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 regard. It is a prop for Voltaire's histories, such as his Age of Louis XIV, published in 1751 and positioned in the intellectual postmortem of religion as chief marker of culture. The secular progeny of the Thirty Years War may be perceived as a corrective to previous cultural inadequacies, but Candide does not look toward a utopian future; the hero barely achieves the insight that cultivation of a garden is as worthy a human pursuit as perpetual war. Viewed in the...