CandideVoltaire

Candide is a short satire aimed at a philosophical position. Leibniz argued in the Theodicy that God, surveying infinite possible worlds, actualized the best of them, and that evils which look gratuitous are necessary parts of a whole too large for us to take in. Voltaire hands that doctrine to Pangloss, a tutor who goes on repeating it while he is hanged, dissected, enslaved, and reduced to a syphilitic beggar.

The plot moves fast and hurts constantly. Candide is expelled from the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh for kissing Cunégonde, conscripted and flogged by the Bulgars, shipwrecked at Lisbon in time for the earthquake and the auto-da-fé the Inquisition stages to prevent another one, then carried through Paraguay, Surinam, and Eldorado, a country of gold and no priests that he chooses to leave. Each episode sets the doctrine against a particular atrocity. Voltaire was writing after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands on All Saints' Day, and the book is his reply to anyone who would call that a necessary thread in a good design.

The ending withholds both optimism and despair. Candide reassembles his companions on a small farm outside Constantinople, Cunégonde now ugly and Pangloss still theorizing, and closes the argument: we must cultivate our garden.

The Syntopicon cites Candide wherever the goodness of the world is in question. Voltaire supplies the case against providential design in the form the tradition remembers: a run of events that no argument survives.