Candide

Summary

What if everything that happens—war, disease, torture, betrayal—is actually for the best?

That’s the philosophy a young man named Candide learns from his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, in a comfortable castle in Westphalia. “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” Pangloss teaches. Noses were designed to hold spectacles. Legs were made for stockings. Everything has a purpose. Everything works out.

Then Candide is kicked out of the castle for kissing a girl, and his education in the real world begins.

This is Candide, or Optimism—Voltaire’s savage, hilarious attack on philosophical optimism, written in 1759 and still devastating today.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Voltaire wrote Candide in a fever—three days for the first draft—as a response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. That disaster killed tens of thousands of people on All Saints’ Day. Churches collapsed on the faithful. A tsunami followed. Then fires. Then looters.

How could this be the best of all possible worlds?

The philosophy Voltaire mocks belonged to Gottfried Leibniz, who argued that God, being perfect, must have created the best possible world. Any apparent evil must serve a greater good we cannot perceive. This idea was popular among comfortable Europeans who had never been trampled by Bulgarian soldiers.

Candide has been trampled. He has been conscripted, flogged, nearly executed, shipwrecked, robbed, and cheated. He has watched his beloved Cunégonde violated, his tutor hanged, his fortune stolen, and his friends enslaved. Through it all, he keeps trying to believe that everything happens for the best.

The joke—and the tragedy—is that he’s wrong.

The Education of Candide

Candide begins life in paradise, or what passes for it. The Baron of Thunder-ten-Tronckh’s castle in Westphalia has windows, a door, and tapestry in the great hall. The Baron’s daughter Cunégonde is seventeen, fresh, and desirable. Dr. Pangloss teaches that this is the most magnificent of castles in the best of all possible worlds.

When Candide and Cunégonde are discovered kissing behind a screen, the Baron kicks Candide out with great violence. This is cause and effect, Pangloss would say. Everything is connected.

What follows is connected too—a chain of disasters that reads like a tour of eighteenth-century horrors.

Candide is conscripted by the Bulgarians. He tries to take a walk and is nearly beaten to death for desertion. He witnesses a battle so horrific that thirty thousand men die while both kings sing hymns of thanksgiving. He escapes through villages where women have been disemboweled and children murdered.

He finds Pangloss, now a diseased beggar who reports that the castle has been destroyed, everyone murdered, and Cunégonde violated and killed.

“Alas,” says Pangloss, explaining his condition, “it was love.”

They sail to Lisbon just in time for the earthquake. The sea rises, ships are dashed to pieces, whirlwinds of fire consume the streets. Thirty thousand die. A sailor robs the dead.

“What can be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?” asks Pangloss.

The authorities decide the earthquake requires an auto-da-fé—a public burning of heretics. Pangloss is hanged for speaking. Candide is flogged for listening. Neither is comforted by the knowledge that this is for the best.

Reunions and Murders

But Cunégonde is alive. She witnessed the auto-da-fé and recognized Candide. She sends an old woman to rescue him.

Cunégonde’s story is worse than his. She was violated by soldiers, sold to a Jewish merchant, shared between him and the Grand Inquisitor, and forced to watch the public punishment of the man she loves. Yet here she is, in a little house outside Lisbon, available on alternate days.

When her two owners arrive on the same night—the Jew first, then the Inquisitor—Candide kills them both. “Had not Pangloss been hanged,” he observes, “he would give us good counsel in this emergency.”

They flee to South America with the old woman, who tells her own story. She is the daughter of a pope. Her fiancé was poisoned. She was captured by pirates, sold into slavery, survived a plague, and had one buttock cut off and eaten during a siege. “A hundred times I wanted to kill myself,” she says, “but I still loved life.”

In Buenos Aires, a governor with a very long name wants Cunégonde. The Inquisition is pursuing Candide. They separate. Candide flees into the jungle with his servant Cacambo.

There he discovers that the Jesuit commander is Cunégonde’s brother—thought dead but very much alive. Candide announces his intention to marry Cunégonde. The Baron-turned-Jesuit refuses. They quarrel. Candide runs him through.

“Good God!” he says. “I have killed my brother-in-law! I am the mildest man in the world, and yet I have killed three men, two of them priests.”

El Dorado

Fleeing the Jesuits, Candide and Cacambo stumble into a hidden valley surrounded by impossible mountains. The roads are paved with gold. Children play with emeralds. When Candide tries to pay for dinner with rubies, the innkeeper laughs—all inns are free, paid for by the government.

This is El Dorado, the lost city of the Incas, preserved from European greed for two centuries.

There are no monks, no courts, no prisons. Everyone worships God without priests. The king is wise and kind. Science flourishes. No one is unhappy.

Candide could stay. He has found Pangloss’s best of all possible worlds—and it does exist, but only because it has sealed itself off from humanity.

He leaves.

Why? Because Cunégonde is not there. Because he wants to be richer than all the kings of Europe. Because humans are never satisfied with paradise.

The king gives him sheep laden with gold and diamonds—enough treasure to buy nations. By the time Candide reaches Surinam, he has lost most of it to cliffs, swamps, and thieves. A Dutch merchant steals the rest.

Candide looks at what humans do to each other. He encounters an enslaved man who has had his hand cut off for getting a finger caught in the sugar mill, and his leg cut off for trying to escape.

“This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe,” the man says.

“Oh Pangloss!” cries Candide. “This is an abomination you never imagined. I must at last renounce your optimism.”

Martin the Pessimist

Seeking a traveling companion, Candide advertises for the most miserable person in the province. He selects Martin, a poor scholar who has been robbed by his wife, beaten by his son, abandoned by his daughter, and persecuted by the clergy.

Martin is a Manichean. He believes the world is ruled by an evil spirit. Everywhere he looks, he sees evidence.

“Do you believe men have always massacred each other?” Candide asks. “That they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves?”

“Do you believe hawks have always eaten pigeons when they found them?” Martin replies.

“Yes, of course.”

“Well then. If hawks have always had the same nature, why should you imagine that men have changed theirs?”

Candide has no answer.

Through Paris, through Venice, through Constantinople, Martin and Candide argue. They encounter six deposed kings at an inn—real monarchs, fallen from power, each more miserable than the last. Candide gives them charity. Martin notes that charity won’t make them happy.

Nothing makes anyone happy.

The Garden

At last Candide finds Cunégonde. She is a slave, washing dishes for a deposed Transylvanian prince. She has become ugly—“brown, wrinkled, with red arms and bloodshot eyes.”

No matter. Candide ransoms her, along with the old woman. He finds Pangloss and the Baron alive, enslaved as galley rowers. He ransoms them too.

They buy a small farm near Constantinople. Cunégonde turns out to be a very bad cook. The old woman is sickly. Pangloss is bitter about not having a university position. Martin believes they would be equally miserable anywhere.

“I want to know which is worse,” the old woman says, “to be raped a hundred times by pirates, to have a buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet, to be hanged, to be dissected, to row in a galley—or simply to sit here with nothing to do?”

“That is a great question,” says Candide.

They consult a famous philosopher, a dervish. When Pangloss starts asking about the origin of evil, the dervish slams the door in their faces.

Then they meet a humble farmer with twenty acres, two sons, and two daughters. He knows nothing about politics, nothing about philosophy. He grows oranges and pistachios. His labor keeps him from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.

Candide is struck.

“Let us cultivate our garden,” he says.

Pangloss tries to argue that all their sufferings led them to this moment. Candide interrupts him.

“That is well said,” he replies, “but we must cultivate our garden.”

What Voltaire Means

“We must cultivate our garden” is one of the most famous lines in literature, and also one of the most debated. What does it mean?

Some read it as retreat—withdraw from the world, tend your own plot, ignore the suffering you cannot change. This is the conservative Candide, the Candide of resignation.

Others read it as the opposite—reject abstract philosophy, stop debating whether evil has a purpose, and do useful work. The garden is not escape but engagement. It’s not passive but active. Candide doesn’t retreat from the world. He builds something in it.

Voltaire himself never retreated. He spent his final years campaigning against injustice, fighting to overturn wrongful convictions, mocking the church and the state with inexhaustible energy.

But he had no illusions. He knew the world was cruel, that earthquakes killed the innocent, that priests burned heretics, that the powerful exploited the weak. Optimism was obscene because it denied suffering. Pessimism was paralyzing because it justified inaction.

The answer was work.

Not grand systems. Not theological debates. Not waiting for the best of all possible worlds. Just the garden in front of you, the vegetables you can grow, the small good you can do in an imperfect world.

Why It Lasts

Candide has survived for nearly three hundred years because we still live in Candide’s world.

We still hear that suffering serves a purpose. That the market will provide. That technology will save us. That things are getting better, that everything happens for a reason, that this is the best we can do.

We still watch earthquakes, wars, and plagues, and hear philosophers explain why they’re necessary.

Voltaire’s response is laughter—cruel, sharp, and cleansing. He won’t let us hide in comfortable ideas. He shows us Pangloss defending optimism while being dissected alive. He shows us a mutilated slave explaining the price of sugar. He shows us six kings who ruled millions, now begging at an inn.

But the laughter isn’t nihilism. Candide ends with work, with community, with a small farm producing plentiful crops. The world is terrible. Philosophy is useless. And yet we can still grow oranges and make pastries and build furniture.

We must cultivate our garden.

It’s not much. But it’s honest. And it’s ours.