From the Lisbon earthquake to El Dorado
This week’s literary focus at Harvard is Voltaire’s Candide. At first glance, the novel can be read simply as a fast‑paced adventure story, full of absurd twists and comic misfortunes. Yet, as our professors emphasized in lecture and discussion, the real richness of Candide lies beyond the surface narrative. Their analysis opened up wide horizons — connecting the text to politics, economics, philosophy, religion, science, and even natural disasters that shaped Voltaire’s world and inspired his writing.
What struck me most is how Candide becomes not just a tale of wandering characters but a lens through which we can explore the Enlightenment itself: its debates about optimism and suffering, its fascination with global trade and exploration, and its search for harmony between reason, faith, and lived experience. Reading the book alongside these discussions was eye‑opening, world‑opening, and deeply moving, revealing just how many layers of meaning can be cultivated within a single work of literature.
What follows here are the notes from the lecture held by Professors David Damrosch and Martin Puchner on Voltaire’s Candide.
Voltaire and the Birth of the Literary Market
For centuries, writers had little choice but to rely on patrons — kings, nobles, or the church. Literature was written for courts and temples, not for a broad public. To survive as a writer, you either had to be independently wealthy or tethered to a powerful sponsor.
By the early 18th century, however, the book trade was changing. A genuine market in literature was emerging: chaotic, competitive, and unregulated. Writers could now cater to readers directly, without bowing to royal or religious authority. This was both liberating and precarious. One could get rich, but one could just as easily starve.
Voltaire thrived in this new environment. He was a professional writer in the modern sense, living by his pen. His works were often edgy, critical of authoritarianism in both politics and religion. That boldness landed him in the Bastille and later in exile in England, where he absorbed the lessons of constitutional monarchy, freedom of speech, and above all, commerce. Unlike Spain or Portugal, whose empires were built on gold and conquest, England’s strength lay in trade — private enterprise like the East India Company. Voltaire admired this system, seeing it as a check against government autocracy.
For his own career, the international book market became crucial. If Paris censored him, he could publish abroad. He understood the mechanics of distribution, piracy, and branding long before “publishing strategy” was a phrase.
Candide and the Game of Publishing
When Voltaire released Candide in 1759, he played the market brilliantly. He published simultaneously in four countries — Geneva, Paris, London, and Amsterdam — all in French. The book appeared anonymously, with no author or publisher listed. This was radical. Traditionally, title pages carried names and addresses, pointing readers to the bookseller’s shop. Voltaire stripped all that away.
Why? To evade censorship and to blunt piracy. By flooding multiple markets at once, he made it harder for authorities to suppress the book and harder for pirates to steal his thunder. It was an open secret that Voltaire was the author, but anonymity gave him cover while living in France.
Of course, piracy still struck. Within six weeks, an English translation appeared, proudly naming “Monsieur de Voltaire” and the publisher’s shop on the Strand. The English publisher didn’t care if Voltaire faced arrest in France — scandal sold books. And Voltaire, by then a brand name, guaranteed sales.
The Geneva edition alone sold 20,000 copies in its first year, a true bestseller by modern standards. Voltaire profited handsomely from his French editions, though he earned nothing from foreign translations. Still, he knew the market, played it well, and even used his fiction to settle scores. One Amsterdam publisher who had cheated him earlier reappeared in Candide as a villainous caricature — proof that it’s dangerous to cross an author.
Voltaire’s mastery of both literature and commerce made him not just a philosophe but a pioneer of the modern publishing world. He understood that writing was no longer confined to courts or temples; it was a product in a global market, subject to competition, piracy, and branding. And he turned that reality into opportunity.
Satire, Earthquakes, and the “Best of All Possible Worlds”
When Voltaire sat down to write Candide, he wasn’t just spinning comic fiction. He was sharpening satire against some of the most influential philosophical ideas of his age. Chief among them was the optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued that we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”
This claim was rooted in theology. If God is perfect, Leibniz reasoned, then the world He created must also be perfect. Even suffering, disaster, and injustice must somehow fit into a grand design of harmony. It was a bold attempt to justify the existence of evil within a monotheistic universe — what Leibniz himself called theodicy.
But then came the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. In a single morning, 85% of the city was destroyed. Tens of thousands died, many crushed while attending mass on All Souls’ Day. The catastrophe was followed by a tsunami and fires that consumed what remained. For Voltaire, the irony was unbearable: how could a benevolent God allow worshippers to be killed in church?
The disaster ignited fierce debate across Europe. Was this divine punishment, random chance, or simply nature at work in a deistic universe where God had wound up the cosmic clock and stepped aside? Voltaire seized the moment. In Candide, he lampooned Leibniz’s optimism through the character of Pangloss, who insists — absurdly, in the face of endless suffering — that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
Possible Worlds and Satire in Fiction
Leibniz’s philosophy wasn’t just theological; it was logical. He imagined different possible worlds, each with its own truths and contingencies. Some propositions were necessarily true in all worlds, others necessarily false, and some contingent. From this framework, he concluded that God, being perfect, could only create the best possible world.
Voltaire turned this abstract logic into biting satire. He juxtaposed real-world horrors — war, slavery, natural disaster — with utopian fantasies like El Dorado. In Candide, El Dorado is a glittering “possible world,” a place of abundance and harmony, but it exists only as a fleeting dream, contrasted against the brutal reality of the Suriname slave trade.
This technique wasn’t unique to Voltaire. Jonathan Swift had already experimented with “possible worlds” in Gulliver’s Travels, sending his hero to lands of giants, tiny people, and floating islands. Voltaire himself had written Micromégas, an early science-fiction tale of interplanetary visitors who mock human pretensions. But in Candide, the satire cut deeper: utopia and dystopia collide, exposing the absurdity of optimism in a world scarred by disaster and cruelty.
Voltaire’s satire wasn’t just about mocking Leibniz. It was about confronting the Enlightenment’s central tension: how to reconcile reason, faith, and the harsh realities of human existence. By weaving together topical events like the Lisbon earthquake, philosophical debates about theodicy, and imaginative “possible worlds,” Candide became more than a comic novel. It became a philosophical weapon — a way to laugh at optimism while forcing readers to grapple with suffering, injustice, and the limits of human reason.
Voltaire’s Values in El Dorado
El Dorado in Candide is not just a fantasy of wealth; it’s a thought experiment about values. The streets are paved with gold, jewels lie scattered, and yet no aristocracy hoards them. Children play with gems as if they were pebbles. Wealth exists, but it has no corrupting power. This reflects Voltaire’s suspicion of luxury as a tool of hierarchy and oppression. In El Dorado, abundance is common property — closer to a communal or “proto‑communist” vision than to aristocratic privilege.
Religion in El Dorado is equally telling. Voltaire was not an atheist but a deist: he believed in a divine watchmaker who set the universe in motion but does not intervene in daily affairs. In El Dorado, people worship God without priests, without petitions for favors, and without the selfishness Voltaire saw in conventional prayer. Religion becomes natural, harmonious, and free of institutional corruption.
Technology and science also underpin this utopia. Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet shared a passion for mathematics, optics, and physics, and El Dorado reflects that Enlightenment confidence in reason and natural order. The inhabitants live in harmony with the physical universe, not trapped by materialism, but attuned to its beauty and balance.
Comedy, and Survival in Candide
Voltaire’s satire doesn’t simply mock optimism; it exposes the limits of philosophy when it becomes detached from reality. Pangloss, the comic philosopher, embodies this flaw. No matter what happens — war, disease, rape, slavery, natural disaster — he repeats the same refrain: “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” His rigidity makes him absurd, and Voltaire uses comedy to show how dangerous it is when philosophy becomes dogma.
Aristophanes, in The Clouds, dragged Socrates onto the comic stage, turning the philosopher into a figure of ridicule. Comedy thrives on puncturing authority, and philosophers — with their lofty abstractions — make perfect targets. Voltaire inherits this resource of comedy, but he also uses it to grapple seriously with the world.
In Candide, Voltaire discovered the power of narrative comedy to stage philosophy itself, to dramatize ideas rather than declaim them.
His earlier poem on the Lisbon earthquake was monologic — one voice railing against optimism. But Candide is dialogic, full of perspectives, contradictions, and comic exchanges. This makes the critique more persuasive. Instead of Voltaire shouting at Leibniz, we watch Pangloss and Candide stumble through disasters, clinging to optimism, and we laugh at their blindness.
Practical Philosophy vs. Abstract Philosophy
The real counterweight to Pangloss’s absurdity comes not from another philosopher but from characters on the margins: Cacambo, the mestizo guide; Cunegonde, the survivor; and the old woman, who has endured unspeakable suffering yet still declares, “I loved life.”
These figures embody a practical philosophy — born of experience, flexible, responsive to circumstance. Cunegonde compromises, schemes, and survives. The old woman reflects with distance yet clings to life. Their wisdom is not abstract but lived. They show that philosophy can be adaptive, a way of carrying on in the face of forces larger than oneself.
This is where Voltaire’s satire deepens. Pangloss is funny because he never changes. Cunegonde is moving because she does. In the end, when she reunites with Candide, her response is not a philosophical maxim but a simple, human one: “You must be hungry. Let’s eat.” It’s a line that echoes Voltaire’s own witty retort to Frederick the Great, but here it becomes the novel’s affirmation: survival, appetite, and the ordinary act of sharing a meal.
Voltaire doesn’t want us to conclude that the world is the worst possible. He wants us to see that rigid systems — whether philosophical, religious, or political — fail to account for the complexity of life. Comedy allows him to ridicule those systems while elevating the resilience of ordinary people. In Candide, philosophy is funniest when it is most absurd, but it is most profound when it emerges from lived experience.
Cultivating the Garden: Voltaire’s Ending as Global Philosophy
One of the striking features of Candide is its restless movement. The novel zigzags across Europe, South America, the Ottoman Empire, and even into imaginary utopias like El Dorado. It is, in many ways, one of the first truly global novels. Yet at the end, the frenetic pace stops. No more ships, no more zigzagging. The characters settle in Turkey, a liminal space between Europe and Asia, between Christianity and Islam. The narrative comes to rest.
This is not a retreat from the world but a recalibration. After the slapstick chaos of global wandering, the garden represents balance: nature ordered by human cultivation. It is neither rigid nor chaotic, but harmonized. Voltaire himself cultivated gardens at Ferney, walking among them with a book in hand. The metaphor is layered — cultivation of land, cultivation of mind, cultivation of community. And crucially, the garden is notre jardin — our garden. It is collective, shared, and communal.
Harmony, Humanism and technology in garden
The garden resonates with Leibniz’s idea of “pre‑established harmony,” the notion that our minds are attuned to the order of the world. But Voltaire transforms this into something humanist. The garden is not Eden, imposed by divine command. It is a humanist Eden, cultivated by people together. The necessity — il faut cultiver notre jardin — is moral, aesthetic, and practical. It is about finding grounding in a chaotic world, neither rigid like Pangloss nor scattered like the drowned Anabaptist.
This ending also echoes ancient epics. Like Gilgamesh or Odysseus, Candide’s journey ends in a kind of homecoming. But instead of returning to a divine paradise, he arrives at a garden shaped by human labor, within the divine order but requiring human effort. It is Enlightenment humanism in narrative form.
Voltaire’s utopia is not purely pastoral. El Dorado, unlike Thomas More’s Utopia, is a techno‑utopia. Engineers build devices, technology aids cultivation, and science enriches life. This reflects the early scientific revolution: mechanized agriculture, navigational instruments like the sextant, and the printing press as a new industrial technology.
Books themselves become tools — machines for living, instruments for navigating the world. Voltaire’s ethic of work and use contrasts sharply with Pococurante’s decadent library, where books are mere luxury commodities. For Voltaire, books are technologies of cultivation, just as gardens are technologies of nature.
The garden, then, is not just a metaphor for retreat. It is a blueprint for building. Voltaire’s Enlightenment vision is constructive: harmonizing opposites — male and female, European and non‑European, natural and technological. Freemasonry, with its symbols of building and craft, was part of this ethos. The garden becomes a site where dislocations — satire vs. reality, foreign vs. familiar, men vs. women — are rewound into harmony.
In this sense, Candide is not only a satire but also a manifesto for a new kind of world literature. It negotiates between conflicting forces, weaving them into a narrative that ends not in despair but in cultivation. The garden is the best of all possible worlds not because it is perfect, but because it is built — patiently, collectively, and harmoniously.
Conclusion: Voltaire’s Global Satire and the Work of Cultivation
Voltaire’s Candide is more than a comic tale; it is a mirror of the Enlightenment world. From his professional mastery of the literary market to his restless travels across Europe, Prussia, and Geneva, Voltaire embodied the new possibilities of a global economy of ideas. His novel reflects this mobility, zigzagging across continents and utopias, weaving together influences from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to the Lisbon earthquake, from Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” to Frederick the Great’s court.
At its heart, Candide is a satire on rigid philosophy and blind optimism. Pangloss’s absurd insistence on harmony in the face of disaster dramatizes the dangers of abstract systems detached from lived experience. Against this, Voltaire elevates practical philosophy — embodied by survivors like Cunegonde, Cacambo, and the old woman — who adapt, endure, and carry on. Comedy becomes a tool not just for ridicule but for serious engagement with the world’s suffering and resilience.
El Dorado offers a glimpse of values Voltaire cherished: communal wealth, natural religion without priests, harmony with science and nature. Yet even utopia is fleeting. The novel ends not in escape but in grounding: il faut cultiver notre jardin. This garden is collective, pragmatic, and humanist. It harmonizes nature and technology, order and chaos, Europe and the wider world. It is neither the best nor the worst of all possible worlds, but the one we must build together.
That final phrase has echoed across centuries. In political philosophy, it reminds us to focus on local responsibility and shared community. In environmental ethics, it calls us to steward the Earth as our common garden. In literature, it remains one of the most brilliant narrative closures ever written — a slowing of pace after global wandering, a homecoming not to Eden but to human labor and collective survival.
Voltaire’s masterpiece endures because it teaches a modest but profound lesson: we cannot control the world’s chaos, but we can cultivate — patiently, harmoniously, and together — the spaces we inhabit. In that work of cultivation lies both freedom and hope.
