Understanding Voltaire's Candide: Optimism, Satire, and the Human Condition

Candide, ou l’Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism), published in 1759, is Voltaire’s most famous philosophical tale and one of the great works of the Enlightenment. The short novel follows the adventures of its naïve hero, Candide, through a series of disasters that systematically destroy his faith in the philosophical optimism of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, and that lead him to a more hard-won and more realistic view of the human condition. This article examines the structure, the themes, and the lasting significance of Candide.

The Plot

Candide opens in the castle of the Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh in Westphalia, where the young Candide is being raised by Dr. Pangloss, the castle’s tutor, who teaches a version of the philosophy of optimism associated with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. The philosophy, in its simplest form, holds that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

The young Candide falls in love with the baron’s daughter, Cunégonde, and is expelled from the castle when the two are discovered kissing. The remainder of the novel follows Candide’s adventures across Europe and the Americas, as he encounters a seemingly endless series of disasters: war, earthquake, betrayal, robbery, murder, and the various other forms of suffering that human beings inflict on one another. Through all of these experiences, Dr. Pangloss continues to maintain his optimism, providing elaborate justifications for why each disaster is actually a contribution to the best of all possible worlds.

The novel ends with Candide and his companions (including Pangloss, Cunégonde, and several other survivors of the various disasters) settling on a small farm in Turkey, where they resolve to “cultivate their garden” — to abandon philosophical speculation and to devote themselves to the practical work of making their lives as comfortable as possible.

The Critique of Philosophical Optimism

The central target of Candide is the philosophical optimism associated with Leibniz and Pope. Voltaire had been impressed by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which had killed tens of thousands of people and had raised troubling questions about the problem of evil. The novel was, in part, a response to those questions, and to the inadequate answers provided by the optimists.

The optimists, in Voltaire’s view, were guilty of a fundamental intellectual error. They assumed that the world, considered as a whole, was the best possible, and they used this assumption to justify the existence of particular evils. But the assumption was unwarranted, and the justifications were absurd. The existence of even one innocent victim, Voltaire argues, is enough to refute the claim that this is the best of all possible worlds.

The target of Candide was not only Leibniz and Pope. The novel was also a critique of a broader tendency in Enlightenment thought to provide rational, systematic justifications for the existing order. The optimists were not the only philosophers who tried to explain away the evils of the world; they were only the most prominent example of a more general intellectual failure to take seriously the realities of human suffering.

The Satirical Method

Candide is one of the great works of satirical fiction in the Western literary tradition. The novel uses a variety of satirical techniques — caricature, parody, hyperbole, irony — to subject its targets to ridicule and to expose the contradictions and absurdities of the existing order.

The targets of the satire are numerous. They include not only the philosophical optimists, but also the Catholic Church, the Protestant churches, the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Portuguese Inquisition, the Jesuits of Paraguay, the Dutch merchants of Surinam, the French aristocracy, the Prussian military, the various governments of Europe, and the institutions of the Old Regime more generally. The novel leaves few of the established institutions of the eighteenth century untouched.

The literary style of Candide is also an important part of the satire. The novel is short, fast-paced, and constantly moving, with Candide and his companions traversing vast distances and encountering a remarkable variety of human experience. The brevity of the work, the rapid pace of the plot, and the wide scope of the satire all contribute to the devastating effect of the novel.

The Conclusion: “Cultivate Your Garden”

The famous conclusion of Candide — “il faut cultiver notre jardin” — has been read in many different ways. Some readers have seen in it a call to practical action, a rejection of philosophical speculation in favor of the concrete work of improving the human condition. Others have seen in it a quietist acceptance of the limits of human understanding, a recognition that the philosophical search for the meaning of the universe is doomed to failure.

The most plausible reading is probably a combination of these. The conclusion rejects the optimistic philosophy that has been the target of the satire, and it offers in its place a more modest and more practical view of the human condition. The proper response to the evils of the world, for Voltaire, is not philosophical speculation but practical action: the cultivation of one’s own garden, the improvement of one’s own life, the relief of the suffering of those around us.

The Lasting Significance

Candide has been continuously in print since its first publication in 1759, and it has been translated into virtually every major language. The novel is taught in schools and universities throughout the world, and it has been adapted for theater, film, television, and other media. The phrase “the best of all possible worlds” has entered the English language as a standard expression for naïve or unwarranted optimism.

The novel remains an important resource for thinking about some of the central problems of modern thought. The problem of evil, the relationship between theory and practice, the proper response to suffering and injustice — all of these questions are addressed in Candide, and the novel’s witty, irreverent, and profoundly serious engagement with them remains as fresh and as challenging today as it was when the book was first published.

Further Reading

• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu), relevant entry
• The Cambridge Companion to [Thinker] (Cambridge University Press)
• Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (1969)