Le Monde Français du Dix-Huitième

Siècle

Volume 6, Issue-numéro 1 2021

Pédagogies et héritages
Dir. Servanne Woodward

Voltaire’s Candide:
From the Other Side of
Civilization

Peter R. Saìz
sueywang69@gmail.com

DOI: DOI: 10.5206/mfds-ecfw.v6i1.13888

Voltaire’s Candide : From the other side of Western Civilization
[…] many years ago I remember asking a scholar of the
“Enlightenment” whose talk celebrated ideas of freedom and
individualism that were developed in the second half of the century how
he might reconsider his ideas if he thought about them from the point
of view of people and territories that were colonized then. He said he
thought my response was “bizarre.” 1

[…] while the cosmopolitan is nowhere a stranger, and moves freely

from city to city and continent to continent, the slave is defined as
unfree. Like a domesticated animal or a commodity, his movements in
the world are always chosen and controlled by others. Through these
two figures and their encounter in the novel, Voltaire exposes the
human condition in a world where individual identity depends upon the
rules of commerce. 2

Suvir Kaul is enthusiastic about the recent success of ASECS’ panels on “Race and Empire Studies”
to “packed audiences” (p. 34), while Ingvild Hageb Kjørholt discusses Voltaire’s optimistic view of
British commerce as leveling all otherness in its peaceful magnanimous way, a perspective favoring
cosmopolitan luxury in Le Mondain, yet he somewhat reverses course with Candide (1759), where the
global tour reveals, “a global geography of commerce and war” the one built on the other
(“Cosmopolitans”, 63). The assessment of Voltaire’s anti-imperialism provides some evidence that the
transition could be compared to current calls for “decolonizing” our heritage of the eighteenth-century
was not entirely foreign to this philosopher.
Voltaire has often been regarded as the symbol of the Enlightenment, the philosophe whose life
and work embodies the spirit and progress of the “age of thought”. However, Voltaire was often
alienated from the same society that he sought to influence. He always remained a Parisian at heart,
though he spent much of his life in exile. He cursed the city’s barbarity, returning only at the end of
his life to receive a hero’s welcome and to die there. His heritage often resurfaces in his works, evincing
an ambiguous perspective toward French Imperialism.
At the time of Voltaire’s banishment from France, the French author was beginning to be
recognized as France’s foremost new playwright, the heir to the tradition of Corneille and Racine.
Some biographers contend that Voltaire’s thought undergoes a marked transformation during his stay
in England, while others believe that the sojourn hardly changed his thinking. The mindset of Voltaire
was probably well established before he ever left France. However, it is certain that Voltaire greatly
admired England and felt that France suffered by comparison in the domain of politics, religious
tolerance, liberal thought, and culture. For Voltaire was liberal and despised tyranny of any kind.
Much of the resentment directed against Voltaire stemmed from the fact that he had so much
influence during the course of his life. Aside from his anti-clerical views (though a deist) and subversive
nature, he was known for being one of the few philosophers, if not the only one, to directly influence
the politics of an age. He was accepted as a member of the Royal Court in England and assumed the
position of advisor to the king of Prussia during Frederick’s reign. Voltaire also issued political

1 Suvir Kaul, in Nicole Mansfield Wright, “ASECS at 50: Interview with Suvir Kaul”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 53.1
(2019): 33 of 31-42.
2 Ingvild Hageb Kjørholt, “Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme”, Eighteenth-

Century Fiction 25.1 (September 2012): 63 of 61-84. DOI:10.3138/ecf.25.1.61

pamphlets against the kingdom of France and urged other groups to do so. In effect, he initiated a
tone of rebellion for an age which would culminate in the French Revolution.
Following the popularity of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries travel literature, he chose
the backdrop of an international journey to contest the optimism of Leibniz. The European’s desire
to explore was based on economic and political factors, as well as the desire to uncover some lost
utopia, and Edenic paradise and an El Dorado. Voltaire was influenced by the travelogues of his days,
though citing specific influences proves difficult. It was established, however, that the author has read
and admired Rabelais, Montesquieu, and The Arabian Nights.
Candide recounts the journeys of its title character, who is wronged or mistreated during each
of his expeditions. Candide, who is the illegitimate nephew of a German nobleman, falls in love with
his daughter, Cunegonde. Cunegonde and Candide’s first kiss is interrupted by her father, who
consequently banishes Candide from his palace. Candide is thus expelled from “Eden”, or the
kingdom inhabited by Cunegonde. She is the symbolic Eve whose charms prove fatal to her lover.
Candide may simultaneously represent Christ, Adam, and Cain, since he is variously cast as an
innocent, a victim of seduction, and a murderer.
After Candide leaves the castle and the kingdom, the Abares are slaughtered by Bulgarian
soldiers, the baron and his daughter are evicted from their dwelling just like Candide, and eventually
all the characters suffer comparable sets of tragedies. In the battle between the Abares and the
Bulgarians, the author describes how “First the cannons battered down about six thousand men on
each side: then volleys of musket fire removed from the best of the worlds nine or ten thousand rascals
who were cluttering up its surface” (Candide, p. 5). This passage is obviously an attack on the
philosophical optimism of Leibniz, Pope, and others who proclaimed that “whatever is, is right.”
Voltaire also rejects their notion of an idyllic nature and a benevolent God. Hence, Voltaire’s portrait
of the garden signals disruption. Candide’s tale is set against the backdrop of imperialist wars and
domination. The conquest of his family’s kingdom by a foreign power sets in motion an endless series
of violence related to this event. Nationalism as expansion through conquest, imperialism, war in
general all come under attack by Voltaire.
Candide’s rejection of El Dorado signifies the absurdity of humanity’s vision. Candide chooses
to leave this ideal city, where each subject is rich and stands on an equal footing, in order to pursue
Cunegonde and worldly privileges halfway around the world. The question of why Candide leaves El
Dorado remains a vexing question for many readers. It seems that his greed is a source of great evil
and it exists in a context of inequality, where some are rich, and some are poor or dispossessed.
Voltaire’s message rings clear. Imperialism as greed constitutes an extension of this distressful
condition. A surplus of destitute people feeds its expansionist wars. Martin renders a most succinct
description of the imperialist orders of Europe when he says that “A million regimented assassins
roam Europe from one end to the other, plying the trades of murder and robbery in an organized way
for a living, because there is no more honest work for them” (Candide, p. 45). Perhaps an even more
telling indictment of imperialism is suggested by Voltaire when Candide meets up with a black slave
at a Dutch colony in Africa. After having described his poverty and mutilation to Candide, the slave
proclaims that “This is the price of sugar” to be consumed by the Europeans (p. 41). A more stirring
denunciation of colonialism is not to be found in this text.
Yet while Voltaire is attacking the evils of an age which included imperialism and colonialism,
he is also affirming these modes of usurpation. Voltaire’s critique of imperialism is not altogether one-
sided. In Candide, the landscapes are often represented as rough and unaccommodating if not
inhospitable. The narrator’s depiction of the hemispheres emphasizes their wilderness and
undesirability. El Dorado is described as surrounded by perilous cliffs and sharp rocks. El Dorado,
the European conception of paradise, remains utterly dissatisfying since Candide wants to leave the
city so much that he is willing to risk his life in the process. Its city appears uninhabitable and it is
surrounded by an hostile environment, as if its exception cannot be sustained if it is in contact with
the rest of the world. When Candide exports its treasures, they disappear at great speed. During the
trip to Cayennes, “mountains, rivers, cliffs, robbers, and savages obstructed the way everywhere”
(Candide, 54). The concept of the hostile environment of outcasts, living out of alternative economies,
and other “savages” is opposed to civilized and policed society. Urban landscapes or cultivated fields
seem desirable in Manon Lescaut (1731) as well. Even before the apex of European intervention in
“unexplored” territories, other cultures are denigrated. In Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), a satire which
influenced Voltaire, as well as in Samuel Johnson’s oriental epic Rasselas (1759) published the same
year as Candide, European civilization appears most welcoming and desirable. The philosopher Imlac,
who often serves as Johnson’s mouthpiece, denigrates Arabic culture while praising Western-
European refinement, and technological advancement and knowledge. “That Other,” says
Christopher L. Miller, “always has a separate identity of its own, an inferior culture” (Blank Darkness,
15). “Others” are invested with falsehood as a negative of true beingness as if they presumably emerge
from the land that should support the foundation of the Empire. The process of mythmaking relegates
those others as the roots of the empire erased and superseded by modernity. The “natives” are always
local and diminished to a primitive stage of development, a first wave of humanity “long ago” that
will give way to the second one, more distinct, more “present”, should we say, more “human”? For
instance, after he kills the two monkeys who were the lovers of native girls (Chapter 16) Candide
relates to Cacambo how he heard Master Pangloss tell how the natives mating with animals created
modern versions of centaurs, fauns, and satyrs. Jovial references to well-deserved cannibalism against
the Jesuits among the “Oreillons” justifies the nullification of ancient mythology for a new one based
on modernity and proper moral discrimination.
Candide becomes bored in El Dorado because he cannot assert himself as an individual and
because the kingdom lacks culture and arts. The two monkeys that attack the girls along the meadow
represent grotesques of the natives. Here, the author suggests that the natives are not far removed
from the apes in physical appearance and potential brutality. Yet this chapter is also explaining how
emissaries from the imperial world appear to the natives. From the perspective of the Oreillons, the
Jesuits are nasty, harmful animals that can be recognized by their robes, and they are just good enough
to serve as meals. Once Candide asserts that he killed one of these Jesuit animals and that he wears
the robe of his victim as one might wear the skin of a prey for clothes, he proves his humanity to the
Oreillons who are now welcoming and willing to present Cacambo and Candide to the local girls. The
protagonists’ experience of the new world shows that all become barbaric in its realm, from Candide
who kills the brother of Cunegonde to the cannibals who detest the Jesuits. As well if the lovers of
the young women appeared to be monkeys to Candide, for a while, he clearly appears to be an edible
animal to the Oreillons. Still, Voltaire seems to be inhibited in his criticism of imperialism since
European modernity appears preferable to any “natural” realm, or the domain of the “natives”.
Voltaire as a quintessential Parisian depicts nature as an alienating place that his characters eventually
embrace.
Recent studies in eco-criticism define our psychological relationship to our environment: “Thus,
the concept of environmental identity focuses our attention on how the environment transforms the
way we identify ourselves, and how that identification affects our interpretation and understanding of
the world,”3 says Yi-Ting Chang in an attempt to determine how we impart meaning to our life through
the way we feel in nature. Once expelled from his uncle’s abode, Candide has attempted to find his

3
Yi-Ting Chang, “I See it Feelingly”: Environmental Identities in Lila, Train Dreams and Child of God, ISLE: Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 26, Issue 1, Winter 2019, Pages 65–82, https://doi-
org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/10.1093/isle/isy083
place in the world (if possible in the vicinity of Cunegonde). The ideal society posited at the end of
Candide attains a “primitive” notion of happiness in an agricultural-horticultural community, either
Rousseau-like or derived from the East. Here in the garden, all members of society stand on equal
footing in forming a union which is not merely a retreat from the world, but an example for humanity.
Agrarian work is redeeming. In those terms, “Work,” as the Turkish philosopher says at the end of
the journey across the globe, “keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty” (p. 76).
Instead of reproducing France elsewhere, instead of relocating France or Europe on other
hemispheres, and acquiescing in the expansion of nationality, Voltaire puts forth the notion that one
must forge a better world within one’s own circle of existence. Though Voltaire would appear
pessimistic, there is hope for salvation. But in Candide, this salvation does not come from European
civilization, nor from Heaven. Cacambo (the servant-slave) and the small society evolve at the end of
the novel not so much as a closed circle but as an opening, toward the horizon of a new cooperative
generosity eradicating oppositional identities of past versus present, other versus familiar: the
characters must collectively etch their place, repeatedly, in the moving furrows of the earth, and they
follow the cycle of plant growth, thus forging an inclusive yet laborious common place, attuned to
nature, which is finally perceived as hospitable. Certainly, the encouragement to “cultivate one’s
garden” is to be taken metaphorically, and yet Voltaire did choose an agrarian image to help his readers
determine what could be their place and purpose in the world, which works contrary to colonial and
imperialist expansion, with the correlate of cultural hierarchies and master-slave relations.
Peter R. Saìz,
Purdue University
Bibliography

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