Candide
Voltaire1759Voltaire took apart philosophical optimism, the idea that this is "the best of all possible worlds," in about 90 brutal and very funny pages.
Read this if you…
- want one of the shortest enlightenment books that still rips
- like a writer who hates "everything happens for a reason" people
- like a book that's funny while it deals with serious philosophical concepts
Skip this if you…
- hate anything French instinctually
- want characters with depth, its too short so characters are vessels for ideas
Why It Matters
Voltaire took apart philosophical optimism, the idea that this is "the best of all possible worlds," in about 90 brutal and very funny pages. The closing line about cultivating your garden became permanent shorthand for getting on with your work instead of clinging to ideology. Every satirical novel since owes it something.
The 
Take
Killer little novella. Poignant, tinge of humor, super simple philosophical bent
Where to go next
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Candide built on it. - *Candide* is Swift's invention turned on philosophy — the wide-eyed traveler whose globe-trotting unmasks a fashionable creed, here Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" - Voltaire read *Gulliver's Travels* on its first publication and praised Swift as "the Rabelais of England"; the form runs straight into his tales (the Big-Endian quarrel resurfaces in Zadig) - Read Swift first and you'll see the machine Voltaire inherited — then sharpened to a blade
- On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Candide built on it. - *Candide*'s famous last word — "cultivate our garden" — is the Epicurean ideal, the retreat to tending what's in front of you, transmitted down through Lucretius - Voltaire prized *On the Nature of Things* and leaned on it in his quarrels with the Church - Lucretius is the quiet philosophy underneath Voltaire's satire; reading him first names the garden Candide finally chooses
- A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert. Candide shaped it. - Flaubert read *Candide* something like a hundred times and counted it among his "sacred books" — Voltaire's anatomy of human folly is the engine he carried into his own realism - *A Sentimental Education* takes Voltaire's frantic, episodic catalogue of *bêtise* and slows it to the pace of one disenchanted life - Watch what Flaubert does to the famous ending: Voltaire's brisk "cultivate your garden" curdles into Frédéric's resigned cultivation of lost memories
Depicted in Art
Pangloss demonstrates 'cause and effect' to a chambermaid in the bushes while young Candide watches from behind a hedge in the Baron's garden at Thunder-ten-Tronckh.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1787
Closing plate of the 1784 four-plate Candide set: figures in dialogue, neoclassical line work, a typical Moreau le Jeune Voltaire frontispiece composition.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1784
The Bulgar-Abar battlefield: Candide flees over a heap of dead and dying soldiers, smoke and cannon-fire rising behind him in a 'heroic butchery' of two armies.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1801
Candide kneels in shock before the mutilated enslaved man lying beside the road to Surinam, the sugar plantation visible behind them.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1787
Candide and Cacambo in the South American jungle watch two naked girls running pursued by two monkeys biting their buttocks; Candide takes aim with his musket.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1801
An interior scene from Candide with figures in dramatic gesture; one of the four standard engravings issued for the 1784 complete works.
Jean-Michel Moreau, 1784
Recommended Editions
Theo Cuffe
Penguin Classics · 2005
Theo Cuffe's Penguin lands Voltaire's cruelty in clean contemporary English. The jokes about optimism still cut, the body count still feels absurd, and Michael Wood's introduction is one of the tightest you'll find on a short novel.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“We must cultivate our garden.”
“In this best of all possible worlds, all is for the best.”