Candide

What Candide is about

Candide is a naive young man raised in a German baron's castle, where his tutor, the philosopher Pangloss, teaches that this is "the best of all possible worlds" and that everything happens for the best. Expelled for kissing the baron's daughter Cunégonde, Candide is swept into a series of disasters across Europe and South America: forced army service, war, shipwreck, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Inquisition, slavery and theft. Pangloss keeps finding reasons why each catastrophe is for the best. Candide briefly finds the perfect country of El Dorado and leaves it for love. The book ends with the survivors on a small farm near Constantinople and Candide's famous conclusion that "we must cultivate our garden".

The short novel satirises the optimistic philosophy associated with Gottfried Leibniz, along with religious authorities, nobility, war, colonialism and slavery.

The ban, in full

Candide was published anonymously in early 1759, printed in Geneva and released almost at once in several cities. Voltaire denied writing it. The Geneva authorities condemned it and ordered copies seized and burned, and in Paris the authorities also seized copies, but it sold so fast that thousands were in circulation within weeks. The Catholic Church put it on its Index of Forbidden Books in 1762. Much later, in 1929, US Customs seized copies arriving in Boston as obscene.

About Voltaire

Voltaire was the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), the best-known writer of the French Enlightenment. He was twice imprisoned in the Bastille, lived in exile in England, where he admired English religious toleration, and spent his last decades at Ferney, just across the French border from Geneva, so that he could escape either country's authorities. He campaigned against religious persecution and judicial cruelty, notably in the case of Jean Calas, a Protestant executed in 1762.

Which edition to read

Candide is short and in the public domain. Good English translations include those by Theo Cuffe (Penguin) and Roger Pearson (Oxford World's Classics), both with notes on the people and events Voltaire mocks. Free public-domain translations are also widely available.

Reception and legacy

Candide has never been out of print and is one of the most-read works of the Enlightenment. Leonard Bernstein turned it into a comic operetta in 1956, with a libretto first written by Lillian Hellman.

Questions

Why was Candide banned?

For mocking religion and the Church, and for its sexual content and attacks on authority.

Is Candide still banned?

No. The Index of Forbidden Books itself was abolished in 1966. More: books banned in France, books on the Vatican's Index.