10. Candide (1759) by Voltaire [François-Marie Arouet] (1694-1778)

The 1759 edition of Voltaire’s Candide From The New York Public Library   www.nypl.org

‘There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deum to be sung each in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the Bulgarians had burnt according to the laws of war. Here, old men covered with wounds, beheld their wives, hugging their children to their bloody breasts, massacred before their faces; there, their daughters, disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames, begged to be despatched. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.’

Mutually destructive mass slaughter, the weaponizing of religion, the suffering of civilian populations subjected to rape and murder… It’s all here in Chapter III of the French writer Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide, a celebrated example of the author’s disgust at the horrors of war.

His bitterness is expressed in the contrast between the glamour of fine military uniforms and stirring music and the actual chaos of brutal combat. Bulgarian rapists are described as ‘heroes’ and the battle as ‘heroic butchery’.   

The above translation by William F. Fleming of the original French text was published in 1918. An introduction by Philip Littell stated that it was ‘one of the right moments’ to republish the book, presumably referring to a time of reflection on the horrors of WW1 which had finally come to an end.  

 

Portrait of Voltaire in around 1724 by the French painter Nicolas de Largillière (1656-1746). Image credit: Wikipedia

François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name of Voltaire, published the book anonymously with the claim that it had been translated from the German by a Dr Ralph, knowing that it would upset the authorities. Soon after it appeared the book was widely banned because of what was viewed as its seditious content and religious blasphemy. Censorship merely boosted sales: a total of twenty editions appeared in 1759.

 

This English translation of Voltaire’s novel was published in 1762. Image credit: Wikipedia

The original title of the work was Candide, ou L’Optimisme, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining…’  ‘Everything will fall into place, just be patient…’ ‘Nothing is impossible…’  ‘There’s always a reason for everything…’  ‘It’s all for the best…’ Such are the sayings that we recognise today as an everyday optimistic view of the world.

 

Portrait of Leibniz in about 1700 by the German painter Christoph Bernhard Francke (1665-1729)

Intellectuals of Voltaire’s time, when the existence of God was largely unquestioned, were drawn to consider more fundamental issues such as the function of Divine Providence. How can it be reconciled with the moral and physical evils that plainly exist in the world, they asked. The German thinker Gottfried Leibniz formulated a Philosophical Optimism in his attempt to explain the presence of evil in a world that God had created. The world is not perfect, he argued, but God has created the best of all possible worlds that he could have created.  

Voltaire uses the image of naïve Candide, trembling ‘like a philosopher’ as he attempts to reason on ‘effects and causes’, to criticise such thinking.  

Throughout Candide there are mocking references to phrases used by Leibniz. Examples are in this passage from Chapter III, where Voltaire describes the bayonet as ‘a sufficient reason’ for the deaths of thousands, and the slaughter as taking place in ‘this best of worlds’.  

Voltaire echoes ironically Leibniz’s Philosophical Optimism as expressed in a work like La Monadologie, written originally in French in 1714:  

‘Now, as there is an infinity of possible universes in the Ideas of God, and as only one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God’s choice, which determines him toward one rather than another. And this reason can be found only in the fitness, or the degrees of perfection, that these worlds contain, since each possible thing has the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection it involves’.

 

Candide learns the cruel realities of the sugar trade from a slave in the Dutch colony of Surinam, South America. Engraving by Jean-Charles Baquoy (1721-1777). Image credit: Wikipedia

Faced with the real world of inhumanity and injustice, Voltaire could not accept such ideas on Divine Providence. Later in the book, while visiting Surinam, Candide is moved to tears when he meets a mutilated slave, punished by having his left leg and right hand amputated. ‘This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe,’ the slave tells him. The episode is shown as one more reason for Candide’s rejection of optimism: he defines it to his friend Cacambo as ‘the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong’.

Various other reasons have been put forward for Voltaire’s grim view of the world as seen in Candide.

 

The Lisbon earthquake as portrayed in 1755. Image credit: The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum, Bedford, UK

He was evidently moved and depressed by the news of the Lisbon earthquake on 1 November 1755, in which between 30,000 and 40,000 people lost their lives. The incident is briefly mentioned in Candide, but Voltaire uses it mainly to highlight religious superstitions. He accuses the Lisbon authorities of thinking that ‘a beautiful auto-da-fé’ consisting of ‘the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking’.

 

The death of General Braddock at the Battle of Monongahela, 1755, in North America. Image credit: National Army Museum  www.nam.ac.uk

Chapter III of the book is said to reflect the savagery of the Seven Years’ War, involving European powers including Britain, France and Prussia. Fought between 1756 and 1763, it broke out in North America. The above image shows a scene of slaughter by musketry similar to that described in Candide.

The role of religion as a contributing factor to wars in Europe can also be seen in this chapter, where each army believes that God is on its side and celebrates its ‘victory’ with a Te Deum. A few years after the publication of Candide, Voltaire would lead a campaign for religious toleration. This followed the wrongful execution of the French Protestant cloth merchant Jean Calas in Toulouse on 10 March 1762, thanks to a miscarriage of justice due to anti-Huguenot prejudice.  

Here’s a fitting view of Candide’s author as a pacifist ‘War Correspondent at Large’ written in 2009 by Professor Daniel Brewer of the University of Minnesota:

‘War for Voltaire represented yet another instance of infamous unreason, odious intolerance, and despicable evil. It was the collective, generalized form of  l’infâme (“the despicable”), against which he publicly and tirelessly railed.’