Before you run away in fear of a text which, like Life cereal, is supposed to be good for you, rest assured that the novel is also a first-rate adventure tale and love story, filled with tales of sexual intrigue, scenes of war and destruction, travels to exotic locales -- in short, the only thing keeping it from appearing at the Brick Cinema is . . . actually, I can't think of a reason why it isn't appearing at the movies.

Still, while the novel reads like the action story it is, it was written in response to some of the prevailing philosophical ideas of the time.  Thus, while on one level it is the story of Candide's search for his love and his many attendant adventures, at another level it is a satiric attack upon accepted wisdom, a thumb in the eye of convention.  Of course, times have changed a bit since the 1700s, and what was accepted wisdom then is ancient history to readers in 21st century American.  To fully appreciate the novel, I've included below some background material that should fill in some of the gaps in your knowledge of the period, and help flesh out the references to topical events, people, and beliefs that shape the work.  I've tried to keep my comments brief because while understanding the background of a work is critical to understanding how it works, what is most important is the work of art the writer actually created.

Manuscript of Chapter 24 in secretary's
hand with Voltaire's own revision (and the
background to this page). (double click to view)

The Times
The Headlines
Candide was written, in part, in response to a natural disaster; an 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal which killed fifty thousand people. It's also a response to a human disaster; the long train of wars fought on European soil throughout the centuries, and the more recent (for Voltaire), Seven Years war (mid 18th century) which took place in Canada and America.

One specific change that has resonance in Candide is based on John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).  He argued that the mind was a tabula rasa -- a blank slate -- upon which experience and the environment wrote and formed a consciousness.  This seemingly benign belief had important consequences for religion, and since religion was the guiding force of European civilization, it resulted in cultural changes.

Instead of a belief in pre-destination -- we are all "sinners in the hand of an angry God" and "In Adam's fall we sinned all" -- there grew a belief that perhaps free-will was more important than a supposed list of the dammed and the saved.   It also set the tone for an optimistic belief in a more providential view of the world.  Writers such Gottfried Wilhem Von Liebniz and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that since everything was created by God, and since God was omniscient and omnipotent, everything in the world was good, even if we didn't necessarily understand it.  If evil existed, it was only because humans were limited and didn't see the grand design of God.

But the rational ethos of the Enlightenment aroused a more skeptical view of religion.  Many educated people (including several of our founding fathers) moved away from a belief in a vengeful or benevolent God to a belief in an indifferent one.  This "religion," known as deism, is famously described by the analogy of a clock: a god wound up our world like a clock, set it down, and wandered away.  This mindset posits that there was no "grand design:" there was a beginning, and that was it.   This meant that the world was random and chaotic and that the cruelty inflicted upon humans by other humans (or by nature) was just that: cruelty.

This view undercut the authority of the church by shifting the emphasis from God to man.  Additionally, the emphasis on rationality weakened the powers of organized religion and meant that the Catholic church, which had held sway over much of Europe for centuries, was now questioned. And thus the supremacy of the pope -- and of the Jesuits, an order both respected for their intellectual pursuits and suspected as being spies for the Vatican -- were weakened.

One last cultural note: The "New World" (i.e. the Americas) -- though it wasn't so new anymore, still held promise as a land untainted by the corruption of Europe, and writers such as Rousseau projected upon it the idea of an Edenic past; a place where the humans existed in a pre-lapsarian (before Adam bit into that fateful apple) state and were therefore termed "noble savages."

Political
In the 1700s kings and queens (and to a lesser extent the pope) still reigned supreme. Associated with a monarchy is class and its attendant rules and divisions.  A rough pecking order would be the monarchy as chief chicken, then the aristocracy/nobility, clergy (though a poor priest never stood a chance), wealthy merchants, intellectuals/ranking military men, soldiers/ working-class, and everyone else.  In Candide, pay attention to the class tensions and the way Voltaire exploits them.

But this order was weakening.  The speculative attitude of the Enlightenment (if the church could be questioned, what about the supposed divine right of kings?) meant that traditional relationships between monarchy and subjects -- indeed between people -- were examined in a new, more rational light.  This "enlightened" attitude, in part, fueled the French Revolution in 1789 (thirty years after Candide was first published).

A naive hero makes for a great ironic character.  We can look at this person and shake our heads in knowing disbelief as he or she falls again and again for what we can readily see is false.  A writer can easily set up such a persona and place him/her in different situations to illustrate the hypocrisies of life.

One final aesthetic (and philosophical) idea you should be familiar with is the concept of Utopia.  The idea of an imaginary and perfect realm has long held a grip on our imagination.  Plato's Republic (fourth century B.C.) is one of the first examples, but later examples include Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1515-16) and Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726).  Of course, as the word suggests (with connotations of the Greek word "outopia" (no place) and "eutopia" (good place), this is an imaginary world.  Taken in a religious context, it usually refers to an Edenic, pre-laspesarian locale.

This was only the start of a long career as an essayist, historian, dramatist, and novelist.  Throughout all his works, he probes the injustices of man, and delights in exposing our prejudices and hypocrisy.  While this could get tiresome, when it is done with wit and verve, as Voltaire does, it is a mental Altoid ("The curiously strong mint"); it clears away the accumulated refuse of cultural static and lets you discern what is truly just and truly important.

Background music is the overture to the opera Candide, by Leonard Bernstein (1956)

© 2001David Bordelon