Candide

by Voltaire

  Gilbert Murray has written: “The glory of the Stoics is to have built up a religion of extraordinary nobleness; the glory of the Epicureans is to have upheld an ideal of sanity and humanity stark upright amid a reeling world.”47 Voltaire’s particular glory in writing Candide is to have upheld the same ideal in the same spirit as the earlier Epicureans.

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      †  From Trivium 13 (May 1978): 18–30. Reprinted by permission of Trivium Publications, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Lampeter. Pages in brackets refer to this Norton Critical Edition.

      1. The Enlightenment: an interpretation [1966], (London 1973), Vol. I, pp. 21, 197.

      2. ‘Rapports probables entre le Zadig de Voltaire et la pensée stoïcienne,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 52 (June 1937), p. 375, n. 10.

      3. Candide, édition critique (Paris 1959), p. 71.

      4. ‘The Quality of Candide,’ pp. 339–40 in Essays presented to C. M. Girdlestone (Newcastle upon-Tyne, King’s College 1960), pp. 335–347. [See the Weightman article here in this Norton Critical Edition.]

      5. Op. cit., p. 338 [here].

      6. Candide, ed. J. H. Brumfill (Oxford 1968), p. 84 [here].

      7. Norman Wentworth De Witt, Epicurus and his Philosophy [1954], (Cleveland and New York 1967), p. 246. Voltaire himself when we read of him at death’s door, but despite having “lost the use of his eyes, his ears, his legs, his teeth, his tongue” [Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (London 1969), p. 522] still determined to make a visit to Paris, sounds like a real-life conflation of some of the characters from his conte.

      8. Ibid., pp. 67.

      9. For a discussion of suicide in the Stoic system of ethics, see F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics (London 1975), pp. 48–52.

    10. Five Stages of Greek Religion (London 1946), Thinkers Library, No. 52, p. 110.

    11. Epicurus: the Extant Remains, ed. Cyril Bailey (Oxford 1926), p. 115: Vatican Fragments, lvii.

    12. Ct. Sandbach, op cit., pp. 32–35.

    13. Ll. 363–368.

    14. ‘Candide, Gull in the Garden’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 3 (1969), pp. 265–277. See pp. 274, 276.

    15. G. Murray, Voltaire’s Candide: the Protean Gardener, 1755–1762. Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, 59 (Geneva 1970); P. Ilie, ‘The Voices in Candide’s garden, 1755–1759: a methodology for Voltaire’s correspondence,’ Studies on Voltaire … 148. (Oxford 1976), pp. 37–113.

    16. Ilie, op cit., pp. 44–5.

    17. Ibid., p. 102.

    18. Ibid., p. 89.

    19. Ibid., p. 104.

    20. Ibid., p. 113.

    21. Ibid., pp. 53, 107 (n. 139).

    22. Ibid., p. 107.

    23. Ibid., p. 112.

    24. Cited by René Ternois, ‘Saint Evremond et Gassendi,’ Actes du VIIIe Congrès de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 1969, p. 726.

    25. Ilie, op cit., p. 112.

    26. Ibid., p. 89.

    27. Ars poetica, I. 343: “omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.”

    28. Le Philosophe ignorant, xlv (‘Des stoïciens’).

    29. Cf. Complete Works of Voltaire, Correspondence, definitive edition by Theodore Besterman: D8035 (Jan. 9, 1759); D6307 (June 13, 1755).

    30. Cf. Christopher Thacker, ‘Voltaire and Rousseau: eighteenth-century gardeners,’ Studies on Voltaire … 90, p. 1597.

    31. W. F. Bottiglia, Voltaire’s Candide, analysis of a classic, Studies on Voltaire … 7, (Geneva 1959), p. 109.

    32. Pensée sur le bonheur (1724). Cited by J. Ehrard, L’Idée de Nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris 1963), Vol 1, p. 564.

    33. Essai sur le mérite et la vertu (1745); Dédicace ‘A mon frère.’ Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. Assézat et Tourneux, Vol. 1, p. 10.

    34. Op cit., Vol. 1, p. 544.

    35. Le Philosophe ignorant, xliv (‘D’Epicure’).

    36. Oeuvres meslées. (Londres 1705), 2 vols in 4. Vol. 1, p. 462: “Je ne croi pas qu’il [Epicure] ait voulu introduire une Volupté plus dure que la Vertu des Stoïques. Cette jalousie d’Austérité me paroît extravagante dans un Philosophe voluptueux, de quelque manière qu’on tourne sa Volupté.

    37. Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam 1734), 5 vols. Vol. II: Art. ‘Epicure,’ p. 741, p. 740 (note H). Cf. La Rochefoucauld, Lettre à la Duchesse de xxxx, Oeuvres (Amsterdam 1692). Vol. II, p. 47: “Je crois que, dans la morale,… Epicure était un saint.” Cited by J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, p. 142, n. 2. The whole of Chapter VIII of this work (‘The Rehabilitation of Epicurus’) is invaluable for any consideration of Epicureanism during this period.

    38. Le Philosophe ignorant, xliv.

    39. Quoted by Gilbert Murray, op cit., p. 110.

    40. Cf. Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Classical Antiquity (Baltimore 1967), p. 165.

    41. C. Bailey, op cit., p. 129: Letter to Pythocles.

    42. Dennis Fletcher, ‘Candide and the theme of the happy husbandman,’ Studies on Voltaire … 161 (1976), pp. 1–11.

    43. Cf. P. Toldo’s interpretation of Candide’s “il faut cultiver notre jardin”: “… un pessimisme qui, malgré tout, n’est qu’à la surface: une aspiration au silence et à l’oubli que tout homme éprouve à certaines heures,” ‘Voltaire conteur et romancier’ in Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 40, (1913).

    44. Livre 24, Ch. 10 (‘De la secte stoïque’).

    45. Le Philosophe ignorant, xlv.

    46. The epigraph to Alzire (1736) reads: “Errer est d’un mortel, pardonner est divin.”

    47. Op cit., p. 130.

  HAYDN MASON

  [Gestation: Candide Assembling Itself]†

  [Gustave Lanson’s enchanting picture of Voltaire’s little “metairie” (farm) at Ferney—busy and prosperous, playful yet disciplined, cozy and intimate yet engaged in a vast semiclandestine conspiracy—had yet another aspect. In those hundreds of letters that Voltaire dispatched all across Europe, he accumulated (almost surely without realizing it) phrases and formulas and turns of thought that after lying dormant in his mind would emerge coated with crystals of Voltairean wit and anger to form part of Candide. Whether this material amounted in the end to a private language addressed to a special group of Voltairean initiés may be debated; the case is proposed by Geoffrey Murray in Voltaire’s Candide: The Protean Gardener, published as volume 69 (1970) of Studies on Voltaire. Without getting into that argument, one can say that the materials assembled by Haydn Mason clearly demonstrate the inchoate preexistence of the book in Voltaire’s mind and imply its assemblage, more abrupt than gradual, into the sparkling coherence we know. Where Mason does not do so, I have translated into English the French materials cited in the body of the text.—Robert M. Adams]

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  Let us return to an examination of Voltaire’s own attitudes as they evolved in the period immediately preceding Candide. That conte, considered by general consent to be Voltaire’s masterpiece, is a kind of summation of Voltaire’s views in the late 1750s on the human condition, beset by suffering and wickedness yet not wholly without scope for initiative and improvement. This is not the place for an analysis of Voltaire’s tale; but no biography of the philosophe can reasonably neglect a close look at the way his mind came to absorb and shape materials from the world around him and from his own reading. Such a consideration, involving as it does a careful review of detailed, even minute, matters, inevitably calls for a certain rigour of attention; yet without it we cannot hope to understand very much about the genesis of Voltaire’s greatest work.


  As we have seen, the news of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 played an important rôle. Voltaire’s immediate reaction is one of horror: ‘One hundred thousand ants, our neighbours, crushed all of a sudden in our ant-heap, half of them perishing doubtless in inexpressible anguish.’ The sole consolation is that the Jesuit Inquisitors of Lisbon will have disappeared with the rest. That, concludes Voltaire, should teach men not to persecute men, ‘for while a few confounded rascals are burning a few fanatics the earth is swallowing up both’ (D6597, 24 November [1755]).1 Already the ironic perspective that informs Chapter VI of Candide on the Lisbon auto-da-fé has been glimpsed. Such expressions of horror resound through letters of succeeding days. The very size of the catastrophe is ‘a terrible argument against Optimism’ (D6605). Confronted by it, Voltaire feels his own problems shrink to such petty dimensions that he is ashamed of them (D6605, D6607). This attitude is somewhat reminiscent of the way his hero Zadig in an earlier conte had forgotten his own miseries in contemplation of the infinite heavens. But there is a sombre difference; Zadig’s vision was sublimely consoling, whereas Voltaire’s merely confirms the awful destructiveness latent in physical nature.

  It is clear that the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne constituted an almost instinctive response. However, less attention has been paid to the fact that once the poem is completed Voltaire’s attitudes are swiftly transmuted into a rather different stance. In a letter to the Protestant pastor Allamand on 16 December 1755 he writes: ‘I pity the Portuguese, like you, but men do still more harm to each other on their little molehill than nature does to them. Our wars massacre more men than are swallowed up by earthquakes. If we had to fear only the Lisbon adventure in this world, we should still be tolerably well off’ (D6629: my italics). Two new notes are struck. Despondent alarm at the earthquake has given way to a more detached attitude; and the physical evils of the universe are set in a context in which man’s wickedness to man, particularly in wars, looms far greater. Even in his very first letter after learning of the earthquake (D6597) he had, as we saw, found space to think also of the persecutions inflicted by the Inquisitors. It is this kind of consideration which, with more time for reflection, becomes paramount. Physical suffering, it is true, is a sufficient refutation of the belief that ‘all is well’; but the true horror lies in the spectacle of what men do to one another. The same evolution of attitudes can also be glimpsed in the Poème sur le désastre, which begins with the actual catastrophe at Lisbon but then opens out onto a wider scene in which ‘tout est en guerre.’2

  Reasons to support this new-found awareness that war is the supreme evil were soon to be sadly abundant in the world around. On 29 August 1756 Frederick the Great invaded Saxony, thereby precipitating the Seven Years War. It accords well with Voltaire’s darkening mood. In early 1756 he had passed from specific concern with the Lisbon earthquake to a more general brooding on the problem of evil. He tells Elie Bertrand (another of the Genevan clergy) in February that the myth of the Fall of Man, whether Christian or otherwise, is more reasonable in human terms than the Optimism of Leibniz and Pope, which beneath the disguise of a consoling name simply removes all hope: ‘if all is well, how do the Leibnizians admit of a better?’ (D6738: author’s italics) It is the fatalistic quality of Optimism that is so cruel, for it invites man to acquiesce and therefore give up all striving for improvement. As we have seen, in the desolate picture Voltaire paints of the human condition, he allows man one single consolation: hope. Otherwise, the pessimism is general, and indeed increasing in the author’s view of the world. He begins to become more interested in Manichean beliefs, according to which evil has a life of its own quite independent of the forces of good in the universe. A letter to Mme du Deffand in May 1756 talks of Jupiter’s two casks, one for good and another, bigger, for evil. Not only does he pose the basic question—Why so? More daringly, he wonders whether the evil cask could have constructed itself. Here are the seeds of an outlook voiced in Candide by the self-styled Manichean Martin.

  However, this increasingly sombre view of the world does not relate to a personal crisis as is sometimes claimed. Apart from worries over such matters as the widespread circulation, despite his efforts to the contrary, of his notorious mock-epic La Pucelle, Voltaire is by and large happily established in Geneva. Les Délices has needed some improvements and from the early weeks he is busy planting, furnishing, building. Claude Patu, a visitor in autumn 1755, speaks wonderingly of Voltaire’s vigour: ‘Imagine, together with the air of a dying man, all the fire of first youth, and the brilliance of his attractive stories!’ Never has one seen better fare or more engaging manners; the whole of Geneva is delighted to have him there and is doing all it can to keep him (D6562). The picture, in short, is not far short of idyllic. True, Voltaire looks like a corpse, as another visitor confirms (D6646). But the sense of returning vitality and purpose flows from the correspondence as it must have done at the dinner table. In 1758 Mme d’Epinay was also to find the philosophe full of gaiety and cheerfulness (D7704). Even the references to ill-health become less common. Voltaire has found ‘a port after weathering so many storms’ (D6842). To Thieriot he makes the touching confession that he is writing about the sufferings of his fellow-men out of pure altruism, for ‘I am so happy that I am ashamed of it’ (D6875, 27 May [1756]).

  Yet this state of personal contentment in no way precludes a total divorce with the philosophy of Optimism, and from its outset the Seven Years War is invoked as a decisive refutation (e.g., D7001). To his friend the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, who is to find herself in the thick of the battle, he never ceases to point up the absurd horror of it all, using the War polemically to express disagreement with her adherence to Optimism (e.g., D7023). To his more intimate acquaintance Thieriot, he voices an attitude of indifference: ‘Happy is he who lives in tranquillity on the edge of his lake, far from the throne, and far from envy’ (D7028). To the duc de Richelieu, also a friend but more distant as being of high rank and politically influential, another side appears. Richelieu being in charge of the larger of the two French armies, Voltaire turned to him to advocate his invention of an armed chariot which, he reckoned, would kill many Prussians, indeed would knock out everyone it met, so that two of the machines would be enough against a battalion and squadron combined (D7043, D7293). This particular notion (which the French Government did not take up) should of itself dispose of two long-standing myths about Voltaire: that he was a total pacifist, and lacked all sense of patriotism. Generally pacifist in outlook, he nevertheless was forced to accept the realities of preparing a military defence against the aggression of Prussia on land and the British at sea. Both countries fill him with consternation, though for rather different reasons.

  He is appalled by the desolation wrought by Frederick’s armies in central Europe, once they had won the decisive engagement at Rossbach on 5 November 1757. But prior to that he had been moved by compassion for the Prussian King, who had intimated that he was contemplating suicide (D7373). Voltaire replied in urgent tones dissuading him from such a course, pointing out that it would dismay his supporters and give joy only to his enemies. Instead, Frederick should seek an honourable peace (D7400), show he is a philosophe and live for all the good things still remaining to him: possessions, dignities, friends (D7419). A further plea follows on 13 November (D7460). Ironically, it is written after Rossbach, which is Frederick’s contemptuous reply to Voltaire’s advice (the King had already expressed his scorn in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina, D7414, Commentary). The news of that Prussian victory reverses Voltaire’s attitude. A despairing Frederick gains immediate access to his warm sympathy. Yet at the same time he is hoping for revenge over Frederick for the humiliating moment at Frankfurt when four bayonets had menaced Mme Denis, and he is disappointed when Frederick triumphs (D7471). His feelings towards the Prussian King are as strongly ambivalent as ever. Richard Phelps, a British visitor at this time, acutely observed: ‘He was the most inconsistent, whenever he talked of the King of Prussia.�
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  By contrast, Voltaire’s views on the British Navy are unequivocal. He fears their superior numbers (D7210) and wants to see their piratical ways punished (D7491). The British were exercising a direct influence upon Voltaire’s life. Not only were they likely by their hostile actions and blockades to cause the price of sugar to rise (D7131, 7901). They were, more gravely, capturing French vessels in which the writer had considerable investments, especially the fleet sailing from Cadiz (D5719), and at times the Cadiz mercantile trade was to give him much cause for concern (e.g., D6811). Besides, the British Government had provided one of the more signal instances of horrible folly during the Seven Years War by the execution of Admiral Byng for failing to relieve Minorca against the duc de Richelieu’s forces at Port-Mahon in May 1756. Voltaire and Richelieu had both intervened on Byng’s behalf in the court-martial following the engagement, but to no avail; Byng was sentenced on 27 January 1757 to be shot, the sentence being carried out on 14 March. André-Michel Rousseau, providing a comprehensive account of the affair, sees it as Voltaire’s baptism as champion of the oppressed. This time he was to gain nothing, save the achievement of making Byng, through his appearance in Candide, far more famous in death than he ever was in life and of turning the ironic remark that he had been executed ‘pour encourager les autres’3 into one of the very few phrases from French literature to have gained a proverbial currency in the English language.