Candide, ou l'Optimisme (1759). Philosophical tale by Voltaire. It bitterly satirizes the Optimism of Leibniz and others because, placed in the hands of trusting adepts, this easily becomes a form of fatalism, schooling men to accept the human condition, whereas Voltaire's own experience suggested that man was better employed in reacting against his condition, however puny the end-result might be. With its controlled anger and its deliberate ironic distancing, his conte makes for painful, if amusing and instructive, reading.
Candide, a trusting young man, has been taught by his tutor Pangloss to believe that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’. Brutally expelled, at the end of Chapter I, from the household at Thunder-ten-Tronckh, an ‘earthly paradise’ of calm and unquestioning Optimism, Candide wanders from Europe to the Americas and back again, now re-finding, now again losing sight of, the other members of the household, who are also discovering the real world which constantly and cruelly contradicts the Optimism of Pangloss.
Having for 30 chapters experienced every evil known to man, the little family (with several new members, including the bitter Manichean Martin) comes full cycle and is reunited, outside Constantinople, on a smallholding which proves, like Thunder-ten-Tronckh, to be another ‘earthly paradise’. Now, however, it is one of calm and sceptical realism: Candide has learned that life in all its evil does not necessarily have to be accepted. He now knows that the ultimate wisdom requires like-minded people to pool their meagre resources in determined opposition to the hostility of the world. The book ends with his dismissal of Pangloss's unrepentant philosophizing: ‘ “Cela est bien dit”, répondit Candide, “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.” ’
[John Renwick]
