The Savage Garden of Philosophical Optimism
Review of Voltaire's "Candide, or Optimism" (1759)
Voltaire's "Candide, or Optimism" (1759) is a literary drive-by shooting of philosophical optimism and its messenger, the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, thinly disguised as Dr. Pangloss.
"All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."
Pangloss repeats this line throughout, even as the novella subjects its characters to earthquakes, warfare, rape, slavery, and virtually every horror imaginable. You'll find yourself wondering along with the titular character, Candide:
"If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?"
Upon publication, Candide was promptly banned by both civil and religious authorities—a sure sign Voltaire hit his mark. The Vatican placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books, while the Journal of Trévoux called it "impious, obscene, and slanderous."
Yet the public devoured it, making it a bestseller that has never gone out of print.
If you enjoy philosophical satire, this book will delight you. If you’re the kind of person who still insists "everything happens for a reason," it will either change your mind or make you very, very uncomfortable.
The Fool Who Wouldn’t Learn
Candide, our hopelessly naive protagonist, is a walking disaster magnet. Raised under the influence of his philosopher-tutor Pangloss—who insists that everything, no matter how horrifying, happens for the best—Candide bounces from one catastrophe to another.
“It is demonstrable," said [Pangloss], "that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings, accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles, therefore My Lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten, therefore we eat pork all the year round: and they, who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best.”
Candide is kicked out of his home, pressed into military service, nearly executed, shipwrecked, tortured by the Inquisition, and swindled at every turn. He watches cities burn, friends die, and lovers suffer, yet Pangloss's nonsense keeps hammering into his ear, even after the good doctor contracts syphilis and gets hanged (badly).
The joke, of course, is that the world Voltaire presents is a brutal, chaotic mess. The Lisbon earthquake kills thousands. Religious leaders are corrupt hypocrites. Nobles and kings are sadistic idiots. And yet, Candide keeps searching for a way to make it all make sense.
After all his suffering, Candide doesn’t find wisdom or redemption—just exhaustion. He abandons philosophy entirely, deciding instead to cultivate his own garden.
It’s one of the most famous endings in literature, and it can be read two ways: as quiet acceptance that happiness comes from work, not grand ideas, or as Voltaire’s way of saying, "Shut up and do something useful for once."
“Our labour preserves us from three great evils – weariness, vice, and want.”
Either way, Candide stops looking for meaning in suffering and starts looking for something he can actually control.
Where Voltaire shines
In Candide, it's not just the philosophical targeting that appeals, but the sheer velocity of its cruelty. Voltaire dispatches characters with the casual indifference of a bored deity:
"'What can be worse than being burned in public?' asked Candide.
'Being buggered by Bulgar soldiers after having one's castle destroyed and watching one's beloved raped,' answered Pangloss."
The horrors pile up so quickly they become darkly comic, forcing you to laugh at atrocities you'd normally weep over—precisely Voltaire's point about philosophical abstraction in the face of actual suffering.
“But there must be some pleasure in condemning everything – in perceiving faults where others think they see beauties.'
'You mean there is pleasure in having no pleasure.”
Candide created the template for satirical novels that would follow for centuries: take an innocent protagonist, expose them to society's hypocrisies through increasingly absurd scenarios, and let the contrast between ideals and reality reveal uncomfortable truths.
Without Candide, we might not have Gulliver's Travels, Catch-22, or even Forrest Gump.
When Candide asks a mutilated slave about his condition and receives the answer "It is the price we pay for the sugar you eat in Europe," Voltaire delivers a critique of colonialism that remains unanswerable.
Unlike his verbose contemporaries, Voltaire delivers his devastation in about 80 pages of crisp, clean sentences. His social commentary particularly benefits much, becoming enduringly quotable:
“In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.”
Or, take his description of a Parisian supper:
“The supper was like most Parisian suppers: silence at first, then a burst of unintelligible chatter, then witticisms that were mostly vapid, false rumors, bad reasonings, a little politics and a great deal of slander; they even spoke about new books.”
When describing the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, he writes:
"After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-quarters of the city, the sages of Portugal could think of no more effective way of preventing total ruin than to stage a magnificent auto-da-fé."
The juxtaposition of "magnificent" with systematic murder encapsulates Voltaire's gift for revealing absurdity through simple description. And then there is the clergy:
“What! have you no monks who teach, who dispute, who govern, who cabal, and who burn people that are not of their opinion?”
What might disappoint you
For all its brilliance, Candide occasionally succumbs to a common 18th-century ailment: episodic exhaustion.
Around the two-thirds mark, as Candide and his valet Cacambo escape from yet another near-death experience, you might find yourself thinking, "Enough already—I get the point!"
Voltaire's relentless narrative becomes almost as tiresome as Pangloss's optimism.
“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable.”
The Verdict:
Voltaire’s cynicism hasn’t aged a day. If anything, Candide reads like it was written for our own absurd times.
“I scarce ever knew a city that did not wish the destruction of its neighbouring city, nor a family that did not desire to exterminate some other family. The poor in all parts of the world bear an inveterate hatred to the rich, even while they creep and cringe to them; and the rich treat the poor like sheep, whose wool and flesh they barter for money”
...
“Even in those cities which seem to enjoy the blessings of peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by envy, cares and anxieties, which are greater plagues than any experienced in a town when it is under siege.”
You'll laugh at scenarios that should make you weep, question assumptions you didn't know you held, and emerge with a new skepticism toward anyone selling simple solutions to complex problems.
Candide neither embraces naive optimism nor surrenders to cynical despair. Instead, he seems to be recommending a middle path: doing what good we can, where we are, with what we have.
In a world still plagued by ideologues of all stripes, you could do worse than adopt this modest philosophy.
Read Next:
For more ruthless satire, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels uses fantastical journeys to critique real-world absurdities with the same mix of humour and horror.
In philosophical fiction, Albert Camus’s The Plague explores absurdity and suffering in a more modern way. And, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground offers the rants of a man who would definitely punch Pangloss in the face.
In non-fiction, try Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Café, an engaging introduction to the philosophers who, like Voltaire, questioned grand systems of meaning.