François Marie Arouet de Voltaire's
Candide, or Optimism (1759)

[Image at right: L'homme unique à tout âge, Jean-Baptiste Le Vachez (1778)]
Purpose: to explore the ideas and concerns of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment is traditionally defined as the eighteenth-century transformation of thought and literature by the application of reason in place of faith. More simply put, Enlightenment thinkers and writers used the ideas of the scientific revolution to deal with questions of morality, religion, politics and social life.
In contrast to seventeenth-century writers for whom reason represented tradition, authority, and stability, eighteenth- century writers of the Enlightenment, or "Age of Reason," saw reason as a tool, a means to authority. Reason and science, they believed, could liberate humans from ignorance, tyranny and superstition; in the hopeful future, all people would be free and equal.
François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694 - 1778), most usually referred to with the single name Voltaire, was a leading cultural figure in the French Enlightenment who travelled widely (including extended stays in London and Frankfurt); he was best known for his satires.

Source: François Marie Arouet de Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism (1759)

Method: analyze a "fictional" literary work, Voltaire's Candide.

You will be familiar with literary analysis if you have ever taken a literature course. Literary analysis concerns itself with the technical production of the work of literature (the writing style, the imagery, the language, literary conventions like metaphor, simile and hyperbole) as well as the literary context of the writer (other writers who had an impact on the writer, what the writer read, other writers considered part of the writer's generation or "school," the writer's impact on other writers) and the content of the work (its inclusion of mythic elements, its treatment of certain themes). Historical analysis of literary works may also concern itself with these issues, but its main concerns are the content of the work (the story it tells and the way in which it tells it) and the context of the work (its historical significance).
Literary and historical analyses are in fact quite similar, and the line between the two is extremely fuzzy. For our purposes, therefore, we will define the line as this: literary analysis extracts from a literary work that which makes it a valuable work of art (its beauty, its emotional impact, its effect on other works of art), while historical analysis extracts from a literary work that which makes it a valuable work of history (the insight it provides into the minds of historical figures or periods, its contemporary interpretations of events, its role in influencing change).
Using this definition, we will, as a class, perform an historical analysis of Candide. We will focus on the manner in which Candide sheds light on the historical phenomenon of the Enlightenment.

Questions to Think About:

1) The original title of Candide was Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism). How does Voltaire deal with the question of optimism in Candide?

2) Voltaire considered himself an historian; in 1731 he wrote History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, and in 1751 he published a cultural history, The Age of Louis XIV. Is Candide also an historical work? Did Voltaire intend it to be so?

3) How is religion satirized in Candide? Who does Voltaire show as the one "good christian" in Candide?

4) What are Voltaire's views of good and bad governments?

5) How does Candide reflect the concerns of the Enlightenment, including humanism, secularism, freedom, morality, and education?

6) For whom did Voltaire write Candide? What was his intended audience?

7) How does Voltaire view human nature?

8) What is Voltaire's view of the natural world in Candide?

9) Contrast the "Eldorado" section of Candide with the rest of the book. How does Voltaire describe Eldorado? What is the significance of the social customs that Candide finds there? What is the symbolism of the pebbles and sheep that Candide brings from Eldorado?

10) If you have read other utopian writings (for example, Plato's Republic, Thomas More's Utopia, Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, H.G. Wells's A Modern Utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland, or Aldous Huxley's Island), how do they compare to the "Eldorado" section of Candide?

11) How is the eighteenth-century ideal of common sense illustrated in Candide?

12) What is the relationship between Candide and Newtonian science?

13) Contrast the philosophical positions represented by Pangloss (a satire of Leibniz), Martin and Candide.

Further resources and readings:

The Voltaire Society of America’s Brief Bibliography for the Study of Candide: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA/Candide/bibliography.html.

Penguin Putnam’s ”The Best of All Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Candide”: http://www.penguinputnam.com/academic/classics/rguides/voltaire/content.htm.

Simplicius Simplicissimus (or Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen), Adventures of a Simpleton (a German Candide). New York: Frederick Ungar, 1669, 1962.

Robert Adams, "The Intellectual Backgrounds," in Candide: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, ed. Robert M. Adams, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991). Peter Gay, "The Philosophe in His Dictionary," The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971).

Peter Gay, Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (New York: Vintage, 1975).

Ira O. Wade, Voltaire and Candide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

Eric Jonas's The Best of All Possible Worlds: The Philosophy of Candide: http://www.ericjonas.com/features/candide/home.asp.

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for Honors 506 (The Western Experience: Social Science), The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York, Spring Semester 2001. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Last modified: Wednesday 31 January 2001.