Product Description

Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13835 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-27
• Original language: French
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

About the Author
François-Marie Arouet, writing under the pseudonym Voltaire, was born in 1694 into a Parisian bourgeois family. Educated by Jesuits, he was an excellent pupil but one quickly enraged by dogma. An early rift with his father — who wished him to study law — led to his choice of letters as a career. Insinuating himself into court circles, he became notorious for lampoons on leading notables and was twice imprisoned in the Bastille. By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733) — an attack on French Church and State — forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopted daughter, “Belle et Bonne,” and marked by his intercessions on behalf of victims of political injustice. Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatient with all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778 — the foremost French author of his day.

Customer Reviews

Delicious Irony Amidst Swift-Like Satire
Ever since philosophers began thinking about the meaning of life, a favorite question has been "Why do bad things happen to good people?". In Voltaire's day, this issue was primarily pursued either from the perspective of faith (everything that happens is God's will and must be for Divine purpose) or of reason (What do these events mean to you, as you interpret them subjectively?). Infuriated by the reaction by some members of the church to a horrible loss of life from an earthquake in Lisbon, Voltaire wrote this hard-biting satire of the human condition to explore these questions.

Before reading further, let me share a word of caution. This book is filled with human atrocities of the most gruesome sort. Anything that you can imagine could occur in war, an Inquisition, or during piracy happens in this book. If you find such matters distressing (as many will, and more should), this book will be unpleasant reading. You should find another book to read.

The book begins as Candide is raised in the household of a minor noble family in Westphalia, where he is educated by Dr. Pangloss, a student of metaphysical questions. Pangloss believes that this is the best of all possible worlds and deeply ingrains that view into his pupil. Candide is buoyed by that thought as he encounters many setbacks in the course of the book as he travels through many parts of Europe, Turkey, and South America.

All is well for Candide until he falls in love with the Baron's daughter and is caught kissing her hand by the Baron. The Baron immediately kicks Candide out of the castle (literally on the backside), and Candide's wanderings begin. Think of this as being like expulsion from the Garden of Eden for Adam. Soon the penniless Candide finds himself in the Bulgarian army, and receiving lots of beatings while he learns to drill.

The story grows more far-fetched with each subsequent incident. To the casual reader, this exaggeration can seem unnecessary and annoying. It will remind you of the most extreme parts of Swift in Gulliver's Travels and Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel. But subtly, Voltaire is using the exaggeration to lure the reader into making complacent judgments about complacency itself that Voltaire wants to challenge. The result is a deliciously ironical work that undermines complacency at a more fundamental level than I have seen done elsewhere. Basically, Candide challenges any view you have about complacency that is defined in terms of the world-view of those who are complacent.

Significant changes of circumstances (good and ill) occur to all of the members of the Baron's household over the course of the story. Throughout, there is much comparing of who has had the worst luck, with much feeling sorry for oneself.

That is the surface story. Voltaire is, however, a master of misdirection. Beneath the surface, Voltaire has another purpose for the book. He also wants to expose the reader to questioning the many bad habits that people have that make matters worse for everyone. The major themes of these undercurrents are (1) competing rather than to cooperating, (2) employing inhumane means to accomplish worldly (and many spiritual) ends, (3) following expected rules of behavior to show one's superiority over others that harm and degrade others, (4) focusing on money and power rather than creating rich human relationships, (5) hypocritical behavior, and (6) pursuing ends that society approves of rather than ends that please oneself.

By the end of the story, the focus shifts again to a totally different question: How can humans achieve happiness? Then, you have to reassess what you thought about the book and what was going on in Voltaire's story. Many readers will choose to reread the book to better capture Voltaire's perspective on that final question, having been surprised by it.

Candide is one of my favorite books because it treats important philosophical questions in such an unusual way. Such unaccustomed matching of treatment and subject matters leaves an indelible impression that normal philosophical arguments can never match. Voltaire also has an amazing imagination. Few could concoct such a story (even by using illegal substances to stimulate the subconscious mind). I constantly find myself wondering what he will come up with next. The story is so absurd that it penetrates the consciousness at a very fundamental level, almost like doing improvisation. In so doing, Voltaire taps into that feeling of "what else can happen?" that overcomes us when we are at our most pessimistic. So, gradually you will find yourself identifying with the story -- even though nothing like this could ever happen to you. Like a good horror story, you are also relieved that you can read about others' troubles and can put your own into perspective. This last point is the fundamental humanity of the story. You see what a wonderful thing a kind word, a meal, or a helping hand can be. That will probably inspire you to offer those empathic actions more often.

After you have finished Candide, I suggest that you ask yourself where complacency about your life and circumstances is costing you and those you care about the potential for more health, happiness, peace, and prosperity. Then take Voltaire's solution, and look around you for those who enjoy the most of those four wonderful attributes. What do those people think and do differently from you?

Biting satire from a political animal.
Candide is a true populist masterpiece. Salacious, insidious, and refreshingly free, Voltaire's ubiquitous cynicism provides the ultimate defence of free thought. As a text-book of common-sense, it parodies beautifully some of the philosophical faiths of his time, and lambastes the incongruity of the worship of Reason which he reveals to produce a succession of unreasonable conclusions. Reason should be blindly praised only when we have all the answers, yet how can this be possible when we haven't yet asked every question?
No religion is safe. Protestant schism, Catholic dogma, and philosophical mantras all suffer in a cacophony of irony, the ostensible flippancy of which is simply a veil for a web of observational brilliance. After all, Voltaire is a superb observational comic: more satirically charged than Swift, with the outrage of Monty Python and the caustics of Spike Milligan. And yet so much more clever. His ability to destroy an empty argument is always clear and impressive, even though we are never immediately aware of how he did it. Voltaire’s vision for inconsistency is unique.
Adorned with rape, scandal, and brutal humour, Voltaire’s work is a paragon of how tabloid literature would appear in an intellectual’s wet-dream. And for such a short volume, Candide provides some of the greatest value-for-money known to man. There is enough from 100 pages to last a lifetime, whatever your background. For those who are a little familiar with 18th Century philosophy, politics and war, the content is an irrepressible summary of the mania of the age. For everyone else, this is a timeless tome on humanity: its frivolities, its fortunes, and its failings. Read it.

Has the hand of time dulled Voltaire's rapier?
Ouch! That hurts!

(reacting to the sorry metaphor of my subject line)

I found Voltaire's famous satire surprisingly tepid. Perhaps I've become jaded in my old age, or perhaps I should have read this in the 18th century when it caused such a sensation because of the scandalous way that Voltaire satirized the church, the clergy, and just about everybody else in any position of power or influence. Reading it now, it seems a bit tame. All the horrors and stupidities Voltaire describes seem almost commonplace considering what we have experienced since he made his attack on optimism in 1759. Today we can look back at two world wars, at the Holocaust and Hiroshima, at the war in Vietnam, at terrorism and the latest stupidity in Iraq. Nothing in Candide can compare to these real historical events that have so sorely tested human optimism. We can even look back to the French Revolution and the revolutions that followed in the 19th century, which in a sense Voltaire predicted with his devastating critique of the corrupt and degenerate European society. Or we can recall the Catholic priests and Ted Haggard from yesterday's headlines. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

It is difficult to appreciate how deliciously scandalous this was in Voltaire's time since today we are free to criticize the church and our governments, whereas in Voltaire's time such criticisms could land you in the Bastille. Voltaire's legendary reputation for rapier wit and shocking turn of phrase can be found in these pages, but much of it seems diluted because his style has so often been imitated. We have read and reread his imitators, and we have even read some who have improved upon him in some ways, people in America like Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. We tend to forget where they got their inspiration at least in part. An example from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (episodic in structure much like Candide, by the way) is in the rascals that Huck and Jim meet on the river, the Duke of "Bilgewater" and the "King of France," who, like the six "kings" that Candide sups with in Venice, are out and our frauds and represent the impossible, deluded aspirations of the average person.

This is the work in which we have Dr. Pangloss and his "best of all possible worlds." And this is the work which ends with Candide summing up all the philosophy he has learned in his travels with the words, "'Tis well said, but we must cultivate our gardens."