In all that happens to Candide, we see at work a displacement of authority that from one episode to another carries the whole movement of the narrative. Authority is affirmed, then questioned, then reaffirmed in a different way, then questioned again, and so on. This is the overarching dynamic of the tale in its most abstract formulation. Any interpretation must necessarily refer to the concept of authority if it is to capture not just the style of Candide but what is at stake in the work.
In the beginning, in the closed universe of the tiny Westphalian province, the hero is clear about authority: it resides in the head of the household, in the aristocratic hierarchy, in Pangloss’s philosophical system, which affirms that the world has a sense and that humanity is the beneficiary. To start with, Panglossian metaphysics is all of a piece with the status quo, in that it justifies and reinforces the master’s authority. But immediately the malice of the narrator, who has a broader view, undermines this ostensible authority. Candide, as a bastard, is living proof of the challenges that love poses to aristocratic requirements. By the fact of his birth, Candide embodies the fragility of the established order: the quarter of nobility that he lacks is a lacuna from birth, a gap at the heart of the system. The narrator thereby denounces the verbal artifice by which the baron’s rural household pretends to the status of a real court: a shift of substantives turns “barnyard mutts” into a “pack of hunters,” “stable-boys” into “huntsmen,” and a “country vicar” into a “chaplain.” Similarly, by crediting Panglossian learning with the suffix nigologie,4 Voltaire instantly devalues it with the ringing endorsement of his scorn. The tutor’s lecture, supposedly celebrating the transparent order of the world, is pronounced with chronic lack of logic; in the very moment that it is given, its intellectual authority is undermined (for anyone who knows how to read). But as for Candide, he is full of admiration.
The kiss behind the screen is an allegory of the sly intrusion of what is traditional authority’s stubborn rival: feeling, desire. Cunégonde is prepared to repeat with her cousin the transgression to which he owes his birth. After a momentary eclipse of authority, a few kicks and slaps quickly restore order—in what is also the first manifestation of violence. But at this level, minor potentates and minuscule states are not guaranteed to keep the upper hand. Noble titles and the vestiges of the old military order cannot hold out against the princes with larger numbers of crack troops. At the heart of a world governed by a single principle of political authority, princely sovereignty and military might play a decisive role: and so the province, the castle, the baron, whom in his naïvety and gullibility Candide took to be absolutes, are all quickly relativized. The facts—ruins and massacres—stand as sufficient proof. If nothing in existence lacks sufficient reason, whosoever controls the biggest army has sufficient reason on his side. Power can quickly change hands. The resort to force triggers a “chain of events” whose end is uncertain. Voltaire enjoys delivering up the violent to violence, letting tyrants perish at the hands of rival tyrants or in a victorious rebellion. The baron who chases out Candide vanishes in the disasters of war, the Bulgarian who rapes Cunégonde is instantly killed by his captain, the kidnappers of Urban X’s daughter are slaughtered by a rival faction, the Grand Inquisitor who holds Cunégonde and who has had Pangloss hanged is killed by Candide, the Dutchman who stole from Candide is sent to the bottom of the sea, and so on. These are so many twists of fate that are too sporadic, too unexpected to suggest a sense of immanent justice: violence is not confined to the violent, and innocents perish while thugs go unpunished. Worse still, those characters who are sincere and good, such as Candide, find themselves helplessly sucked into the whirlpool of violence. It’s not easy to find one’s bearings, and in this game of slaughter, effective power is never held for long; as we watch the demise of the baron, the Grand Inquisitor, the Reverend Father Commandant, the English admiral, one after another, the narrative acquires a sense of generalized destitution, affecting not only those holding civil and religious authority, but authority itself, the very principle that gives legitimacy to the exercise of power. Neither the Church nor even the monarchy emerges unscathed; when Candide is passing through Paris, there has just been an attempt on the life of the king, and all foreigners are arrested. Except in Eldorado, no representative of supreme power is exempt from danger: in Venice, the dinner of the dethroned kings, with its remarkable comic repetition, epitomizes this frenzy of lèse-majesté. It is clear that the target here is not just the vanities of greatness and the caprices of fate, but rather the ultimate impotence reserved for those who have held, or have hoped to hold, sovereign authority. One does not have to be an authority in psychoanalysis to notice that throughout Candide, Voltaire is determined to inflict subtly calculated humiliation on the image of the father, multiplied indefinitely: what satisfaction, what revenge, when one can poke fun at “his miserable Highness”! It wouldn’t be difficult to discern a similar attack, but this time on literary authority, in Pococurante’s assessments of the great writers: no matter that this profanation comes from a tired dilettante, it has the effect of depreciation, of denying traditional approbation, of amputating—more mutilation!—celebrated works by criticizing their weak parts.
When the young baron, the last representative of restrictive authority, is finally sent back to the galleys, the position is clear. No haughty inquisitors or reverend fathers are left in the Propontis. The survivors are foreigners who possess a “small farm”: political power, far distant, seemingly respects ownership of property and is disinclined to intervene officiously. Where is authority now? Is it reduced to this nonintervention, to this spirit of laissez-faire that benefits all those who don’t come too close to the Court? After their trials, have Candide and his friends simply found the place where they are beyond the reach of authority? Or will they themselves instigate a new authority, different from the one that had oppressed them, that they had tested, and that they found sometimes laughable, sometimes tyrannical, and sometimes laughable and tyrannical both at the same time?
Let’s reconsider the problem from a philosophical angle. The question we began with concerned the harmony of the universe, the finality discernable in all things. Optimism consists not just in affirming that we must discern that finality, but that discerning it is our first duty. The debate about theodicy assumes that humanity gives priority to the search for contemplative knowledge, to the effort of capturing meaning: it is necessary to understand the world and to recognize its order. The Optimist response believes it has attained this goal. There is no more to be done. The question of theodicy is interesting only if, as an ancient injunction has it, humanity finds happiness in theoria, in the contemplative apprehension of meaning. According to the Panglossian principle, authority then resides in the reason inherent in the world itself, and in its unfolding of the whole sequence of events. Absolute will, intelligence, power (those of God, of whom Pangloss hardly speaks, but who is always implied in his arguments) have chosen for the universe ultimate perfection; humanity’s task is not to intervene in the course of events (Pangloss only interprets them), but to decipher the course of meaning as it emerges, includng its accompanying evils. Before it can be resisted, evil has to be understood as one of the transitory means that a just Creator requires to achieve his ends: the general good, and, looking forward, universal happiness. Panglossian Optimism is inclined to overlook Leibniz’s argument against “idle sophistry.”
The method of Voltairean critique consists in cutting out of the chain of putative causes everything that is not accessible to the candid eye: divine origins and harmonious finality. Voltaire’s polemical technique denounces as fanciful every wish to return to a first cause, and every presumption to pontificate on final causes. To pretend that one can assign a place to every event in some divine plan is idle banter, and the perfection of the universe is no more than a consoling deception, deaf to contrary arguments, at odds with the “fact of reality.”
The story of Candide unfolds in brief episo
des based on immediate cause and effect, the exact opposite of the interminable causal chains invoked by Pangloss. Following an assumption of radical empiricism that refuses to make conjectures about what cannot be observed, only the immediate cause and its subsequent effect are considered here. Sufficient reason is in this way reduced to mere efficient causality. Voltaire deliberately exaggerates this restriction on causality: his strategy is to isolate the event, detaching it from the context that would have given it meaning, to make it exist for itself alone. The absurdity leaps out at us. An example would be the chapter of the battle. What are the political aims of the Abar and Bulgarian kings? Voltaire intentionally says nothing about them: the omission of distant causes and of the aims of the war leaves only the fact of the war: the murderous acts, the weapons, the corpses. The war seems all the more appalling because it is conducted literally for no reason. Only the mechanisms and the arithmetic of combat survive: “The cannons first killed about six thousand men on each side.…’ We certainly have cause and effect here: the instrumental cause and the murderous effect; but we remain spectators of “quivering limbs,” and all “profound reason” is lacking. We have observed only a single day of battle. (It was not like this in the Poème de Fontenoy, when Voltaire spoke as the official eulogist of the king and his victory; that battle was justified by high political purpose: the victorious king “will pacify Europe, will bring calm to the Empire.”) What revolts Voltaire most is the way in which people excuse the illogicality and brutality of their actions by attributing them to a Providence overseeing the destiny of humankind: the battle (the effect of short-term causality) is an absurdity, but the two kings have the Te Deum sung, as if the event formed part of the long-term causality of some divine plan. When religion sanctions absurdity, Voltaire’s fury knows no bounds.
Voltaire has sporadic recourse to the terminology of systematic philosophy in order to underline the critical impact of fragmented causal links. He introduces these terms into the narrative to test them against specific reality. Concepts such as “physical experiment,” “effects and causes,” “sufficient reason,” “best of worlds,” taken out of context, detached from their system and trivialized, can only shrivel: their incongruity in this new context disqualifies them entirely. They are henceforth fundamentally inadequate, void of authority. The infinite chain of being, the “great chain of beings and events,” simply does not exist. To put it more precisely: this hierarchy expands by sprouting new branches, and these curtailed branches and sterile boughs are numerous and unpredictable. Everything is not therefore the cause of everything else. It suffices to look at the entry “Chain of Events” in the Philosophical Dictionary, where Voltaire sets out his arguments very clearly:
Let’s get this straight: every effect obviously has its cause, going back from cause to cause in the abyss of eternity, but not every cause has its effect, down to the very end of time. I freely admit that each event is produced by the next, and that if the present is born of the past, the present in turn gives birth to the future; all things have progenitors, but all things do not necessarily have progeny. Here it’s just the same as in genealogy: every family tree goes back to Adam, as we know, but in every family there are always people who die without issue.5
The causal cul-de-sac, whereby many events remain without consequences, deprives them of all real function and prevents us from invoking them as necessary links to a “future good.”
In the end what dominates in Candide is not the chain, but the procession of events, in which miseries and absurdities occur totally at random: the genealogy of smallpox or the list of assassinated kings are jumbled sequences, in which moral and physical evil goes on repeating itself in a never-ending sterile cycle. Pangloss, who would like to justify providence, just maunders on. One of the last images of a procession occurs in the final chapter, when ships sail constantly back and forth before Candide’s eyes, bringing the disgraced Effendis, Bachas, Cadis, severed heads, and so on. In a ludicrous chain and a nonsensical rhythm, tyrannical arbitrariness is repeated indefinitely. Faced by this spectacle (“there is a dreadful lot of evil on earth”), the last representative of religious authority, the Dervish, falls silent; he enjoins the manifestation of the System, in the person of Pangloss, to hold his tongue. The last external authority abdicates, or at least renounces the attempt to interpret God’s will. From that moment, God retreats into an unfathomable distance, and humanity is left to itself, alone, without the comfort of universal order, exposed to “convulsions of anxiety” or the “lethargy of boredom.” The world is no longer governed by Reason: we see at work an unbenevolent law that determines the regularity of natural effects. What remains? It remains to know this merciless law, not so as to celebrate it meekly, but to take control, as Bacon advises, by obeying it. Individuals, restricted to their space and confined to their garden, discover in themselves and by the quantifiable results of their productive efforts, the new authority that will take the place left vacant by the old authority. “The small farm yielded a great deal.” When Martin exclaims, “Let’s work without reasoning,” he is formulating the cry of the new human order, which is closely linked to the (unreasonable) refusal of reason that had previously sought to construct an acceptable image of the universe. Authority, henceforth, is not to be found outside of humanity; it is reduced to this “Let’s work without reasoning,” which gives absolute primacy to the activity of labor. There is no longer an order to contemplate, only land to work.
Is this simply about the symbolic advent of the bourgeois ethic of work and productivity? Things are less simple than contemporary literary sociology would have us believe. In Candide’s formulation of the imperative to work, we can still recognize one of the great precepts of Christian moralists preaching to cure the boredom of cloistered monks: manual activity is essential to those who experience acedia, the taedium vitae; and this is precisely the psychological state of the survivors on Turkish soil: “When we were not arguing, the boredom was unbearable.…” Work, at the end of Candide, is a psychological remedy.
It is also at the same time a response to an economic necessity. Voltaire has fun, by first making Candide extremely poor (when he leaves his first “paradise”), then extremely rich (when he leaves Eldorado). Candide has lost all his treasure, partly through people’s dishonesty and partly through his own generosity, when he buys nearly all his companions out of slavery. There comes a moment when the reserves of “yellow mud” and of the pebbles gathered so easily are exhausted. Life must go on.
In extreme poverty, Candide had observed that all was not for the best on Earth; when he has become excessively rich, he begins to ask a different question: Who is happy? How can we be happy? For money, without Cunégonde, brings no happiness. And Cunégonde, belatedly recovered, does not bring happiness either. Work, in the final resort, masks the absence of happiness, and brings in its place other benefits—less precious, no doubt, but preserving us from a void: “Cunégone was in truth very ugly; but she became an excellent pâtissière.”
A more exact way of describing this transfer of authority would be to note how, in Candide, the emphasis first placed on the question of the world’s order is displaced finally to the question of humanity’s happiness. Through the link that Voltaire establishes between happiness and work, he is already sketching in outline the lesson that Goethe will propose in Faust, Part Two. The new age that is dawning is not properly characterized by the currently fashionable term bourgeoisie: we are in fact witnessing the emergence and triumph of the moment when humanity, no longer the admiring spectator of an all-encompassing universe, makes itself the creator of its own world, a world that is partial, specific, and provisional.
But there is nothing yet to anticipate the Industrial Revolution and the technological domination of nature. What Voltaire draws in miniature is an agrarian society deriving the essential part of its income from the land, supplemented by the modest luxury of embroidery. But is it in fact a society at all? Have we not here rather an ex
ample of withdrawal into private life? The group around Candide form neither a state nor even a family. They are at most a tiny enclave in a world given over to evil; a refuge, a place of asylum (as they said at the time) for a group of cripples whom chance and misfortune have brought together. None of the farm’s residents is a native of the place; they reconstitute a miniature homeland in a place where they can lead a better life—and they can lead a better life when they are not dependent on either religious or political power. It’s important to note that the group of exiles is cosmopolitan: in addition to the Westphalians (Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss, Paquette), there are the Italians (the old woman, brother Giroflée), a Dutchman, more or less (Martin), and the Metis Cacambo. This group would come close to being a symbol of all humanity, were it not for the individual nuances of skin color and opinion that Voltaire holds precious and that he will always want to preserve in all his calls for toleration. The group is marginal, so small that it can dispense with the problem of political organisation. Voltaire’s evocation of productive labor checks any thoughts of utopia. This small society is in no way a model. “The small farm yielded a great deal.” That is all. It’s very little, some will say. Voltaire does not need more. (As for Rousseau, he offers far greater emotional and social riches with the image of Clarens in La Nouvelle Héloïse.) Voltaire has kept his variations on the theme of utopia for the kingdom of Eldorado, suggesting perhaps that the best of political organizations is conceivable only as the attribute of a nonexistent place. In the Propontis, at the end of this unsatisfying odyssey, we are far from absolute perfection. We have a bastard, surrounded by a prostitute, a renegade priest, a pox-ridden pedant, an ugly and abused young baroness, and a half-breed valet—impure guilty beings, in short, seemingly scarred by moral conventions—who take charge of their destiny and who, by what they undertake, by what they make with their hands, seek in the final resort to become less unhappy. They manage an accommodation that can never quite compensate for life’s wear and tear. A political reading of Candide should ask if the small territory of the farm is more likely to endure than the tiny barony—the pocket-sized Eden swept away by violence at the beginning of the narrative. At a time when small feudal lands have been swallowed up in the conflicts of the nation-states, what do we make of the fate of a private domain in a despotic state? Does even this compromise have a future? Voltaire perhaps wants to make us feel the fragility and eccentricity inherent in any semblance of regained stability.