil. But Voltaire doesn't endorse this view either. Martin's certainty that evil always triumphs is as rigid and unhelpful as Pangloss's certainty that everything is for the best.

The various villains include the Inquisitor who orders burnings to prevent earthquakes, the Jesuits who run Paraguay like a private kingdom, and Vanderdendur, a Dutch merchant who steals most of Candide's fortune. Real historical figures appear thinly disguised: the "King of the Bulgars" is Frederick the Great of Prussia, and the six deposed kings Candide meets in Venice were all actual monarchs who lost their thrones.

What Does "Cultivate Our Garden" Mean?

The novel's ending has sparked centuries of interpretation. After all his adventures, Candide settles on a modest farm with his companions. When Pangloss launches into another optimistic speech about how all their sufferings led to this happy conclusion, Candide responds: "That is well said, but we must cultivate our garden."

Some readers take this literally: reject abstract philosophy and focus on practical work. Stop asking whether this is the best possible world and start improving your small corner of it.

Others see political meaning: withdraw from the corruption of courts and governments. Don't try to reform society; create your own small community of decent people.

Still others interpret it as a statement about happiness: grand adventures and philosophical certainties both fail us. Contentment comes from modest, productive labor among people you care about.

What Voltaire almost certainly did not mean was passive acceptance of evil. His entire career was devoted to attacking injustice, from religious persecution to judicial torture. The garden is not an escape from the world's problems but a realistic scope for one's efforts. You cannot solve the problem of evil, but you can grow vegetables and not torment your neighbors.

The Secret Publication

Voltaire knew exactly what reaction Candide would provoke, which is why its publication was probably "the most clandestine work of the century." He denied authorship for years, despite it being an open secret.

The simultaneous publication in multiple countries was a deliberate strategy. Copies appeared in Geneva (printed by Cramer), Amsterdam (printed by Marc-Michel Rey), London (printed by Jean Nourse), and Paris (printed by Lambert). By flooding the market at once, Voltaire made suppression nearly impossible. Even as authorities banned and burned copies, the book spread across Europe.

Only one manuscript from before publication survives: the La Vallière Manuscript, sent chapter by chapter to a Duke and Duchess, probably dictated by Voltaire to his secretary Jean-Louis Wagnière. It was rediscovered in 1956 after sitting unrecognized in a library archive for almost two hundred years.

A popular legend claims Voltaire wrote Candide in just three days. This is almost certainly false, probably based on a misreading of an 1885 biography. Scholars believe he worked on it through late 1757 and 1758, including during a three-week visit to the Elector Palatine at Schwetzingen.

The Illustrations Voltaire Didn't Want

Voltaire hated illustrations in books. In a 1778 letter to publisher Charles Joseph Panckoucke, he complained: "I believe that these illustrations would be quite useless. These baubles have never been allowed in the works of Cicero, Virgil and Horace."

Despite this protest, French artist Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune produced illustrations for Candide twice: four images in 1787 for a complete works edition, and seven more elaborate drawings in 1803. These remain among the most famous visual interpretations of the text.

More unexpectedly, the modernist painter Paul Klee credited Candide with helping him discover his own artistic style. His 1920 illustrations for the novel, published by Kurt Wolff, brought the eighteenth-century satire into dialogue with twentieth-century abstraction.

The 1761 Revision

Voltaire made one major revision after initial publication. Chapter twenty-two, concerning Candide's time in Paris, was considered weak by some early readers, including the Duke of Vallière. In 1761, Voltaire expanded this section substantially.

The playful English title of this edition was Candide, or Optimism, Translated from the German of Dr. Ralph. With the additions found in the Doctor's pocket when he died at Minden, in the Year of Grace 1759. Voltaire loved these fictional attributions, maintaining the pretense that he was merely a translator or editor of someone else's work.

The final version authorized by Voltaire appeared in Cramer's 1775 edition of his complete works, known as l'édition encadrée for its decorative borders around each page.

The Conte Philosophique

Candide wasn't Voltaire's first philosophical tale, nor his last. The conte philosophique—philosophical story—was a genre he helped establish. Unlike conventional novels focused on psychological realism, these tales used fantastic plots and exaggerated characters to explore philosophical questions.

Earlier examples in Voltaire's own work include Zadig (1747), about a Babylonian philosopher's encounters with fate, and Micromégas (1752), a proto-science fiction tale about giants from Saturn and Sirius visiting Earth. Candide became the most famous and influential example of the form, inspiring similar works throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The speed and absurdity of Candide's plot are features, not bugs. Characters die and return to life; protagonists cross oceans in paragraphs; coincidences pile upon coincidences. This is not sloppy storytelling but deliberate parody of adventure novels and romances that relied on similarly improbable events without acknowledging their absurdity.

Why It Still Matters

Every age has its Pangloss figures—people who explain away suffering with abstract theories, who insist that systemic problems are actually hidden benefits, who counsel acceptance of injustice as somehow necessary to some greater good we cannot see.

Voltaire's response to such thinking remains potent: look at the world. Look at the earthquake, the war, the slave with his hand cut off for trying to escape. Now tell me again about the best of all possible worlds.

Candide does not offer a systematic philosophy to replace optimism. It offers something more valuable: the insistence that we take suffering seriously rather than explain it away, and the suggestion that useful work among people we love might be the only answer available to beings like us.

We must cultivate our garden.