A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  These ideas acquired new urgency in November 1755, as news spread of a calamitous earthquake in Lisbon that killed many tens of thousands. The beautiful city lay in ruins, and public opinion across Europe became preoccupied with this flagrant example of gratuitous evil so close to home. Of course, there were theologians aplenty prepared to argue that this was God’s divine judgment on the good citizens of Lisbon; and these theologians in turn became the target of Enlightened rationalist philosophers who were quick to ridicule such notions of providential intervention. Voltaire’s response was predictable and immediate: his long philosophical poem rejecting belief in Providence, “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” (“Poem on the Lisbon Disaster,” 1756), was circulating widely within a matter of weeks. Candide, a few years later, is an eye-witness to the earthquake and a victim of the vicious theological intolerance it unleashed (chapters 4–6): eighteenth-century readers of the novel would certainly have linked this episode to the controversy aroused by the earlier “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster.”

  The Leibnizian worldview might seem a somewhat simplistic view of creation, or at least an overoptimistic one (to use the word “optimism” in its modern sense)—that was certainly what Voltaire thought. Dr. Pangloss—his name means “all tongues”—is a German philosopher who has a simple, one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of evil: “Everything is for the best.” Whatever disaster befalls him, to the very end of the novel, he repeats endlessly the same mantra. The idea that this work should be read as a satirical attack on the philosophy of Leibniz and his solution to the age-old problem of evil seems evident, and this is certainly how the book was understood in the eighteenth century.

  Here is James Boswell, in his Life of Samuel Johnson: “Voltaire’s Candide, written to refute the system of Optimism, which it has accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its plan and conduct to Johnson’s Rasselas; insomuch, that I have heard Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other.” A case, then, of great minds thinking alike—except that Boswell is clearly uncomfortable with Voltaire’s famously secular view of the world: “Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was the same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than good, the intention of the writers was very different. Voltaire, I am afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending Providence: Johnson meant, by showing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal.” So in Boswell’s view, Voltaire’s prime aim, beyond discrediting Leibnizian optimism, was to destabilize blind belief in Providence, to make us suspicious of the metaphysical. As the historian Daniel Roche writes, “The appeal of Candide lay in its representation of a key idea of the Enlightenment: the embrace of the concrete, the idea that the spiritual does not exist apart from its manifestations.”

  The characters in this novel mostly accept Providence with a shrug and submit to whatever befalls them, but their attitude is not exactly one of simple resignation. The narrative conveys a strong sense of anxiety, and in this topsy-turvy world, nothing is comfortably in its right place. The traditional reading of Candide as a satire on Leibnizian optimism is not altogether wrong, but it is insufficient. The narrative is not preoccupied solely with the problem of evil, and the novel, even though its action is anything but realistic, does also reflect aspects of the “real” world.

  In chapter 26, Candide and Martin dine with six dispossessed kings who compare their respective tales of woe: the tone might be that of a fairy tale, but the characters and their stories are all real. War is depicted with particular brutality in chapter 3, a forceful example of gratuitous evil in general. At the same time, this description also reflects a contemporary political situation: in the mid-eighteenth century, a series of wars was fought in Europe, North America, West Africa, and India, which collectively we now call the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). This was a world conflict, more extensive by far than anything that had been seen in Europe during the previous century, and the casualties were well in excess of one million. In 1761, when Voltaire revised Candide, he extended the title to make the reference to this war explicit: Candide … Together with the Addenda Which Were Found in the Doctor’s Pocket When He Died at Minden in the Year of Grace 1759. Minden is in Westphalia, the very province where Candide’s journey begins, and in 1759 it was the scene of a bloody battle in which sixty thousand French troops were defeated by the Hanoverians, allies of the British. The scenes of brutal carnage depicted in chapter 3 are more than just a generalized exemplification of evil; they document precisely the slaughter then taking place on battlefields in Germany.

  Voltaire attacks war in general, while also giving voice to specifically French fears about the war currently being fought. At the root of the Seven Years’ War was the struggle between Britain and France to expand their trading empires in such places as Quebec and India. By the end of the war, in 1763, Britain would emerge as the dominant colonial power, and references in Candide speak to French anguish about the eventual outcome of this global conflict. One notable early British setback had been the loss of Minorca to the French in 1756, as a result of which the English Admiral Byng was court-martialed and executed. Voltaire has fun with this in chapter 23:

  “And why kill this admiral?”

  “Because he didn’t kill enough people,” Candide was told. “He gave battle to a French admiral, and it has been found that he wasn’t close enough.”

  “But,” said Candide, “the French admiral was just as far away from the English admiral as he was from him!”

  “Unquestionably,” came the reply. “But in this country it is considered a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time so as to encourage the others [pour encourager les autres].”

  But this was a rare French victory, and in this same chapter, there is an overt reference to the war in North America between France and Britain: “As you know, the two countries are at war over a few acres of snow across in Canada, and they’re spending more on this war than the whole of Canada is worth” (a remark that the French-speaking population of Quebec has still not forgiven Voltaire). In the course of 1759, only months after the first appearance of Candide, the French planned to invade Great Britain, but two major defeats at sea left the British navy more dominant than before. This political context was difficult for Voltaire: he had made his name in the 1730s as an enthusiastic proponent of English philosophy and literature, holding up English culture as a model for the French. Now he felt obliged to nuance his position, so it is not surprising that when, in chapter 23, the Dutch ship in which Candide and Martin are traveling docks at Portsmouth, Candide refuses to step ashore: Candide travels across the world, yet still does not, quite, set foot in England. Even in a surreal comedy, there are limits.

  Connected with this anxiety about colonial wars is a contemporary preoccupation with slavery. In 1758, Voltaire read in Helvétius’s De l’esprit, a stinging attack on the practice of slavery: “You must agree that every barrel of sugar that arrives in Europe is tainted with human blood.” Voltaire responded by adding a scene to chapter 19, in which Candide and Cacambo, as they are about to arrive in Surinam, meet a slave (described as “a Negro”) with only one arm and one leg: “When we’re working at the sugar mill and catch our finger in the grinding-wheel, they cut off our hand. When we try to run away, they cut off a leg. I have been in both these situations. This is the price you pay for the sugar you eat in Europe.” It is often said that Candide is a puppetlike automaton who shows no emotion, but this is not entirely true: the pathetic spectacle of the slave prompts Candide to shed tears, and Voltaire to shed his irony. This is the only occasion in the novel that the word “optimism” is uttered:

  “O Pangloss!” cried Candide, “this is one abomination you never thought
of. That does it. I shall finally have to renounce your Optimism.”

  “What’s Optimism?” asked Cacambo.

  “I’m afraid to say,” said Candide, “that it’s a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly.”

  And he began to weep as he gazed at his Negro, and he entered Surinam in tears.

  The trade in sugar referred to here is of course just a small part of the international trade fostered by the warring commercial empires of France and Britain, and this trade was supporting a boom in consumerism in western Europe, the like of which had never been seen. Eighteenth-century Parisian culture in particular attained in this period a level of exquisite refinement unequaled before or since: whether we are thinking of the quality and range of fare available, or the refinement of the porcelain on which it was served, or the beauty of the silk dresses worn by the ladies at table, French culture had reached a level of luxury that was a legitimate source of national pride but also a subject of concern. A debate simmered about the ethics of luxury, and Voltaire himself had previously contributed to this discussion, with his poem “The Man of the World” (“Le mondain,” 1736). The description of the German baron’s château in chapter 1—“his castle had a door and windows. His great hall was even adorned with a tapestry”—is of course a snobbish Parisian put-down of crude German taste; but the description of Eldorado, in the chapters placed at the heart of the novel, can equally be read as a parody (and potential critique) of Parisian hypersophistication. The roads in Eldorado are “covered, or rather adorned, with conveyances of the most lustrous form and substance, bearing men and women of singular beauty, and drawn at great speed” (chapter 17), clearly a reference to the eighteenth-century French obsession with fine coaches; while the food offered at a simple inn—“four different soups, each garnished with a couple of parrots, … two excellent roast monkeys … another platter of six hundred humming-birds” (chapter 17) is an over-the-top parody of luxurious French gastronomy.

  Candide creates a fictional world of pure comic fantasy, but this remains an uneasy and anguished world, and the anxieties of ancien régime France—war with England and the status of France as a world power, the questions of slavery and the colonies, the problem of luxury and consumerism—impinge on the narrative. In an essay introducing Candide, the French critic Roland Barthes famously wrote that Voltaire was “the last of the happy writers.” Like Aldous Huxley, he seems to think that the ills and misfortunes of the eighteenth century were minor in comparison with our own, and that Voltaire’s fast-moving, witty style would no longer be possible or appropriate for a modern writer in the post-Holocaust world. This underestimates the atrocities of eighteenth-century warfare, and more important, it misunderstands Voltaire’s polemical style, where the seemingly superficial treatment of profound horror is a deliberate shock tactic.

  Modern readers will also find in Voltaire’s novel reflections of eighteenth-century society that disturb us, even if they do not seem to have troubled Voltaire’s contemporaries. The accusation is often made that Voltaire was anti-Semitic, and while that may be unjust, the passing remark that Candide “was swindled so many times by the Jews” (chapter 30) makes us uncomfortable. Candide’s comic world is a very macho one, and women occupy in it a prominent but distinctly limited role as the objects of male lust. In what seems to be the glorious conclusion of the final chapter, the women take responsibility for cooking, sewing, and washing—hardly a blow for women’s liberation. The best that can be said for the women in this novel is that they are at least given full rein to enjoy their sexual appetites, including those women in chapter 16 whose taste runs to monkeys rather than men. This remains a resolutely male-centred world, and the one gay character, Cunégonde’s brother, the young baron, is written off as a foolish, unfeeling snob. Although severely punished when he is discovered swimming naked with a handsome young Muslim (chapter 29)—he too gets to enjoy his sexual appetites—this experience fails to teach him tolerance toward others, and he remains implacably opposed to Candide’s ambitions to marry his sister, because of what he perceives to be Candide’s inferior social status. In the resolution of the final chapter, all the characters come together in some sort of harmony—all, that is, apart from the baron, whom the others collectively pack off in a galley. In its depictions of women and homosexuals, Candide reflects the opinions and literary stereotypes of its period more than it challenges them. Voltaire urges us in this novel to challenge received thinking, and in applying his lesson, it is right that modern readers will sometimes want to challenge Voltaire’s own worldview.

  An understanding of the philosophical and historical context of the novel enriches our reading, but it is important to remember that many (most?) modern readers enjoy Candide without any of this background knowledge. The novel must clearly appeal to us at another level. Voltaire has written a novel, not a philosophical treatise, and a novel invites us not just to think about ideas in the abstract but to reflect on how characters deal with and live out those ideas; it is not uncommon, for example, for novels to show us characters who live their lives in contradiction with their stated beliefs. In a typical eighteenth-century bildungsroman, the hero learns empirically from the experiences of life, and the novel charts the hero’s steadily growing maturity. But does Candide really learn anything from his experiences? As one disaster after another crashes about his head, he continues blithely repeating the lessons taught him by Pangloss. Arguably, he comes to learn something in the final chapter in the garden—a scene to which we shall return. But at the very least, one would have to say he is a slow learner. Candide starts off with Locke’s tabula rasa but appears to defy Locke by learning next to nothing: so should we take him seriously? And if Candide is slow to learn, Pangloss appears to learn nothing at all:

  “Now then, my dear Pangloss!” Candide said to him. “When you were being hanged, and dissected, and beaten, and made to row in a galley, did you continue to think that things were turning out for the best?”

  “I still feel now as I did at the outset,” replied Pangloss. “I am a philosopher after all. It wouldn’t do for me to go back on what I said before.” (chapter 28)

  By his own admission, Pangloss is unable to learn from experience. But Voltaire’s satire here seems less directed at Leibnizian optimism than at dogmatic and unbending philosophers, who are unable ever to change their way of thinking. Voltaire is giving us a practical lesson in skepticism and freethinking.

  More than that, the experience of reading this novel reminds us how human beings reinvent the world to fit in with their preconceived ideas and prejudices. Here is how, in the opening chapter, Pangloss explains how all is right with the (or at least his) universe:

  “It is demonstrably true,” he would say, “that things cannot be other than as they are. For, everything having been made for a purpose, everything is necessarily for the best purpose. Observe how noses were made to bear spectacles, and so we have spectacles. Legs are evidently devised to be clad in breeches, and breeches we have. Stones were formed in such a way that they can be hewn and made into castles, and so His Lordship has a very beautiful castle. The greatest baron in the province must be the best lodged. And since pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all the year round. Consequently, those who have argued that all is well have been talking nonsense. They should have said that all is for the best.”

  Here is Voltaire making fun of the argument from design. To say that “the nose has been formed to bear spectacles” is funny because of the upside-down Alice-in-Wonderland logic. But does that mean that Voltaire is dismissing the argument from design? Not necessarily, since we know from other writings that he has a certain sympathy for the idea. As this example shows, Voltaire can poke fun at bad logic, even (perhaps especially) when it leads to a conclusion he agrees with. Pangloss may have persuaded himself that he is arguing from a general and disinterested standpoint, but the reader can see otherwise. Look at the choice of examples here: spectacles, breeches, stones (for bu
ilding a castle), and roast pork: this is a portrait of the old baron sitting down to dinner at home. Pangloss’s mental universe extends no further than his physical domain—and both are rather limited. No philosophical example is innocent, and the give-away here is “Pigs were made to be eaten.” The pork-eating German baron, wearing his spectacles and stockings and sitting complacently in his castle, doesn’t seem to know about Jews or Muslims: why didn’t God design the world for them too?

  The argument from design is intended to prove the existence of God: here it proves only the existence of German barons. Is the satire really aimed at Leibnizian optimism? Or at dogmatic philosophers whose sole purpose is to prop up the status quo? Voltaire’s writing in Candide is steeped in irony, and irony is a complex and corrosive tool. Textbooks explain that irony involves saying one thing while meaning something else: the baron’s castle in chapter 1 is described as “the most beautiful of castles,” so we know it is not. But this is a slippery slope: once a writer begins to use irony repeatedly, the reader has to pay very close attention. Can we believe anything we read? And can the author even control the irony he has unleashed? Candide is so suffused with irony that it is sometimes hard to know quite where it stops, or what Voltaire really means.

  Candide might seem an “easy” novel to read: it is funny, the sentences are concise, the action moves at lightning speed; but this is also a novel that makes the reader work. Let us take as an example the final chapter, titled, conveniently, “Conclusion.” If we are trying to understand the “meaning” of the work, then this would seem a good place to start—unless, of course, the title is ironic? Their crazy adventures at an end, the characters of the novel finally reassemble, and we experience something of that sense of resolution we enjoy at the end of a Shakespearean comedy. All the characters come together, except for the homosexual baron whom they drive out—already there is a slight shadow cast over the garden. They encounter a wise man, the dervish, “who passed for the greatest philosopher in Turkey,” and Candide and Pangloss quiz him about the existence of evil in the world. “What does it matter whether there’s evil or there’s good,” says the dervish. “When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he worry whether the mice on board are comfortable or not?” Pangloss presses on relentlessly with his Leibnizian jabber about “the best of all possible worlds” and “preestablished harmony,” to which the wise man responds decisively: “The dervish, at these words, slammed the door in their faces.” In other words, faced by apparently insoluble problems, best to say nothing and just get on with life. Martin seems suddenly to be cured of his earlier dogmatism: “Let’s get down to work and stop all this philosophizing. … It’s the only way to make life bearable.” This philosophy is crystallized in one of the most famous sound bites of the novel: “I also know,” said Candide, “that we must cultivate our garden.” And the novel ends—concludes?—with these memorable words: “We must cultivate our garden.”