Ridiculing The Notion Of Optimism: Voltaire’s Philosophy In “Candide”
In his novel, Candide, Voltaire tells the story of how a young, inexperienced and optimistic son of a European baron is exiled from his family castle and begins an adventure where he finds the blunt reality of the violent and inhumane world of Voltaire’s time. Candide is exposed to a series of amazing events across three continents, gaining and losing different mentors and companions, one true love, almost an entire family, and fortune. From an innocence lead by optimism, Candide comes to realize that the only truth in the world is simply tending a garden and reflects Voltaire’s cynical viewpoints towards any philosophy or belief system other than man’s reason.
Most of his novel ridicules the notion of optimism, like religion or patriotism, as foolish. Optimism is the biggest casualty in Candide’s journey. Candide is hopeful about the world being the best of all worlds from the teachings of his mentor, Pangloss, who says every situation must be the best of all worlds. When they experienced a terrible earthquake, Pangloss irrationally comforts the wounded by saying, “All that it is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right”. Martin, on the other hand, is the mentor who believes in all the negatives and has lost hope in all the world, he continues to convince Candide to believe in the same views.
The rest of the book makes a mockery of all ideologies and philosophies that try to convince man that the world is good. Voltaire shows how greed is the central evil in the world in several parts of the novel, but the best example in his work is the character Vanderdendur, a slave merchant who offers Candide transport to Venice but, after realizing his gullibility, tricks Candide into loading nearly his entire fortune, two jeweled sheep, and sails off without Candide. He is left with almost no fortune to find his love Cunegonde. But Candide is also focused on riches. He seeks to find legal restitution. Candide later witnesses a naval battle and after one ship sinks, sees his sheep swimming in the ocean. He realizes it was Vanderdendur’s ship sunk and Candide believes he deserves the fate by saying, “You see, the crime is sometimes punished”. He is dismayed by the thought that the pirate’s entire crew perished and that evil punishes the characters who are greed-driven. But Candide is both a target of greed and greedy himself, and Voltaire uses Candide to show how central the vice is to man. Two episodes in the novel clearly show Voltaire’s disdain for religion, especially Catholicism.
After fleeing for his life from Germany, Candide survives a tremendous earthquake in Lisbon. The locals respond by burning several people at the stake to prevent another disaster. Three poor victims accused of incest or refusing to eat bacon are superstitiously sacrificed, and even Candide is flogged for almost no reason. Voltaire is using an actual event to show how barbaric the Catholic tradition of inquisition and auto-de-fa was against poor people and hatred against Jews. He makes his point even though the Church’s inquisition in Spain was limited to Jewish converts to Catholicism. The second episode showing Voltaire’s disdain for religion is the old woman who cures Candide and reunites him with Cunegonde. She says she used to be the beautiful daughter of Pope Urban X.She was raised in luxury but a scandal happened during her wedding and she travelled to mourn her murdered husband and was captured by pirates and went through terrible ordeals.
Clearly, Voltaire is depicting a Pope who has broken his vows of celibacy and lives hypocritically and wealthy. Voltaire is implying that, although this pope is fictitious, that it probably is true and that the Church is unfaithful and people are fooled while their lives are terrible. Voltaire depicts the city of Eldorado as a utopian society. When Candide and Cacambo travel with an old man to Eldorado they find riches. It is surrounded by tall mountains, to guard the town from European conquest. The town people in Eldorado live more peaceful lives, than the outside world. During Candide’s tour of Eldorado, he discovers there is no prisons and court of justice. He finds that everyone worships one God, and believe one God has given them everything they could have asked for and there are no monasteries. It seems as if everyone in this town must believe the exact same as one another, but is different than everybody in the outside world. When Candide questions why they only believe in one God to the old man, he replies, “Here we are all one opinion, and we know not what you mean by monks”.
Voltaire uses this utopia where everything is made of jewels and no one owns them to contrast with the greed of the outside world. But the paradise is so remote that Candide doesn’t stay, he must find his love. Women experience the same level of violence as men in Voltaire’s book, however men did not nearly experience the same level of sexual violence. Just one example of this is Cunegonde speaking to Candide about the Bulgars, she says, “I was in bed and fast asleep when it pleased God to send the Bulgarians to our delightful castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh; they slew my father and brother, and cut my mother in pieces. A tall Bulgarian, six feet high, perceiving that I had fainted away at this sight, began to ravish me”.
Rape is everywhere in this book and almost no woman has not been raped. It is part of the world’s misery unique to women. Both genders are often confronted with violence. We read of Pangloss being hanged, and the Baron being stabbed, how Cunegonde and the Old Woman were stabbed or cut into pieces. The story takes place in a very inhumane and gruesome time that showed no mercy for either gender, however woman are seen more as sexual objects and can be sexually assaulted by a man.
The two important woman in Voltaire’s novel have similar stories to one another regarding both coming from royalty families, family death, slavery, physical and sexual abuse. Cunegonde’s story begins when the Bulgars attacked the castle, one man began to rape and attempted to murder her. Cunegonde survived from a captain who took her in to be his mistress and then sold her to Don Issachar, who he shared her with the Grand Inquistor. Towards the end of her story, Cunegonde becomes sick, old, losing her beauty and charm. The Old Woman’s story starts on her wedding day when her groom is poisoned. The old women and her mother are taken by pirates, where she watched them kill her mother. The old women escaped and then was taken for more rape, slavery, and abuse. The Old Woman was so traumatized from the terror she almost ended her life, but found a way to continue. She is tough, “A hundred time I was upon the point of killing myself; but I still loved life”.
Both woman help each other, while the Old Woman cares for Cunegonde, she has strength to guide and help her survive. When Don Fernando, the governor requests to marry Cunegonde, the Old Woman convinces her to marry him so they can both gain a better life. Cunegonde is a true victim of her story of abuse by the end with her becoming ill and weak mentally. The Old Woman is a survivor from her story as she still finds strength in herself to continue her life. Voltaire wants the reader see the Old Woman as a survivor, even though at the conclusion she is also labeled as mentally unstable.
Voltaire’s conclusion has one last cynicism, after everything Cunegonde and the Old Woman have gone through, Candide sees them both as another just burden in his life. Voltaire states, “But he was so much imposed upon by the Jews that he had nothing left except his small farm; his wife became uglier every day, more peevish and unsupportable; the old woman was infirm and even more fretful than Cunegonde”. This is a cynical conclusion and although gardening is nice, Voltaire’s suggestion on how to live life is dry and nihilistic, it’s easy to cut everything down but in Candide he really doesn’t give his alternative, just a utopia in nowhere.
