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Candide, or Optimism (Candide, ou l'Optimisme, 1759) by Voltaire is the most widely read French novel of the eighteenth century — a satirical novella of approximately 100 pages about the young Candide, raised in the castle of a Westphalian baron and tutored by the philosopher Pangloss (a satire of Leibniz's philosophical optimism, which holds that we live in the best of all possible worlds). When Candide is expelled from the castle for kissing the baron's daughter Cunégonde, he sets out on a series of adventures that take him across Europe, South America, and back, during which he experiences or witnesses the Lisbon earthquake, the Spanish Inquisition, the Seven Years' War, slavery, piracy, and every other disaster that the eighteenth century had to offer — and in which Pangloss maintains, with increasingly strained reasoning, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The novel ends with Candide's famous conclusion: 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' — we must cultivate our garden. Voltaire's satire is both specific (the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which killed tens of thousands, shook European confidence in providential optimism) and comprehensive (the general condition of a world in which optimism in the face of actual experience requires willful blindness).
Where to start
Candide (1759)
Complete Candide Book List
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Candide
Voltaire·1759
Candide — Frequently Asked Questions
What does 'we must cultivate our garden' mean?
Candide's final conclusion — 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' — is one of the most debated phrases in French literature. At its simplest, it is a rejection of Pangloss's philosophical optimism in favor of practical work: instead of explaining why the world is good, one should make it better in the small area one can actually affect. More broadly, it has been read as a statement of pragmatic disillusionment (the world is not explicable, so attend to what is in front of you), as a Stoic withdrawal from the public world, as an affirmation of meaningful labor over idle philosophizing, and as a rejection of all grand explanatory systems in favor of modest practical improvement. Voltaire's own interpretation, in his letters, was roughly the pragmatic one: the only way to make life bearable is to work. The ambiguity of the phrase — is it resignation, wisdom, or evasion? — is part of what makes Candide continue to generate argument.
Why is Candide so short?
Voltaire wrote Candide at sixty-four, in a hurry, as a specific response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and to the philosophical tradition that tried to explain such disasters as compatible with a good God's providential design. The novella form allowed him to construct a compressed satirical argument — every episode refutes a specific philosophical claim — without the digressive expansiveness of the novel form he was reacting against (Richardson's three-volume novels, Fielding's eighteen-book epics). The short form is also more effective for satire: each episode reduces optimism to absurdity and then moves on, denying the reader time to recover before the next reduction.
What is Voltaire satirizing besides philosophical optimism?
Almost everything: the Catholic Church and the Inquisition; the aristocracy and its pretensions; the military and the glorification of war; European colonialism and the slave trade; organized religion in general; the philosophical tendency to explain evil rather than prevent it; literary affectation; and the gap between the best possible world and the world that actually exists. The episode at El Dorado — a Utopian society in South America where gold is worthless and everyone is happy — is a temporary respite that functions as a negative critique: this is what would be required, and it does not exist. The Black slave encountered near Suriname, whose master has taken his legs and his arm to produce sugar, is the novel's most direct moral indictment.
What other works by Voltaire should I read?
Voltaire's other major satirical tales include Zadig (1747), Micromégas (1752), and L'Ingénu (1767) — all shorter than Candide and in the same satirical-philosophical mode. His Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques, 1733), which presented English tolerance, commerce, and empiricism as preferable to French absolutism and Catholicism, was among his most influential works. His Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764) is a collection of essays on religious and philosophical topics written with his characteristic wit and irreverence. And his correspondence — approximately 20,000 letters — is one of the great collections of eighteenth-century prose.
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