It is in that spirit that by the early eighteenth century the quarrel naturally migrated, as Montesquieu satirically notes in Les Lettres persanes (The Persian Letters), to the first cafés to be opened in Paris, where the boisterous exchange of ideas helped to produce the increasingly powerful notion of public opinion. Literature and the arts, which were carving out their own distinct sphere in the quarrel, were now fully open to freewheeling public debate. Both parties had prepared the terrain. Modern partisans had ruthlessly exposed hallowed masterpieces to critical reason and to the new forms of unfettered research that would occupy the coming century; the defenders of antiquity, for their part, had boldly reinvigorated old ideas concerning the primeval and intuitive nature of poetry and the arts that would feed Enlightenment and Romantic interest in artistic genius, aesthetic experience, primitivism, and the sublime. Furthermore, such literary and aesthetic discussions could easily slide into the political and societal issues raised by the ancient works under consideration—including the paganism, republicanism, and sexual license so troubling to modern Christian monarchies—and thus allow a side entrance into those more regulated (and censored) domains. Thus did a debate that reconfigured our understanding of literature’s past also reshape its future prospects.
WORKS CITED AND RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING
Note: All translations of passages quoted in this chapter are my own.
Boileau, Nicolas [Boileau-Despréaux]. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Françoise Escal. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1966.
Corneille, Pierre. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Georges Couton. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1980–87.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by W. R. Trask. New York: Pantheon (Bollingen), 1953.
Dacier, Anne Lefebvre. L’Iliade d’Homère traduite en français, avec des remarques. 3 vols. Paris: Rigaud, 1711.
Diderot, Denis. Œuvres esthétiques. Edited by Paul Vernière. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1994.
Fénelon, François de Pons de Salignac de La Motte. Œuvres. Edited by Jacques Le Brun. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1983–97.
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Alain Niderst. 9 vols. Paris: Fayard, 1990–2001.
La Motte, Antoine Houdar de. Textes critiques. Edited by Françoise Gevrey and Béatrice Guion. Paris: Champion, 2002.
Longepierre, Hilaire-Bernard de. Discours sur les anciens. Paris: Abouin, 1687.
Marivaux. Œuvres de jeunesse. Edited by Frédéric Deloffre. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1972.
Montesquieu. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Roger Caillois. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1949.
Perrault, Charles. Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences (1688–97). Reprint, with introduction by H. R. Jauss. Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964.
Rousseau, Jean-Baptiste. Correspondance de J.-B. Rousseau et Brossette. Edited by P. Bonnefon. 2 vols. Paris: Cornély, 1910–11.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond, et al. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1959–95.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.
Swift, Jonathan. A Tale of the Tub [and] The Battle of the Books. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958.
For a rich historical account of the quarrel in France and Britain, see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); for a briefer introduction, consult Douglas L. Patey, “Ancients and Moderns,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Joan DeJean considers the quarrel in the broader context of recurring cultural wars in Ancients against Moderns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Sara E. Melzer examines the relation between ancient Roman and early modern French imperial ambitions in Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). For an excellent introduction to the contradictory pulls of French neoclassical aesthetics, see E.B.O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950). To pursue further development of the themes highlighted here, see Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Concerning the continuing influence of the quarrel in the Enlightenment, see Peter Gay, Enlightenment: An Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966) and, more recently, Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) and Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). For Boileau and the sublime, see Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Rookwood Press, 2002) and Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London: Legenda, 2006). On Perrault’s modernism, consult Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi, Perrault’s Morals for Moderns (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984).
Among the important works in French must be noted Marc Fumaroli’s extensive introductory essay to the anthology La querelle des anciens et des modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), as well as François Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade, 2005) and Levent Yilmaz, Le temps moderne: Variations sur les anciens et les contemporains (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
Voltaire’s Candide
Lessons of Enlightenment and the Search for Truth
NICHOLAS CRONK
The appearance of Candide in early 1759 was a publishing sensation, what we would now call a “media event.” Following the first edition in Geneva, others instantly sprang up all over Europe, in Paris, London, Liège. Would-be censors protested in vain; the book was everywhere and unstoppable. Voltaire’s short novel, never since out of print, has gone through countless editions and been translated into every imaginable language. In what is the sure sign of a classic, the book has left a mark on the language we speak. One celebrated rejoinder, “Let’s eat some Jesuit!” (mangeons du Jésuite!), became an instant catchphrase in French, while other expressions from the book, such as “Panglossian” and “pour encourager les autres” (to encourage the others), have entered English usage. The book continues to have a vital place in English-speaking culture. In 1932, Bernard Shaw published an imitation of Candide titled The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; the short novel was instantly banned in the Irish Free State on account of its criticism of the Church. Leonard Bernstein’s musical Candide, composed to a libretto by Lilian Hellman, opened on Broadway in 1956 and continues to be widely performed on both sides of the Atlantic. Mark Ravenhill’s Candide (2013), written for the Royal Shakespeare Company, is a modern response to Voltaire’s novel, exploring our contemporary obsession with positive (Panglossian?) thinking that encourages us to rationalize evil out of existence. In preparation for the play’s opening, the playwright “translated” Voltaire’s entire novel into a series of 140-character episodes, which were tweeted eight times a day over a period of two months. There are many ways for modern readers to discover Candide.
If we look at the title page of an early edition, we can see how early readers came to know the novel (see fig. 1). Candide, ou l’optimisme: the term optimisme, as we shall see, refers to a particular philosophical view, but the word itself, an import from German, was then a new coinage in the French language, so its presence in the title of a novel was potentially pretentious or comic. The work is said to be “translated from the German of Dr. Ralph,” an old device that would have deceived no one, especially as the alleged German translator has an incongruously English name. Voltaire’s name appears nowhere—and of course, his celebrity was such that everyone knew the book
was by him. The year of publication, 1759, is correctly stated on the title page, but no place of publication is given, and no publisher is named—these are the hallmarks of a clandestine printing. In fact, in the course of 1759, there were no fewer than seventeen different printings: the one illustrated here was published in London by John Nourse, and it appeared very shortly after the first edition in Geneva, so quickly in fact that it seems that Voltaire must have slipped Nourse the manuscript even before the Genevan edition had appeared, no doubt as a precaution, should the Swiss edition be seized by police.
The eighteenth-century book market was an international one, and French editions published in London found their way to the Continent; but this London edition also reminds us that in mid-eighteenth-century London, there were educated printers able to publish books in French, and educated Englishmen wanting to read novels in French—and in the case of the copy illustrated here, we can see, from his signature on the title page, that one later eighteenth-century reader was presumably George Canning (1770–1827), the future prime minister. And for those English readers who could not read French, there were translations galore: no fewer than three different English versions, one of them published by Nourse, appeared in London in the course of 1759; and all three had to be reprinted in the course of that same year: the public appetite for Candide was insatiable.
Candide remains one of the most widely read novels of the eighteenth century, and for many readers it provides an introduction not just to the writing of Voltaire but to the thought of the age of the Enlightenment. Voltaire (1694–1778) was born and died in Paris, but spent most of his long and restless life away from the capital. He traveled to England in the 1720s, where he was an enthusiastic student of English culture, and to Berlin in the early 1750s, where he was the guest of Frederick the Great. He moved to a house, Les Délices, on the outskirts of Geneva in 1755, and finally settled, in the late 1750s, at the Château de Ferney, a grand residence situated near Geneva, but on French soil. Voltaire, now the most famous living author in Europe, was dubbed “the patriarch of Ferney,” and works continued to pour from his pen until his death at the age of eighty-four. Today, he is remembered for Candide and a handful of other short fictions, like Micromégas, Zadig, or L’ingénu, and for the Lettres philosophiques, published after his visit to England.
Figure 1. Candide, ou l’optimisme [London: John Nourse], 1759. Private collection.
In fact these works represent only a tiny fraction of his writings: the Complete Works of Voltaire currently being published by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford will number well more than two hundred volumes when it is completed, in a few years’ time. Voltaire was prolific and wrote in every known genre, from the most prestigious, like epic poetry and classical tragedy, down to the most ephemeral, like articles for the press or occasional verse. The other philosophes, Montesquieu, Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are remembered for important individual works; Voltaire is remembered for being Voltaire. In whatever genre he was writing, he used his trademark irony to express skepticism about dogmatic belief, in particular about entrenched religious belief. The name Voltaire is itself an invention (he was born François-Marie Arouet), and in some ways it is his greatest literary creation: more a label than a name, it has come to represent a way of looking at the world. And Candide expresses that Voltairean take on the world perhaps better than any of his other books.
When the English novelist Aldous Huxley reread Candide in the years after the First World War, his first response was to remark on how modern the book seemed: “Read the book today; you feel yourself entirely at home in its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of 1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point. The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and Cunégonde, of Martin and the Old Woman who was a Pope’s daughter and the betrothed of the sovereign Prince of Massa-Carrara. The only difference is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the world of 1922 than they did on Candide’s world.”
Candide tells the story of a journey, albeit in a surreal and comic vein. In the eighteenth century, fictional writers increasingly used the idea of travel as a metaphor: travelers (usually men, but sometimes women) no longer simply discover the delights of new lands, they look abroad to learn more about themselves and their own culture, so that travel becomes a means for acquiring understanding. The English philosopher Locke is a key figure here. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke argued for an empirical theory of knowledge, against those who believed in a priori reasoning or in revelation. The human mind, said Locke, is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, on which are written in the course of a human life the experiences derived from sense impressions. The key tenet of scientific method is that truth is discovered through experiment and observation of the natural world, and not by reliance on innate ideas and assumptions. Voltaire wrote about these ideas in Lettres philosophiques (1734), first published in London, in English, as Letters concerning the English nation (1733), and this work played a key role in the 1730s in beginning to popularize Locke’s ideas in France and the rest of Europe.
The principles of empirical thinking came increasingly to shape novel writing in the Enlightenment. The French word expérience means both “experience” and “experiment,” so that the experiences of a fictional hero or heroine became, quite literally, experiments in how to acquire knowledge. Candide’s name—candidus means “white” in Latin—is a deliberate nod to Locke’s blank tablet. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) describe the reactions of two ingenuous Persian visitors who struggle to learn from their experiences, while Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747) give a feminist twist to the model, describing the struggles of a Peruvian woman to come to terms with French culture (and men). This use of a foreign culture to relativize one’s own could easily become mechanical, but Diderot gives the device sophisticated treatment in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville (written in 1772): in this encounter between the very different sexual mores of France and Tahiti, we are no longer quite sure who is learning what from whom.
Candide, like other novels of the period, presents us then with a hero traveling in search of truth. But this is a comic novel, and in his hectic journeys to so many different countries, Candide is confronted by extraordinary events that flash by at bewildering and implausible speed: for the reader, it is like watching the speeded-up action of an old black-and-white film, with predictably comic results. How can we be expected to learn from our experiences, when there are just so many of them? And what is particular about this story is the way in which Candide is subjected to a crash course in evil: moral evil, the evil that humans inflict on their fellows (war, cruelty, violence); and metaphysical evil, those inexplicable and seemingly random events that God inflicts on humanity (earthquakes, plagues).
So the central philosophical question raised by the novel is this problem of evil: if, as Christians believe, God exists and he is good, why does he permit evil to exist on earth? This is hardly a new problem—think of the Book of Job—but each age has come up with a different way of approaching it. The eighteenth century explored a new answer: what seems evil to human beings appears so only because of their limited perspective; from God’s point of view, the world we inhabit is actually the “best of all possible worlds”—in other words, evil does not really exist, when viewed in the larger context. This response to the problem of evil—which in the eighteenth century goes under the misleading name of “optimism”—derives from the German philosopher Leibniz, and a somewhat simplified version of the philosophy is associated with the English poet Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man (1734) was widely read across Europe:
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth
is clear, whatever is, is right.
In other words, there is nothing random or accidental in God’s creation: it is up to each of us to discern the underlying order of divine Providence. It was common in the eighteenth century to suggest that this latent sense of structure was proof of God’s existence. In the spirit of this so-called argument from design, Voltaire liked to refer to “God the watchmaker”: when you look inside a watch, you know that the machinery was designed and assembled by the intelligence of a watchmaker. Thus the design or harmonious shape of the universe is “proof” of a divine designer or creator. This idea (refuted robustly by David Hume in the mid-eighteenth century) lingers on, and “intelligent design” is a phrase much in circulation since a key US Supreme Court ruling of 1987 concerning the teaching of “creationism” in American schools. According to the static worldview of Leibnizian optimism (which has no place for any notion of change or evolution), there is a providential order in the universe, God is in his place, and, conveniently, evil seems not to exist.
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