Candide — themes & analysis

The novel's target is a serious eighteenth-century philosophical position. Leibniz had argued in his Théodicée (1710) that since God is perfectly good and chose this world out of all possible ones, the one he chose must be the best available — every apparent evil necessary to the larger harmony. Pope had popularized the position in English: "whatever is, is right." Voltaire had once been broadly sympathetic. By 1755 he was not.

Pangloss is the position made flesh. He teaches "metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology" and proves admirably that noses were made for spectacles, legs for stockings, stones for castles, pigs for pork. Each proof is a parody of a Leibnizian argument: take the existing arrangement, declare it necessary, declare its necessity proof of its goodness. The first chapter is funny. The reader is not yet meant to feel the cost.

The cost is what the rest of the novel delivers. Pangloss contracts syphilis from a chambermaid and proves, between coughing fits, that without it Europe would have neither chocolate nor cochineal. He is hanged at the Lisbon auto-da-fé and (when later revealed to have survived) concludes the rope was for the best. Even at the end, after a hanging, dissection, slavery in the galleys, and the loss of an eye and an ear, he tells Candide he still holds his original opinion: he is a philosopher, and Leibniz cannot be wrong. The argument lands because it shows Pangloss's optimism cannot be falsified by any evidence. Whatever happens, it was for the best — and so the system explains nothing.

Candide's own arc is the slow disenchantment Pangloss never undergoes. He begins quoting his teacher and ends cutting him off mid-sentence. By Surinam, encountering the mutilated slave on the road, Candide has the chapter's most striking line: "I'll have to renounce your optimism at last." The novel does not propose a counter-philosophy. It only shows that this one cannot survive contact with the world.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the doctrine introduced), Chapter 4 (Pangloss diseased and still optimistic), Chapter 19 (Candide renounces optimism).

On the morning of November 1, 1755, while most of Lisbon was at Mass for All Saints' Day, a series of earthquakes struck. The first shock toppled buildings; the fires that followed burned for five days; a tsunami swept up the Tagus and finished what the fires had not. Sixty thousand people died — most of them inside churches that collapsed on top of them. The news reached Voltaire at his estate near Geneva within days. He could not stop thinking about it.

What appalled him was not the earthquake but the response — the pamphlets, the sermons, the philosophers explaining that the disaster, properly understood, was further evidence of divine goodness. Some argued Lisbon had been chosen for its sins; some that the dead were now in heaven; some that suffering of this magnitude must be part of a larger plan. Voltaire wrote a long furious poem in 1756 attacking these answers directly. Three years later Candide was the version of the argument that everyone read.

In the novel the earthquake takes a chapter and a half. Pangloss and Candide arrive in the harbor at the moment the ground begins to shake. Thirty thousand inhabitants are crushed beneath the ruins. Pangloss, stepping over rubble and corpses, observes that there must be a vein of sulfur underground running from Lima to Lisbon. This is what Leibnizian philosophy actually has to say about an earthquake: a calm geological observation delivered to a man bleeding in the street. Candide asks for wine and oil. Pangloss continues his lecture. The Inquisition, the next chapter, decides the way to prevent further earthquakes is to burn a few people alive at an auto-da-fé.

The Lisbon chapters are the moral hinge of the novel. Before them Pangloss's optimism is funny. After them it is monstrous. Voltaire knew his readers would know exactly which earthquake he meant. The book carries that historical weight even now. Lisbon was the event that made Voltaire stop being patient.

Where to follow it: Chapter 5 (the earthquake itself), Chapter 6 (the auto-da-fé to prevent further quakes), Chapter 20 (Martin's Manichean reading of the world).

Halfway through the novel, after escaping the Oreillons, Candide and Cacambo are carried by a river through a vault of rocks into a hidden kingdom. The kingdom is the ancient country of the Incas, walled in by ten-thousand-foot cliffs, untouched by Europeans. The Spaniards once heard rumors and called it El Dorado. The Inca royal family who stayed behind during the conquest decreed that no inhabitant should ever leave. The policy has held for two hundred years.

Children play with rubies the size of dinner plates and treat them as pebbles. Inns are paid for by the government. There are no lawsuits. There are no prisons. There are no monks. The religion is a single God to whom no one prays, because, as the old man explains, He has given them everything they need. The King is greeted by an embrace and a kiss on each cheek. The travelers are dazzled. They spend a month. Cacambo observes that Pangloss's "best of all possible worlds" might actually exist, just nowhere anyone in Europe knows about.

And then Candide chooses to leave. The reason is the most embarrassing one Voltaire could have chosen. Candide wants to find Cunégonde — but more than that, he wants to be richer than the kings of Europe, to bring back enough El Dorado pebbles that everyone he ever knew will have to bow to him. The King observes this is foolish; once they leave, they cannot come back. Candide leaves anyway. Within a hundred days, accidents have killed all but two of the hundred sheep loaded with El Dorado treasure. By the time they reach Surinam, even those two are about to be stolen from him.

Voltaire's joke is layered. Utopia exists. Utopia is unreachable for almost everyone, by accident of geography. The one man the novel hands a ticket to chooses to leave it, for vanity and love and the human itch to cut a figure back home. The kingdom continues without him, behind its mountains. The novel's most positive vision is also its most quietly cynical. The best of all possible worlds is real. We won't stay in it.

Where to follow it: Chapter 17 (entering El Dorado), Chapter 18 (the city, the King, the choice to leave), Chapter 19 (the treasure dwindles in Surinam).

Candide is structurally a picaresque — a form Voltaire borrowed from Spanish models like Lazarillo de Tormes and adapted to a philosophical purpose. The picaresque hero is naive, mobile, unkillable; he passes from one episode to the next without much inner development; what changes is the world around him. Voltaire took the form because no other available form could carry the argument he wanted to make. An essay refuting Leibniz had to refute him point by point. A novel could simply produce a world.

The world it produces is not random. Every catastrophe Candide passes through is a specific contemporary reality. The Bulgarian war is the Seven Years' War, then in its second year — Voltaire's "million regimented assassins." The Lisbon earthquake is the Lisbon earthquake. The auto-da-fé is the actual practice of the Iberian Inquisition. The Surinam slave is the Atlantic slave trade as it was in 1759, on contracts every European reader had eaten the produce of. The Jesuits in Paraguay are the actual Jesuit reductions, then the subject of a major European political crisis. The six dethroned kings dining at Venice are six specific eighteenth-century rulers, all by 1759 either deposed or in exile.

The pacing is part of the argument. A village is destroyed in three sentences. A family is murdered in one. The Bulgarian battle, killing thirty thousand, takes a paragraph. The famous comic contrast is that the prose stays unhurried and ironic while the events are atrocities — the surface continues to make small jokes about nations and customs while bodies pile up at the same rate they actually were piling up in 1759. The reader cannot register one disaster before the next arrives. Pangloss's calm explanations look more grotesque after each one.

The picaresque has been borrowed since by every political satirist who needed a non-essayistic form for the same job — Twain in Huckleberry Finn, Heller in Catch-22, Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five. The form is now so familiar the argument it carries is almost invisible. Voltaire was the one who first realized that thirty disasters in a row, narrated calmly, would do what an essay could not.

Where to follow it: Chapter 3 (the Bulgarian battlefield), Chapter 19 (the Surinam slave), Chapter 26 (the six dethroned kings).

The last chapter is short and quiet. Candide has finally married Cunégonde, who has become so ugly he marries her only because he had promised. The Baron has been packed off to Rome. Pangloss is unhappy at not shining at a German university. The Old Woman is infirm. Cacambo is exhausted from the garden. They have ended up on a small Turkish farm outside Constantinople, all of their fortunes spent, no one comfortable. The Old Woman puts the question: which is worse, all the disasters they have just lived through, or this?

They walk over to consult a famous local Dervish on why so strange an animal as man was made. The Dervish answers, "What business is that of yours? Hold your tongue," and shuts the door. They walk on. They meet an old Turkish farmer sitting under his orange trees, who has never heard of any of the political events Pangloss is interested in, who lives quietly with his children on twenty acres. He says, in the line everything has been preparing for: our labor preserves us from three great evils — boredom, vice, and want.

Candide thinks about it on the walk home. Pangloss launches one last metaphysical lecture, listing the kings of antiquity and the Bible who all came to bad ends. Candide cuts him off with the sentence that has become the novel's slogan: il faut cultiver notre jardin. Pangloss, agreeable as ever, finds a learned precedent in the Garden of Eden. Martin says, more bluntly, that they should work without arguing because that is the only way to make life tolerable. The chapter ends with the whole little community finding small useful jobs.

The line is famously slippery. Some readers take it as quietism. Others take it as the opposite — small useful work near at hand is the only honest answer to suffering you cannot fix from a distance. Voltaire was not retreating; he had spent his life writing pamphlets against injustice and would continue for nineteen more years. He was refusing the grand theological systems he had spent thirty chapters dismantling and refusing to replace them with a new system. What is left is the work in front of you, with the people you have. As an answer to suffering it is modest. It is also one of the few sentences in eighteenth-century literature anyone alive today can use without translation.

Where to follow it: Chapter 30 (the Turkish farmer and the line), Chapter 18 (El Dorado, the alternative refused), Chapter 25 (Pococurante, dissatisfaction without garden).