Anonymous translation, 1918
Considered one of the great works of French literature, Candide: or, The Optimist was first published in January 1759 and is Voltaire’s best known and most successful work. It was immediately denounced by religious and secular authorities as a heretic and seditious text threatening and undermining the morals of the period. A month after its publication the Grand Council of Geneva and the administrators of Paris banned the book, although this most likely contributed to its massive sales figures and popularity.
The novella opens with the young Candide living in a castle in Westphalia, where he is tutored by the ‘optimist’ Pangloss and has fallen in love with the baron’s daughter. After being caught kissing his beloved, he is banished from the castle and sent to the military, where he endures great hardship. He next travels to Lisbon with Pangloss, where they suffer a storm, sinking their ship, two earthquakes, killing thousands of people, and multiple instances of torture. The Portuguese earthquake was based on the real life calamity, which beset Lisbon in 1755, resulting in as many as twenty thousand deaths across the country and neighbouring regions.
Candide then travels with his beloved Cunegonde to South America, where they become separated. The eponymous hero endures more hardships, before stumbling into an isolated ‘utopia’, which he nevertheless chooses to leave. He returns to Europe with a ‘pessimist’ called Martin, with whom he debates philosophy, while witnessing more horrific deeds, before settling in the Ottoman Empire. The tone of the work is deeply satirical as Voltaire mocks a plethora of European institutions and dominant belief systems. One of the central targets of the author’s wit and ire is the philosophical system of ‘optimism’, chiefly associated with Gottfried Leibniz.
The term ‘the best of all possible worlds’ was introduced by the philosopher in his 1710 work Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and The Origin of Evil. It is his attempt to solve ‘The problem of evil’: the question of why evil exists if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. Leibniz argues that the world is the best it could be imagined and the fact that one as an individual thinks something is an evil occurrence is simply based on one not knowing the divine plan or understanding the order of the universe. An event that appears awful to humans is actually part of a divine structure that is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire attacks the idea of order, not only through the narrative in his work but also by the very chaotic and disorderly structure of Candide. The text unrelentingly attacks Leibniz’s claim, showing so much torturous and capricious evil as to render the philosophy meaningless. Voltaire is deeply interested in exposing the disgraceful abuses of power, while arguably suggesting there is little to prevent them from happening; the only possibility for contentment is to attempt to escape from them and cultivate a separate space in the world through work and co-operation with others.