Candide
Voltaire
Candide
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Candide is raised in a German castle on his tutor's assurance that this is the best of all possible worlds, and is then kicked out of it. Conscripted, flogged, shipwrecked, robbed and caught in an earthquake, he keeps going in search of Cunégonde and keeps being told the doctrine again. Voltaire wrote it in a few weeks, and it has never been out of print.
About the book
Published anonymously in 1759 and banned almost at once, Candide follows a young man expelled from a Westphalian castle for kissing the baron’s daughter, and then dragged through the worst of the eighteenth century: conscription and flogging, the Lisbon earthquake, an auto-da-fé, the Inquisition, slavery in Surinam, war, shipwreck and theft. His tutor Pangloss, who is hanged, dissected and re-encountered, continues to demonstrate that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire wrote it at speed after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands of people at Mass on All Saints’ Day, an event no theology of the day could account for. The target is the optimism of Leibniz, but the book outlives the quarrel — it is a hundred pages long, it moves like farce, and its closing instruction to stop explaining the world and cultivate the garden is among the most quoted sentences in French.
Characters
Candide — Protagonist
A guileless young man thrown out of paradise and unable to stop believing what he was taught there.
Pangloss — Tutor
A philosopher who proves that everything is for the best, whatever is presently being done to him.
Cunégonde — The baron’s daughter
Loved, lost, sold and resold across three continents, and pursued the whole length of the book.
Martin — Companion
A scholar hired for the voyage home whose pessimism is the argument’s other half, and no more useful.
Cacambo — Valet
The one entirely competent person in the novel, who saves Candide repeatedly and keeps the money.
The old woman — Servant
A pope’s daughter reduced to servitude, whose history outdoes everyone else’s and is told without self-pity.
The Baron — Cunégonde’s brother
A Jesuit who survives everything and still objects to his sister marrying beneath the family.
About the author
Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), the most famous writer in Europe for most of his long life and the one who did most to make tolerance an argument rather than a mood. He was imprisoned in the Bastille at twenty-three for verses about the Regent, exiled to England, and spent decades within reach of a border he might need. He wrote Candide in his sixties, not long after the Lisbon earthquake killed tens of thousands on All Saints' Day — a fact that is the spine of the book. Late in life he took up the cases of men executed on religious grounds and got their convictions overturned.