INTRODUCTION TO CANDIDE

In order to understand and appreciate the humor in a satirical work such as Candide the reader must first
understand the subject that is being ridiculed. The information in this document will give the reader a
foundational understanding of the historical context in which Voltaire wrote. It will also summarize
optimism, the philosophical way of thinking ridiculed in Candide, and meliorism, the philosophical way of
thinking championed by Voltaire.

Instructions: Read and mark up sections one, two, and three.

SECTION ONE
THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
In 1755 the city of Lisbon, Portugal, was leveled
by a tremendous earthquake. More than 30,000
people were killed. The event, which shocked
Europe, had an especially profound effect on
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire. Voltaire, then
nearly 61, was the leading French man of letters
and one of the most influential figures of his
time. His first reaction to the tragedy was the
moving and angry "Poem on the Disaster of
Lisbon," written in the weeks after the
earthquake. Four years later, in 1759, a second
fruit of Voltaire's reflections on this tragedy was
published. It was his comic masterpiece,
Candide.
Voltaire had long opposed the extreme optimism
of many people of his time that was expressed
in the belief that this is the "best of all possible
worlds" and that all that happens is for the best.
How could the loss of more than 30,000 lives in
an earthquake be for the best? What place did
the slaughter of the Seven Years War that
ravaged Europe from 1756 to 1763 have in the
best of all possible worlds? Voltaire's discussion
of these questions can be found in Candide, his
satirical, witty attack on optimism.
THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE OF 1755
"Probably the most famous of all earthquakes is
that which destroyed Lisbon on Nov. 1, 1755.
There were three great earthquakes (the first
was the largest) at 9:40 A.M., 10 A.M. and at
noon. The main shock lasted six to seven
minutes, an unusually long duration. Within six
minutes at least 30,000 people were killed, all
large public buildings and 12,000 dwellings were
demolished. It was a church day, and great loss
of life occurred in the churches. A fire followed
which burned for six days. A marble quay at the
riverside disappeared into the river bottom laden
with people. Alexander von Humboldt stated that
the total area shaken was four times that of
Europe."
--Encyclopaedia Britannica (1961 ed.), Vol. 7, p.
848.
 SECTION TWO
OPTIMISM
Theodicy, a term invented by Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz that first appeared in print in his Essais
de théodicée (1710; Theodicy, 1951). Leibniz
never defined the term but clearly meant an
account of the justice (Greek, diké) of God
(Greek, theós); it is now common to conflate it
with John Milton's project to "justify the ways of
God to men" with reference to evil. The
Theodicy was provoked by the arguments of the
Calvinist skeptic Pierre Bayle, who asserted that
evil was a "problem that reduces all philosophy
to helplessness," but Leibniz's larger targets
were voluntarist philosophies (such as those of
Descartes, Hobbes, and Pufendorf) that
maintained that it compromised God's freedom
to assert God to be good in human terms.
Leibniz's Neoplatonic claim that this world was
the "best of all possible worlds" was intended as
a way of rendering God's goodness
comprehensible without denying the infinity of
God's attributes. The argument was entirely
general, but Leibniz's successors ventured
teleological claims about specific evils
Philosophical theodicy is often thought to have
been destroyed by the Lisbon earthquake of
1755, the sarcasm of Voltaire's Candide, and the
arguments of David Hume and Immanuel Kant,
but in the early 19th century, G. W. F. Hegel
argued that theodicy was not only possible but
also necessary: history is the true theodicy.
While much of 20th-century thought rejected
theodicy, especially in the aftermath of the
Holocaust, the problem of evil has experienced
renewed interest in recent analytic philosophy of
religion.
From the OED: optimism -- 1. A name given to
the doctrine propounded by Leibnitz, in his
Théodicée (1710), that the actual world is the
‘best of all possible worlds’, being chosen by the
Creator out of all the possible worlds which were
present in his thoughts as that in which the most
good could be obtained at the cost of the least
evil. Also applied to doctrines of earlier or later
thinkers to a like effect.
Leibnitz, in his Théodicée, uses optimum as a
technical term, on the model of maximum and
minimum. Hence the Jesuits who conducted the
Mémoires de Trévoux, in the number for Feb.
1737, gave to his doctrine the name optimisme.
It appears in the Dict. Trévoux 1752. It owes its
general diffusion to the attack upon the doctrine
by Voltaire in Candide ou l'Optimisme 1759; and
was admitted into the Dict. Acad. in 1762.
Leibniz, from “Dialog on Human Freedom
and the Origin of Evil” (1695):
I believe that god did create things in ultimate
perfection, though it does not seem so to us
considering the parts of the universe. It’s a bit
like what happens in music and painting, for
shadows and dissonances truly enhance the
other parts, and the wise author of such works
derives such a great benefit for the total
perfection of the work from these particular
imperfections that it is much better to make a
place for them than to attempt to do without
them. Thus, we must believe that God would
not have allowed sin nor would he have created
things he knows will sin, if he could not derive
from them a good incomparably greater than the
resulting good. (115)
 SECTION THREE
MELIORISM
Voltaire's satire of philosophical optimism is one
of the major issues of Candide. Throughout the
story, satirical references to "the best of all
possible worlds" contrast with natural
catastrophes and human wrongdoing. A
question that has been a great source of debate
is what this destruction of optimism implies.
Does it imply the triumph of pessimism? Is the
conclusion of Candide a pessimistic withdrawal
from a corrupt world? Or is its affirmation of a
modest, but nonetheless hopeful, commitment to
life and change? This idea was labeled
"meliorism" by others, and its chief tenet was the
belief that people can actively work to create a
better world. There is much evidence in
Voltaire's life and later works that he believed in
"meliorism."
Pessimism (pes'i·miz'm): an inclination to
emphasize adverse aspects, conditions, and
possibilities or to expect the worst possible
outcome .
Meliorism (meel'yo·riz'm): the belief that the
world tends to become better and that humans
can aid its betterment.
A LETTER FROM VOLTAIRE
The following is a letter written by Voltaire
commenting on the tragic events related to the
Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. How does this letter
reflect Voltaire’s meliorism?
Les Délices, November 24, 1755
This is indeed a cruel piece of natural
philosophy! We shall find it difficult to discover
how the laws of movement operate in such
fearful disasters in the best of all possible
worlds-- where a hundred thousand ants, our
neighbours, are crushed in a second on our ant-
heaps, half, dying undoubtedly in inexpressible
agonies, beneath débris from which it was
impossible to extricate them, families all over
Europe reduced to beggary, and the fortunes of
a hundred merchants -- Swiss, like yourself --
swallowed up in the ruins of Lisbon. What a
game of chance human life is! What will the
preachers say -- especially if the Palace of the
Inquisition is left standing! I flatter myself that
those reverend fathers, the Inquisitors, will have
been crushed just like other people. That ought
to teach men not to persecute men: for, while a
few sanctimonious humbugs are burning a few
fanatics, the earth opens and swallows up all
alike. I believe it is our mountains which save us
from earthquakes.