Voltaire's Candide

This research provides an analysis of Voltaire's Candide from a biographical point of view. What must be understood about Candide is that any reading of it entails acknowledgment that it was an artifact of the Enlightenment. The deliberate self-consciousness with which professional intellectuals of the 17th and 18th centuries developed a secular discourse and consensus of reason is the Englightenment's distinguishing feature. Voltaire, to whose "smile of reason" Clark (245) refers in identifying the period of time, was very much central to the intellectual energy of the age.

No less important is that the content of that energy was secular, the Peace of Westphalia having ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 and having disposed of the last great religious war in continental Europe. It is ironic that Candide, born and reared in Westphalia, that site and symbol of the end of Europe's religious warfare, proceeds to sites all over Europe, the Levant, and South America, where murderous and rapacious religious bigotry thrives. In that regard, Pocock remarks that Voltaire and his exact contemporary David Hume (whether as novelist or historian) were not so much preoccupied with religious wars per se, or even with the decisiveness of the Peace of Westphalia, as with "their aftereffects," i.e., with "the last phase of religious fanaticism [and] an age of enlightened sociability fostered by both courtly monarchy and commercial refinement" (Pocock 22-3). Candide is not unique in this reg

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0 editions of the text were in print when Voltaire died in 1778. Its principal thematic argument, explains Weitz, is not a complaint against the assertion that bad things do not happen to good people, but rather against the assertion that bad things (e.g., Inquisition, shipwreck, earthquake) are not evil. Unable to relinquish the tenet of divine omnipotence, the Christian answer to the problem of evil must be that evil is the name given to what really is an attribute of imperfect human reason and perception. Voltaire's position in Candide is that human reason may be reliable, or anyway no less reliable than human faith, where the problem of evil arises. Even Pangloss is obliged to belie his multiple and fatuous endorsements of Leibniz's ideas. Initially he declares that he (Pangloss) could not as a philosopher contradict his idea that the experience of evil is outside the experience even of one being (for example) severely beaten by pirates. For to agree (says he) that everything in the world is not in perfect harmony would be to contradict himself and his philosophy. And after all, "Leibnitz [sic] could not be in the wrong; and his pre-established harmony is certainly the finest system in the world, as well as his gross and subt

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