with commentary by Salman Rushdie
Voltaire’s Candide (1759) is a short novel of around a hundred pages, but it is densely populated. Characters appear, disappear, are hanged or stabbed or sold into slavery, and then reappear cheerfully several chapters later with a plausible explanation. Each one is doing double duty: they are people in a plot, but they are also philosophical positions, social types, and satirical targets. Understanding who they are and what Voltaire intends by them makes the novel considerably richer on a second or third reading.
Candide
The name, as Salman Rushdie explains in his Rebind commentary on the novel, carries two meanings simultaneously: “candid, open, honest” but also “naive and simple and kind of a bit of a fool.” Both meanings are active throughout. Candide is good-natured, well-meaning, and genuinely kind. He is also, at the start, entirely without judgment — a blank on which the world will write its lessons.
Rushdie describes him as “the classic trope of the innocent abroad. An unworldly person thrust into the wildness of the world of the 18th century.” His illegitimate birth, hinted at but never confirmed in the novel, sets up “a note of illegitimacy” that runs through the whole book. He has no birthright, no fixed place in the social order, and no protection from what the world is about to do to him.
The novel is a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, but with a twist Rushdie identifies: “We can see when we get to the end what, if anything, Candide has actually learned.” The education is real. Whether it produces wisdom is Voltaire’s open question.
Pangloss
Candide’s tutor is the novel’s most important character after its hero, and its most sustained joke. Pangloss is Voltaire’s satirical portrait of the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who argued that God, being perfect, could only have created the most perfect world logically available. Pangloss’s formulation of this, “everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds,” is repeated throughout the novel in the face of every earthquake, torture, plague, and shipwreck Voltaire can arrange.
What makes Pangloss more than a one-note comic target is Rushdie’s reading of why he can’t stop: “For Pangloss to give up that idea is to give up his most essential nature, because he has so deeply embedded himself in that idea that if he loses that idea, who is he? He loses his identity.” This is the novel’s deepest psychological observation. Pangloss is not stupid; he is a man who has made his philosophy identical with his self, and no amount of evidence (not syphilis, not hanging, not dissection on an anatomy table) can dislodge it without destroying him entirely.
Cunégonde
La Belle Cunégonde (Voltaire almost always uses the full title) is the object of Candide’s devotion and the engine of the plot. She is the Baron’s daughter, educated in the same false paradise as Candide, and equally innocent at the start. Her education, however, is considerably more brutal than his.
Rushdie reads Cunégonde as significantly more worldly than Candide gives her credit for. When she tells him she “resisted” the Bulgarian captain and her Spanish keeper, “I suspect the answer is we don’t believe her,” Rushdie says. “She’s become much more worldly by this point in her story. And she also knows that her survival depends on keeping these two guys sweet.”
The novel’s most uncomfortable moment involving Cunégonde comes at the end, when Candide finally finds her, sunburned and roughened by work, and Voltaire describes her as “horribly ugly.” Rushdie catches what this reveals: “The moment he’s told that she’s horribly ugly, he kind of doesn’t want to marry her anymore. Just like that.” He marries her anyway, but that moment of recoil is Voltaire’s small needle in the romantic thread.
The Old Woman
The novel’s most extraordinary character arrives as a servant and turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of a pope. Voltaire gives her two full chapters, which is unusual in a book that moves at this speed. Her life has been a compendium of suffering: captivity, rape, cannibalism among a besieged garrison, the loss of one buttock. And she has survived all of it.
Her conclusion is not despair: “A hundred times I was upon the point of killing myself; but still I loved life.” Rushdie reads this as something deeper than endurance: “The old woman clings to the love of life. In spite of everything that’s happened to her, she rejects suicide because she loves life too much. And what is that rooted in? Life is better than not being alive. Because we’re all going to be not alive for a very long time. We have to hold on to it because it’s all there is.”
Cacambo
Candide’s companion in South America is one of the novel’s most underrated figures. Where Candide is naive, Cacambo is practical. Where Candide stumbles into every trap, Cacambo talks his way out of them, most memorably persuading a tribe of cannibals that their prisoners are not in fact Jesuits. He is defined by language skills and loyalty, qualities the novel treats as genuinely valuable in a world where both are rare.
Cacambo is also, quietly, a critique of the colonial world that produced him. Half-Spanish, half-native South American, he navigates between cultures with a fluency that the pure-blooded Europeans around him entirely lack. When he reappears near the end, enslaved, the book makes a pointed observation about what loyalty and competence actually earn you in Voltaire’s world.
Martin
If Pangloss represents optimism taken to absurdity, Martin represents its mirror image. Introduced as “a scholar who had been robbed by his wife, beaten by his son, and abandoned by his daughter,” his philosophy is thoroughgoing pessimism: the world is bad, human beings are worse, and there is no reason to expect otherwise.
Neither Martin nor Pangloss wins the argument. That is precisely Voltaire’s point. The novel does not resolve it; it holds it open, leaving the reader between two positions neither of which the evidence supports.
Cunégonde’s Brother — The Baron
The Baron’s son appears and reappears throughout the novel as the emblem of a single, immovable trait: class snobbery. He and Candide are genuinely fond of each other until Candide mentions wanting to marry Cunégonde, at which point the friendship dissolves instantly. Rushdie reads this as one of the novel’s sharpest social observations: “Class is stronger than friendship, is stronger than even self interest. The moment Candide says he wants to marry Cunégonde, the brother becomes an enemy rather than a friend.”
What makes the joke darker is that the class world the Baron is defending has been physically destroyed. The castle is rubble. The family has no land, no power. And still: seventy-two quarterings, and a bastard shall not marry his sister. “That reflex of superiority,” Rushdie says, “is ingrained from birth.”