Candide
by Voltaire
Summary
Candide is a gentle young man raised in a Westphalian castle, where the tutor Pangloss teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds and everything in it is for the best. The lesson is put to the test at speed. Caught kissing the baron's daughter Cunegonde, Candide is kicked out into a world of forced conscription, war, the Lisbon earthquake, the Inquisition, shipwreck, slavery and betrayal, on a route that crosses South America, picks up a fortune in the utopian city of El Dorado, loses most of it, and reunites him at last with a Cunegonde whom hardship has made ugly. He marries her anyway. Pangloss, hanged, dissected and enslaved along the way, keeps teaching that all is for the best, because a philosopher cannot afford to recant.
Nobody should be intimidated by its reputation: this is a short, fast, savagely funny book, readable in an evening, with a body count a horror novel would respect and a punchline in nearly every paragraph. Voltaire's method is speed itself, catastrophe delivered in the tone of a fairy tale, and the target is not hope but the philosophy that explains suffering away. The famous last line, that we must cultivate our garden, has been argued over ever since: resignation, wisdom, or both.
It appeared anonymously in January 1759, released in five countries nearly at once, and authorities responded on schedule, banning it in Geneva and Paris within weeks. It sold twenty to thirty thousand copies in its first year, an enormous figure for the time.
Historical Context & Significance
The book is an argument with a specific idea, the optimism of Leibniz, and a specific event, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands on a church holiday and made the best of all possible worlds a hard doctrine to teach. Voltaire denied authorship for nearly a decade, signing the book as a translation by one Dr Ralph, while the Vatican added it to the Index in 1762 and everyone read it anyway. American customs officials were still detaining copies as obscene in 1929.
Its afterlife is broad. Leonard Bernstein's 1956 operetta flopped on Broadway and then refused to die, its overture now a concert standard. The black humourists of the twentieth century, Vonnegut and Heller among them, are Candide's direct descendants, and it remains the most read thing Voltaire wrote, a fate he would have found ironic and probably for the best.