Candide (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition)

By - Voltaire and Paul Klee

Candide, Voltaire's magnum opus, is a matchless satirical take-down of religion, theologians, governments, armies, philosophies, and philosophers. The novella unfolds as the sheltered and privileged Candide, a young man enraptured of his facile mentor Pangloss, experiences the hardships and injustices o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warbler Classics
• Release date: Jan 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781957240176

- Voltaire

Imprisoned in the Bastille at the age of twenty-three for a criminal libel against the Regent of France, François-Marie Arouet was freed in 1718 with a new name, Voltaire, and the completed manuscript of his first play, Oedipe, which became a huge hit on the Paris stage in the same year. For the rest of his long and dangerously eventful life, this cadaverous genius shone with uninterrupted brilliance as one of the most famous men in the world. Revered, and occasionally reviled, in the royal courts of Europe, his literary outpourings and fearless campaigning against the medieval injustices of church and state in the midst of the ‘Enlightenment’ did much to trigger the French Revolution and to formulate the present notions of democracy. But above all, Voltaire was an observer of the human condition, and his masterpiece Candide stands out as an astonishing testament to his unequalled insight into the way we were and probably always will be.

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Introduction

Characteristic of all Voltaire’s life were the acclaim and harassment that marked its close. At the age of eighty-three he returned to his native Paris for a triumph such as few authors have ever enjoyed. Delegations from the Académie Française and the Comédie Française, personages as diverse as Mme du Barry and Mme Necker, Diderot and Franklin, Gluck and the English ambassador, came to pay him their respects. Crowds cheered him in the streets. At the sixth performance of his tragedy Irène, he in his box and later his bust on the stage were crowned with wreaths amid wild acclaim. Yet he had come to Paris with no clear authorization after twenty-four years of exile. When he died there ten weeks later (May 30, 1778) the religious authorities denied him burial, and his body was removed secretly at night to be interred in the abbey of Scellières in Champagne.

The oppressive power of Voltaire’s opponents must be kept in mind if his tales are to appear in their true perspective. Great satire creates the illusion that its targets are more comic than sinister. Imprisonments, exiles, a beating had whetted Voltaire’s will to fight; the longer he lived the more constantly he used his wit to forge weapons of war. His tales, all written after he was fifty, are the weapons that have worn best. Their luster must not blind us, however, to the fact that when Voltaire died his long battle for liberty and justice was not won.

The acclaim, like the harassment; came to Voltaire early as well as late. François-Marie Arouet, who adopted the nobiliary pen name de Voltaire at twenty-three, was born in 1694 of an intelligent, ambitious bourgeois family and given a strong classical education at the distinguished Collège Louis-le-Grand, where his Jesuit masters enjoyed his precocity and rated him as a talented boy, but a notable scamp. He resisted his father’s pressure to follow him into the law, and devoted himself early to literature. In the hedonistic society of the Regency after the death of Louis XIV (1715) he won renown—also imprisonment and brief exile—for his wit. In his twenty-fourth year he scored his first success as a tragedian with Oedipe (1718). Though even his best tragedies, such as Zaïre (1732), Mahomet (1742), and Mérope (1743), are little more than documents today, for much of his life Voltaire’s greatest fame was as the leading successor to Corneille and Racine in classical French verse tragedy, which he spiced with themes from Shakespeare and the East, colorful and violent visual effects, and thinly veiled social and religious criticism.

Five years later he made another successful debut in the epic with La Henriade, today quite dated but enormously popular in its time, and still probably the best French epic in the classical mode. His subject was a lifelong hero, Henry IV, fighter for religious peace and tolerance in France and author (1598) of the Edict of Nantes.

In 1725 a sneer at Voltaire by the Chevalier de Rohan led to a sharp reply, and this to a beating by lackeys directed by Rohan under the indifferent eyes of other aristocrats whom Voltaire had thought his friends. He challenged Rohan, who accepted; but on the morning set for the duel Voltaire was arrested and put in the Bastille, which he was allowed to leave two weeks later for an exile of over two years (1726–1729) in England.

His exposure to English freedoms in his early thirties, following the harsh awakening to his lack of status in the eyes of French nobles, turned his mind to social inequalities as never before. He studied English hard and learned it rather well, made friends with Swift, Pope, Congreve, Bolingbroke, and others, and hailed English freedom of worship, thought, and speech, as well as the Quakers, Shakespeare, Bacon, Locke, Newton, and the parliamentary system, in his Philosophical Letters, or Letters Concerning the English Nation, whose long-delayed publication in 1734 brought about the burning of the book and a warrant for the author’s arrest. The openness and power of his ironic attack on French abuses and inequities give this date great importance.

Meanwhile Voltaire had triumphed in another field with his History of Charles XII (1731). Less important than two later works, The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and the Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations (1756), which brought all civilization and all civilizations into the purview of history, his account of the Swedish warrior-king showed what harm such a man can do even to his own country, and demonstrated Voltaire’s mastery at shaping masses of material into a clear and enjoyable story.

The persecution brought on by the Philosophical Letters found Voltaire prepared. Financially secure since his early thirties after studious and successful investment, he had a safe asylum in the independent duchy of Lorraine at the Château of Cirey with his beloved mistress Emilie, Marquise du Châtelet. Here he settled down for eleven years (1733–1744) with Emilie and her accommodating husband, writing indefatigably, delving deeply, though as an amateur, into the science of his time, especially that of Newton. An even greater lover of science than Voltaire, Mme du Châtelet also loved the philosophical optimism of Leibniz and Wolff, which Voltaire treated gently until her death but ridiculed ten years later in Candide.

In his early fifties (1744–1750) Voltaire was mainly occupied at court, with some success: appointment as historiographer-royal and as gentleman of the King’s chamber, election to the Académie Française. His uneasiness and his disgust with this life, however, appear already in his first philosophical tale, Zadig (1747). The death of Mme du Châtelet in 1749 left him sad and unsettled. For ten years Frederick the Great of Prussia, culturally an ardent Francophile, had been urging Voltaire to come to his German Versailles in Potsdam, near Berlin. Hoping to find a philosopher-king, Voltaire at last accepted.

His stay in Berlin (1750–1753) started like a honeymoon and ended in a violent though not permanent break. Frederick was no comfortable master for a spirited subordinate, nor Voltaire a comfortable courtier for an authoritarian monarch. Both were better at using than at supporting irony. French courtiers aroused Voltaire’s jealousy and fomented bad feeling. Voltaire’s shady speculation with a Jew named Hirschel led to a squalid lawsuit that angered Frederick. The last straw came when Maupertuis, president of the Academy of Berlin, by sheer force of authority had the mathematician and philosopher Koenig condemned as a forger and dismissed from the Academy in disgrace. Voltaire, convinced that Koenig was in the right, protested; Frederick sided with his President. When Maupertuis published some inept Letters, Voltaire ridiculed him scathingly in his Diatribe of Doctor Akakia. Frederick had this burned and Voltaire arrested, and subjected him on his departure later to another humiliating arrest and detainment—not without reason—in Frankfort.

Back in France, Voltaire was soon in trouble over a pirated edition of the Essay on the Manners, and permission to return to Paris was not granted. Needing a safe retreat with Cirey gone, he chose Lake Geneva, renting a house between Lausanne and the lake and buying another just outside Geneva which he named Les Délices. To Voltaire, now sixty, this was a happy home, which could comfortably accommodate his niece—and mistress—Mme Denis, a considerable household, and many visitors. Here, at his own private theater, he could indulge a favorite passion by directing his own plays and acting in them with his guests. Since stage performances were banned in Calvinist Geneva, he was presently required to move his to Lausanne. In return he encouraged his friend D’Alembert to criticize the ban in his article on Geneva in the Encyclopédie, which led Jean-Jacques Rousseau to answer the article and Voltaire with his eloquent Letter to D’Alembert (1758). Voltaire and Rousseau, friendly at first, were now at odds for good. When other matters in D’Alembert’s article worsened Voltaire’s relations with the Genevans, he started looking for a home outside Genevan territory. In 1758 he bought the large property of Ferney on French soil but still on Lake Geneva and only four miles from the town.

The Patriarch of Ferney, as he came to be called, now added to his many other activities those of a country gentleman. He took a strong paternal interest in his village, planting trees, raising wheat and cows, developing pasture land, a stone quarry, a tile works, a tannery, factories of silk stockings, lace, and Swiss watches, obtaining lighter and more equitable taxes for the whole region, establishing a school and a hospital, even building a church. He took many unfortunates into his home: victims of injustice like the Calas and Sirven families; others who provided him a chance for matchmaking, such as a grandniece of Corneille, for whose dowry he published a critical edition of that playwright’s works; and later a particular favorite, Mlle Varicourt, destined for a convent for economy’s sake and in despair until Voltaire took her in, nicknamed her Belle et Bonne, and eventually married her to the Marquis de Villette. Visitors of great distinction flocked to Ferney as to a capital of letters. Meanwhile Voltaire worked as tirelessly as ever, usually in bed, on his enormous and fascinating correspondence, on some plays, but mainly on keen, satiric, short pieces of all sorts including his witty Philosophical Dictionary and most of his tales. The great philosophic struggle was on in earnest, with Voltaire the main leader of the fight to "écraser l’infame—crush infamy": the infamy of intolerance and authoritarian suppression of freedom in thought and word. Publication of that great secular monument the Encyclopédie was completed, after much opposition and repeated suspensions, in 1765. Voltaire contributed considerably to it by writing and soliciting articles, by encouragement and spirited defense.

Nor was the old warrior content to seek justice simply in the abstract. Again and again he fought tirelessly for the victims of judicial injustice and religious intolerance: Jean Calas; Protestant of Toulouse, condemned and executed for the murder of his son, unanimously rehabilitated (1765); Sirven, another Protestant of Toulouse, condemned for killing his daughter (1764), fleeing arrest with his wife and two remaining daughters, exonerated (1771) ; Lally, a former commander in India, executed in 1766, rehabilitated in 1778; the Perra family, Martin, Montbailli; La Barre, whose torture and death were a bitter blow; La Barre’s friend d’Etallonde, whom Voltaire greatly helped. This unsparing dedication to the victims of persecution led to the final transfiguration of Voltaire’s public image: in Paris on his final visit, as in Geneva two years before, enthusiastic crowds hailed him as the defender of Calas.

Voltaire was always a man of action. Highly volatile, sensitive, ambitious, emotional, irascible and generous, vindictive and compassionate, he found his greatest satisfaction and release in work. But work, to satisfy him, must act on others. He once complained that Rousseau wrote for the sake of writing, while he himself wrote in the interest of action. Hence his lack of fondness for meditation or speculation. When Martin, in the conclusion of Candide, recommends work without reasoning as the only way of making life endurable, he is not challenging the priority of reason like Rousseau; he is condemning the libido ratiocinandi of Pangloss, displayed perhaps most clearly in Chapter 5. There Candide, lying injured in the ruins of Lisbon, begged Pangloss for oil and wine, and was treated to a theory of the origin of the earthquake.

"‘Nothing is more probable,’ said Candide, ‘but for the love of God, a little oil and wine.’

‘What do you mean, probable?’ replied the philosopher. ‘I maintain that the matter is proved.’ Candide lost consciousness…. What Voltaire, like Martin, condemns is impractical reasoning and theorizing not leading to action.

Thus Voltaire is not a philosopher in any usual sense. Convinced like Descartes that clarity and distinctness are the prime criteria of truth; convinced that