Verdict first: this is the funniest short novel of the eighteenth century, the most widely taught, the most widely mistranslated, and the most widely misread. Read it in a new translation. Read it fast. Do not study it. The book is a grenade thrown at a philosophy, and grenades are not improved by being disassembled.
Voltaire published Candide, ou l’Optimisme in 1759, anonymously, at sixty-five, while living at Les Délices near Geneva in semi-exile from Paris. He wrote it, by his own account, in three days. Nothing in this story should be believed in the form Voltaire told it — he polished the text for months, the first drafts existed in earlier forms, the anonymity fooled nobody — but the brevity of the composition is, roughly, accurate. The book is a hundred and fifty pages of rapid narrative prose that sends its title character across three continents, through seven wars, twelve natural disasters, multiple religious persecutions, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Spanish Inquisition, the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay, El Dorado, the Suriname slave trade, and finally to a small farm on the outskirts of Constantinople where Candide concludes that the only thing to do is cultivate one’s garden.
The philosophy being grenaded is Leibniz’s. Voltaire’s tutor in the book, Professor Pangloss, is a caricature of Leibnizian optimism — the proposition, derived from Leibniz’s Theodicy of 1710, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss repeats the phrase throughout the novel, after every catastrophe, with an imperturbable cheerfulness that would be annoying if it were not so rapidly absurd. Candide, the young and sheltered noble bastard, is indoctrinated by Pangloss in the opening chapters and then spends the rest of the novel encountering evidence against the doctrine at a rate of roughly one new horror per chapter. By the end, even Pangloss has privately stopped believing it — though he continues to defend it publicly, because he is a professor, and professors defend their published positions.
What works forever: the speed. Voltaire is the single fastest prose stylist of the French eighteenth century. He does not pause. He does not elaborate. He does not describe. A chapter opens, a disaster happens, the characters flee, the next chapter opens, the next disaster happens. The pace is the argument. Pangloss’s philosophy requires time to be processed — the elaborate theodicy of Leibniz, the nested justifications, the consolation that unfolds slowly over careful philosophical pages. Candide refuses the time. The novel operates at a tempo the philosophy cannot keep up with, and the philosophy breaks down, and the novel’s speed is what broke it. This is the technical masterstroke.
What doesn’t work: the women. Cunégonde, Candide’s beloved, is repeatedly raped, enslaved, disfigured, and trafficked across three continents, and Voltaire treats all of this as comic material. The old woman’s backstory, delivered in a single chapter — the daughter of a pope raped by Barbary pirates, sold into Ottoman slavery, forced to cut off a buttock to feed besieged soldiers, eventually serving as Cunégonde’s maid — is one of the great dark-comic set pieces of the Enlightenment, and it is also, read now, a string of atrocities against women played for laughs. A modern reader has to decide what to do with this. My answer: the 1759 satirical economy requires the pile-up of catastrophes, and women’s bodies were one of the things that got piled up in that economy, and a fair reader sees both the craft and the cost. Voltaire was not arguing that rape is funny. He was arguing that the philosophy that claims this is the best of all possible worlds must account for rape, and cannot. The comedy is the measure of the philosophy’s failure.
What still works, despite the above: the final chapter. Il faut cultiver notre jardin. We must cultivate our garden. The whole novel’s argument condenses into this sentence. Not optimism. Not pessimism. Work. Specific, local, daily, unromantic work on the specific, local, daily thing in front of you. The philosophy of the book is not contained in Pangloss. It is contained in the garden. A reader who takes only the garden from Candide has understood the book.
Read it once, young. Read it again, later, when you have done some cultivating. It will be a different book. Both books are worth the time. Both are short. Neither should be studied. Both should be read, preferably on a long train ride or a slow afternoon, with no apparatus, no introduction, no footnotes. Voltaire wrote it for a reader who would laugh. Be that reader first. The rest will come.
A related vagobond.com piece: A Question of Authority: Can There Be Authority in an Anarchist Society.
Readers and fans of Candide will really enjoy Petshitter — my picaresque memoir about a man who kept encountering, for two decades, the specific evidence against the proposition that this is the best of all possible worlds, and who came to roughly the same conclusion Candide came to. Cultivate. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
