by Voltaire
21 (p. 88) “when they die we throw their bodies upon a dunghill”: This is a reference to the automatic excommunication of actors and actresses by the Catholic Church and to the resultant refusal to bury them in consecrated ground. One of Voltaire’s causes was to give actors an honorable status in society and the right to be buried in Christian cemeteries.
22 (p. 88) “Miss Monimia made her exit . . . in the parish”: Miss Monimia refers to Adrienne Lecouvreur (1692-1730), a great actress of the Comédie Française much admired by Voltaire; she made her debut in the role of Monine in Jean Racine’s tragedy Mithridate (1673); after her death she was denied ecclesiastic burial.
23 (p. 93) “Jansenists against Molinists”: Jansenists were members of a Catholic sect that sought religious reform and followed the doctrines of Cornelis Jansen (1585-1638), a Dutch theologian who limited free will in favor of predestination and divine grace. His best-known follower was French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). They were condemned as heretical and were fiercely opposed by the Jesuits, or Molinists—from the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535-1600), who emphasized free will. The quarrel between the two sects continued well into the eighteenth century.
24 (p. 96) not like the one in the month of May, 1610, but like the one in the month of December in 1594: François Ravaillac succeeded in killing Henry IV in 1610, whereas Jean Châtel had failed in his attempt to kill Henry IV in 1594.
25 (p. 99) Canada is worth: This is a reference to the struggle for Canada during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The wars of the French and English over Canada persisted throughout the eighteenth century until the Peace of Paris (1763) confirmed England’s conquest. Voltaire failed to appreciate the importance of Canada.
26 (p. 99) In front of this man stood four soldiers . . . perfectly well satisfied: Candide witnesses here the historical execution of Admiral John Byng (1704—1757), who was executed by a firing squad, by verdict of a court-martial, for allegedly having neglected his duties and thereby having significantly contributed to the humiliating defeat of the English by the French fleet under La Galissonnière in the battle of Minorca (1756) during the Seven Years War. Voltaire had met Byng during his years of exile in England, considered him an innocent victim of national pride, and unsuccessfully intervened in his behalf.
27 (p. 108) “But your excellency does not hold the same opinion of Virgil?” . . . “I prefer Tasso and even that sleepy tale-teller Ariosto: The Roman poet Virgil (70-19 B.C.) wrote the epic poem the Aenied; until the nineteenth century, many ranked him above Homer; the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544—1595) wrote Jerusalem Delivered; the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) wrote Orlando Furioso.
28 (p. 108) ”May I take the liberty to ask if you do not get great pleasure from reading Horace?” . . . . ”I see nothing extraordinary in his journey to Brundusium . . . language was dipped in vinegar. His indelicate verses . . . great offence: Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65—8 B.C.), known as Horace, was one of the greatest Latin poets. The ancient city Brundusium, the modern Brindisi, is located on the heel of the boot of Italy. The phrase “dipped in vinegar” is a reference to a phrase in Horace’s Satires (satire 1, book 7). “His indelicate verses” is a reference to Horace’s Epodes 5, 8, and 12.
29 (p. 117) Ragotsky: Ferenc II Rákóczi (1676—1735) was a Hungarian prince who, with the support of Louis XIV, led a rebellion against the Austrians and became prince of Transylvania (1707-1711); after several defeats, he fled to Poland, then to France, and eventually to Turkey.
30 (p. 123) “everything in this world happens for the best . . . pre-established harmony is the finest thing in the world, as well as a plenum and the materia subtilis”: These are all terms of Leibnizian philosophy. The plenum and the materia subtilis were also theories of René Descartes (1596-1650) to explain that there was no vacuum and that light rays could pass through this “subtle matter.” Voltaire was intent on ridiculing these outdated theories in favor of the more advanced views of English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
31 (p. 124) the contingent or non-contingent events of this world: Yet another example of Voltaire’s use of Leibnizian terminology in order to make fun of Leibniz’s philosophy.
32 (p. 126) he had been so cheated by the Jews: This amounts to a settling of scores, for Voltaire had incurred significant financial losses as a result of disputes with and bankruptcies of Jewish financiers and bankers.
INSPIRED BY CANDIDE
George Bernard Shaw’s Candida
The name Candide has come to mean a naive person who is optimistic to the point of stupidity. However, the title character of George Bernard Shaw’s play Candida (1893) is not at all naive. Shaw speaks of Candida in his stage directions: “Her ways are those of a woman who has found that she can always manage people by engaging their affection, and who does so frankly and instinctively without the smallest scruple. So far, she is like any other pretty woman who is just clever enough to make the most of her sexual attractions for trivially selfish ends: but Candida’s serene brow, courageous eyes, and well set mouth and chin signify largeness of mind and dignity of character to ennoble her cunning in the affections.”
At Candida’s center is a love triangle: Candida; her husband, Morell ; and Eugene Marchbanks, a poet of eighteen who plays the role of the naïf. Marchbanks’s metaphysical poetry echoes the optimistic theories of Leibniz and Pope that Voltaire had lambasted. Shaw, whose best of all possible worlds was no doubt a socialist one, constructed a drama every bit as subversive and critical of human folly as Voltaire’s Candide. But by giving Candida the twin gifts of reason and power, Shaw located wisdom in the feminine.
Leonard Bernstein’s Candide
The evolution of the comic operetta Candide is a story of prolonged adaptation and revision. Leonard Bernstein began work on a musical based on Voltaire’s Candide in 1954, with help from playwright Lillian Hellman and eventual poet laureate Richard Wilbur. Before the work’s 1956 premiere, Bernstein said of Hellman’s book: “She has taken Voltaire and done much more than adapt him: she has added, deleted, rewritten, replotted, composed brand new sequences, provided a real ending, and, I feel, made it infinitely more significant for our country and our time.” To Wilbur’s verses were added lyrics by John La Touche, Dorothy Parker, and Bernstein himself. Bernstein composed the score, arguably one of the most complex in musical theater, around the same time that he wrote the bold and sumptuous West Side Story (1957). When it opened in Boston and had a relatively short run on Broadway (1956-1957), the two-act Candide was not considered a success; rather than comic, the libretto struck audiences as angry in its targeting of McCarthyism as the modern corollary of the Inquisition.
In 1959, the bicentennial of the publication of Voltaire’s Candide, Bernstein’s musical opened in London with some new songs. This production did not succeed either, nor did those based on subsequent revisions in 1966, 1967, 1968, and 1971. In 1973 Hellman’s book was abandoned completely in favor of a new one by Hugh Wheeler, and Steven Sondheim contributed new lyrics. Director Harold Prince took on the task of taming Bernstein’s score, squeezing it into one act and paring down the orchestra to thirteen members. This version, executed without significant input from Bernstein, was the first to have any success. However, though rollickingly funny from curtain to curtain, the 1973 version had lost much of the philosophy of the original.
The director of the Scottish Opera, John Mauceri, began work on his version of the musical in 1982. Mauceri expanded the 1973 version back into two acts and restored nearly all of Bernstein’s music. Five years later, he brought Bernstein back into the process, and the two collaborated on a 1988 production in Glasgow. After the death of Hugh Wheeler, the job of expanding the book fell to John Wells. His revisions reinserted several incidents from Voltaire’s original. In 1989 Mauceri and Bernstein mounted a production in London that, for the first time, Bernstein conducted himself; it included all the favorites from the original 1956 production as wel
l as songs added later, including “Best of All Possible Worlds,” with the combined lyrics of Richard Wilbur and Steven Sondheim, and “Glitter and Be Gay.”Candide: Final Revised Version, 1989 is now considered definitive. Harold Prince revived Candide for the New York City Opera in 1994 and 1997.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Voltaire’s Candide through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Commentary
FRANCIS ESPINASSE
The civilized world was horrified by the news of the terrible earthquake of Lisbon (November 1, 1755). Strictly considered, this frightful catastrophe was only, on a large scale, what, on a smaller, was, and is, happening every day. A vessel founders at sea, a house or theatre is on fire: the just and unjust alike, parents and innocent children, perish in the waves or in the flames, and there is weeping and wailing in many a home. But the colossal magnitude of the appalling disaster at Lisbon made transcendently more intense that feeling of the problematic in human destiny, which is aroused more or less, in susceptive minds, by the vicissitudes of daily life. Goethe, then a boy of six, was as much perplexed as the sexagenarian Voltaire how to reconcile the goodness of the Deity with the seemingly aimless cruelty of what he had permitted, or ordained, to happen at Lisbon. The “whatever is is right,” the “all partial evil universal good,” of Pope’s famous essay, so much admired by Voltaire, who translated them into the pithy formula: “All is well” (tout est bien), were now pronounced by him unsatisfactory. He had opposed a sort of optimism of his own to Pascal’s pessimism, and in “Le Mondain” had sung of the pleasures enjoyed by cultivated and civilized man. But he now struck his lyre to a very different tune in his “Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon; or, an Examination of the Axiom, All is Well”—to which he opposed a gloomy catalogue of all the ills that flesh is heir to.... Though not printed until some years later, [Candide] was begun soon after the Lisbon earthquake.
—from Life of Voltaire (1892)
LYTTON STRACHEY
The doctrine which [Voltaire] preached—that life should be ruled, not by the dictates of tyranny and superstition, but by those of reason and humanity—can never be obliterated from the minds of men.
—from The New Republic (August 6, 1919)
HENRY MORLEY
Voltaire in Candide, as Johnson in Rasselas, expressed the despair of the time over the problem of man’s life on earth. Voltaire mocked and Johnson mourned over the notion that this is the best possible world. Each taught the vanity of human wishes.... All evils of life, wittily heaped together in Candide, when they arise from man’s fraud and wrong-doing are conquerable in long course of time; and conquest of them means that advance of civilization towards which we have begun to labour in this century, with more definite aims than heretofore. The struggle of the French Revolution to lift men at once above those grosser ills of life which pressed upon them in the eighteenth century, and wrung from them such books as Candide and Rasselas, failed only in its immediate aim. Its highest hope is with us still, quickened though sobered by the failure of immediate attainment. A State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed. Our labour now is not to mould States but make citizens.
—from Morley’s introduction to Candide (1922)
E. M. FORSTER
[Voltaire] wrote enormously: plays (now forgotten); short stories, and some of them still read—especially that masterpiece, Candide. He was a journalist, and a pamphleteer, he dabbled in science and philosophy, he was a good popular historian, he compiled a dictionary, and he wrote hundreds of letters to people all over Europe. He had correspondents everywhere, and he was so witty, so up-to-date, so on the spot that kings and emperors were proud to get a letter from Voltaire and hurried to answer it with their own hand. He is not a great creative artist. But he is a great man with a powerful intellect and a warm heart, enlisted in the service of humanity. That is why I rank him with Shakespeare as a spiritual spokesman for Europe. Two hundred years before the Nazis came, he was the complete anti-Nazi.
—from Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)
Questions
Because God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent, any world He created would have to be the best possible. It is true that there are murders, rapists, thieves, and bloody-minded dictators, but free will is so important a good that evildoers must be allowed to choose to do evil. Similarly, for there to be the maximum amount of order, beauty, and variety in nature, there also has to be the possibility of droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the like. Such, greatly simplified, are the kinds of ideas against which Voltaire directs his satire.
1. Does Candide refute such ideas successfully?
2. Could it be that Voltaire’s satire is not so much directed against these ideas as against people who use them as a pretext for a heartless and self-righteous complacency?
3. What do you understand Candide to mean when he says that from now on he will “tend his garden”? Refrain from public life? Accept things as they are? Try to expand this phrase into a program for living.
4. What is your own answer to the violence and misery of human life as Voltaire depicts it?
FOR FURTHER READING
Biographical and General Studies
Ayer, A. J. Voltaire. New York: Random House, 1986.
Barber, William H. Leibniz in France from Amault to Voltaire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Reprint: New York: Garland, 1985.
—. Voltaire. London: Arnold, 1960.
Besterman, Theodore. Voltaire. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969.
Bird, Stephen. Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-century France. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000.
Bottiglia, William F., ed. Voltaire: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
Gay, Peter. Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. Second edition: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Lanson, Gustave. Voltaire. 1906. Translated by Robert A. Wagoner; introduction by Peter Gay. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1966.
Mitford, Nancy. Voltaire in Love. New York: Harper, 1957. Paperback edition: New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999.
Sareil, Jean. “Voltaire.” In European Writers: The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, edited by George Stade. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984, pp. 367-392.
Torrey, Norman. The Spirit of Voltaire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Reprint: New York: Russell and Russell, 1968.
Wade, Ira Owen. The Intellectual Development of Voltaire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Critical Studies of Candide
Barber, William H. Voltaire: “Candide.” London: Arnold, 1960.
Bottiglia, William F., ed. Voltaire’s Candide: Analysis of a Classic. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1959, 1964.
Havens, George R., ed. Candide. New York: Henry Holt, 1934.
Mason, Haydn. “Candide”: Optimism Demolished. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Wade, Ira Owen. Voltaire and “Candide”: A Study in the Fusion of History, Art, and Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959. Reprint: Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972.
Waldinger, Renée, ed. Approaches to Teaching Voltaire’s Candide. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1987.
Williams, David. Voltaire, Candide. London: Grant and Cutler, 1997.
a Province in western Germany. tGenealogical divisions on a coat of arms indicating degrees of nobility. ǂAll tongue (Greek).
b “Cosmo
lo” indicates “cosmology,” a term invented by Christian Wolff, disciple of Leibniz; “nigo” calls to mind “nincompoop” in French.
c Frederick the Great’s recruiting officers wore blue uniforms.
d Greek physician of the first century A.D who traveled with the Roman army as a surgeon and wrote a treatise on medical remedies.
e Phrase employed to ridicule the Leibnizian terminology of deterministic optimism. ƗSatirical reference to the custom of warring nations to invoke the blessing of the Almighty and to ask Him for victory.
f What follows makes clear that this is a Protestant minister who is fanatical in his hatred of the Catholic religion.
g Christian sect that opposed infant baptism in favor of baptism on confession of faith; in Holland, the Anabaptists were granted religious tolerance and refuge against persecution.
h Refers to Aristotle’s definition of man as a featherless biped.
i Syphilis.
j Scarlet dye made from the dried bodies of female cochineal (small, red, cactus-feeding) insects; imported from Mexico and Peru.
k Mercenaries; professional soldiers hired to serve in foreign armies.
