In Candide’s Garden

Voltaire (1694–1778) is probably best remembered for his cynical witticisms. “The English like to hang an admiral from time to time to encourage the others,” or “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” Occasionally he is more inspirational: “I do not believe a word you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Although some years after his death, his enemies managed to scatter his remains into the sewers of Paris, his heart is still displayed in the National Library of France, which solemnly received it from the Emperor Napoleon III. He is to this day a symbol and a legend. When at the height of the Algerian crisis in 1960, critics demanded the arrest of the anti-government Jean-Paul Sartre, President Charles de Gaulle replied: “One does not arrest Voltaire!”

Yet almost none of his works is now read—with one great exception—his satirical novel Candide. First published in 1759 under a thinly disguised pseudonym, it has remained in print and is always remembered at times of great ideological clashes when its irony and scepticism become relevant again. In recent decades it has even been made into an American operetta (with music by Leonard Bernstein) and an Australian musical (with Iain Grandage as composer). The American version failed in the mid-1950s when Lillian Hellman wrote a heavy libretto presenting the story as an attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but when Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim rewrote it, it enjoyed and continues to enjoy international success. The Australian version written by Tom Wright and directed by Michael Kantor was presented this year at the Edinburgh Festival to mixed reviews, although Frank Woodley as Candide won a Festival award.

The novel’s satirical subtitle is “Optimism”. It tells the adventures of a naive, not to say stupid young man who believes what the philosophers tell him about life, especially his tutor Dr Pangloss, a disciple of the great Leibniz who teaches that this is the best of all possible worlds.

In the opening chapter Cunegonde, the beautiful daughter of the baron in whose castle Candide lives, seduces him. When her father observes them in flagrante delicto, he kicks Candide out of the castle. As our simple hero travels the world, at every turn he is witness to, or involved in, persecution, massacres, torture, rapine, enslavement, corruption, deceit, murder, earthquake, shipwreck and disease. But he remains throughout a convinced optimist, loyal to the teaching of Dr Pangloss and Leibniz. He is one of those who finds a silver lining in every cloud, who deeply believes that as one door closes another will always open. Even his companion, Martin, who proclaims that this is the worst of worlds and that everything in it is evil, makes no real impression on his faith.

At the end of his horrific adventures, he settles on a small farm with his now hideous Cunegonde, and the now deformed Dr Pangloss. When his tutor sums up their adventures and concludes that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds, Candide replies: “That is excellently said. But let us cultivate our garden.”

This famous and much quoted conclusion is often taken to be recommending a withdrawal from the hurly-burly, a kind of private quietism, even a stoic defeatism. It is as if Voltaire is saying: “Let us forget the great philosophic arguments about the nature of things and the future of the world. Let us just do what we can in our own little backyards or gardens.” But this is to misunderstand Voltaire’s message. Candide’s garden is still the garden of life and it devalues Voltaire’s achievement if we ignore the high priority he gave to the continuing struggle against injustice. For example, one (among several) of his famous campaigns for justice was the Calas case. The ink was barely dry on Candide before Voltaire took up the case.

Jean Calas was a Huguenot shopkeeper of Toulouse whose son was found hanged in 1761. Charged with having murdered the son to prevent his conversion to Catholicism, Calas was judged guilty, publicly broken on the wheel, strangled and burned to ashes. Voltaire launched a huge international campaign alleging that the trial and execution had not been decided on the evidence but by religious prejudice. His major book on it, Traite sur la Tolerance, appeared in 1763, and in 1765 a fifty-judge panel reviewed the case and found Calas not guilty. Far too late to save the poor man’s life, Voltaire’s crusade nevertheless dramatically strengthened the cause of religious toleration—and law reform.

Voltaire also remained to the end committed to his philosophic and ideological causes. He supported constitutional monarchy (as against dictatorial republicanism) and deism (as against more doctrinal faiths). Several of his controversies arose out of his philosophic or freethinking commitments. He caused great scandal with one of his plays that presented Mohammed as an impostor and another that was irreverent about Joan of Arc.

It is impossible to believe that in advising us to “cultivate our garden”, Voltaire was abandoning his crusades against injustice and for toleration. He was simply asking that these crusades be tempered with common sense. The world is neither completely good nor completely evil—although it has plenty of both. Shun both naive idealism and empty cynicism, he is saying. Keep your feet on the ground. But with those essential warnings in mind, we will still read over the gate leading to Candide’s garden Voltaire’s greatest slogan: “Ecrasons l’infame.” Let us crush the infamous thing.