History-Makers: Voltaire's Satire Masterpiece

New pins, old pins, so many pins! We're rounding out our Zodiac set with Aries and Pisces, and our back catalog is available for our Spring Cleaning Sale. It's here for the rest of the weekend at our merch site, link below. History is already so dang complicated, sometimes we just want it to make sense, so we love chopping up the timeline into neat little eras. Classical world, medieval, renaissance, modern. It's nice, it's easy, and it's completely deceptive, especially in the case of the Enlightenment. This so-called Age of Reason spanned from the late 1600s through to the end of the 1700s, and is largely understood as Europe's intellectual movement away from faff-like religious wars, and towards tolerance, science, and reason. On the tin, it suggests an age where people were smart, trying to understand the world more and devise creative ways to make it better. That all did happen, but we can't forget that we're dealing with history, and people are still... well... people. Because outside of the academies and hot new treatises about living in a society, the world looked pretty normal. Arguably worse. The triangle trade and slavery were still going strong, meanwhile Europe had invented the concept of global war. So while the Enlightenment was an exciting Age of Reason for some, it was business as usual for everyone else. Even still, the most celebrated minds of the era were not perfect machines of rational thought, as famed philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau were arguably the most insane people on the continent because of each other. In short, the Enlightenment is not quite a hypocritical period in history, but it's definitely whack, and all the more interesting for it. And one book written by our Parisian pal Voltaire captures this messy spirit of the age better than any other, a little novella by the name Candide. This story is a work of philosophy and a satire. It's at once deeply tragic, yet unfathomably funny. Candide is the most clever piece of literature this side of the Renaissance, and it's simply one of the best books ever written. So, to understand what compelled Voltaire to compose such a cunning satire and appreciate why it's so dang fun to read, let's do some history. By the middle of the 1700s, Voltaire already had nearly four decades of experience writing histories, plays, and treatises on a variety of subjects, and was fabulously wealthy from his brief but lucrative career as a lottery scammer. Despite being banished from his hometown of Paris two decades earlier, he had become possibly the most famous writer in the French-speaking world and had no intention of slowing down. In 1755, Voltaire settled in the Swiss Republic of Geneva, half a town away from his best frenemy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But that same year, on the far west edge of the continent, away from the epistolary bickering, calamity struck, as the Portuguese capital of Lisbon was flattened by an offshore earthquake that triggered a massive tsunami. Between the five meter wide fissures, the building collapses, the fires from falling candles and lanterns, and the gigantic crush of ocean water to top it off, it was an apocalyptic scale of devastation. With as much as a fifth of the city's population dying outright, and 10,000 more killed across Portugal and Morocco, Europe was no stranger to suffering, but the Lisbon earthquake was among the worst natural disasters since the plague first struck, so the continent was appropriately freaked the f*** out by it. Confounding the usual attempts to suss out a heavenly cause for the trauma, the quake had struck on All Saints Day and destroyed every major church in Lisbon, so nobody could make sense of why God would ruin his own feast day, or what he was even punishing them for. If indeed this was God's work at all. See, in the early 1700s, the fashionable philosophy of the day was optimism, the belief that our big buddy God made us the optimal world to live in, so everything that happens, however seemingly good or bad, was in service of this perfect or near perfect world. The two most famous optimist philosophers were Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who independently discovered calculus at the same time as Isaac Newton, and Alexander Pope, best known for his extremely good translations of the Alien and Odyssey into rhyming English verse. Pope had claimed that what is, is right, and Leibniz asserted that we live in the best of all possible worlds, to square the idea that we don't live in a perfect world free from suffering, but we live in the best world God could possibly create and maintain for us. Both men had died earlier in the 1700s, but their philosophy remained extremely popular even to this day. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is the same core logic behind God works in mysterious ways, and everything happens for a reason. And while I pride myself on my calm and even-handed coverage of history, Voltaire thought all this blind justification for misery was, in fact, horse sh**. He quickly composed a brief 180-line poem on the Lisbon disaster, poking holes in the optimist logic, and mailed a copy to his friend and fellow philosopher Rousseau, who was thoroughly unimpressed. He in turn argued that the real evil was society, packing people so tightly into cities with all those dangling buildings just itching to collapse, but if people lived in nature instead, everything would have been fine. Voltaire didn't respond to his pen pal's claim directly, but we can easily imagine a retort along the lines of, What? No. What? Forget the buildings, you daft, surprisingly handsome idiot. It's the whole ass tsunami. The water would kill anyone inside of the coast whether they lived in the city or not. And it did. That's the problem. Not society. You smoochable buffoon. You idiot. God. And so the stage is set, with Voltaire at the intersection of the worst calamity in a century, plus the onset of the Seven Years' War, and that philosophy of smug complacency he despised. Naturally, the result was the single funniest book in French history, that little hundred-page satire called Candide or Optimism. The story begins in the perfectly ideal castle of Thunderton Troncht in Westphalia, at least according to the protagonist Candide anyway. He's only seen one castle, but it has gates and windows, so lacking any other evidence, it's gotta be the best in the world. Candide is an eager young lad, very personable and extremely naive. That outlook is encouraged by his tutor Pangloss, an optimist philosopher who believes that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. But as the book will soon reveal, all is not for the best, as Candide gets booted from the castle for an affair with the Baron's daughter, and he sets on a perilous journey across the world, traversing Europe and crossing the Atlantic to South America before coming back east and finally ending in Ottoman Constantinople. Along the way, he and his gaggle of misfit travel buddies suffer every variety of hardship, from violence to imprisonment to natural disasters and witness several more. If optimism claims that our world is the best one possible, Voltaire's aim here is to skewer that fallacy with the spear point of satire. It's a winning strategy. Why write an overlong critique of a philosophy when you can mock it far more expediently? The wise Dr. Pangloss sagely claims that noses were formed to support spectacles, therefore we have spectacles. Legs are clearly devised for the wearing of breeches, therefore we wear breeches. The reader is thus primed to suspect that Pangloss might, perhaps, be an idiot, so we then infer the rest of his philosophy is just as laughable. Voltaire obliterates optimism in those first three pages, so the remaining 29 chapters are rhetorical overkill. I, for one, am biased to appreciate comedy as a teaching tool, and nobody in history does it better than him. Voltaire spends most of his runtime relentlessly mocking every corner of the world his characters observe, including his beloved hometown of Paris and even himself. Voltaire jabs at many of his own snobbish opinions about art and literature by putting them in the mouth of a bored Venetian noble who complains about everything. As Candide remarks, But Voltaire could do more than mock and parody, as Candide's journey finally ends with his realization that we must cultivate our garden, accepting that understanding the metaphysics of the universe won't solve our earthly miseries, nor will any amount of money or power. There's no true escape from the horrors of the world, but there is a way to cope. The hard work of quiet, calm self-improvement. Rejecting want, rejecting vice. After 29 chapters of near non-stop torment between natural disasters like the Lisbon quake and man-made atrocities like the Seven Years' War and colonial slavery, this interpretation of stoic philosophy certainly fits. But also, in addressing Voltaire's own crisis of faith after the IRL Lisbon tragedy, wondering how a loving god could possibly let this happen, this philosophy rings with a genuine sincerity. Now, as with all comedy, to explain the joke is to ruin the joke, so permit me instead a brief taste of Voltaire's prose from Chapter 2, when Candide finds himself press-ganked to fight in the Seven Years' War and is caught trying to leave. He was asked at his court-martial which he preferred, to be flogged by the entire regiment 36 times or receive 12 lead bullets in his skull simultaneously. In vain did he remonstrate with them about freedom of the will, and protest that he preferred neither one option nor the other. A choice had to be made. He determined, by virtue of that gift of God called freedom, to run the gauntlet 36 times. He endured two runs. As they were lining up for the third run, Candide, who could take no more, politely asked if they would instead be so kind as to cave his head in. The plea was granted. Now extrapolate that across the entire book, and you've got a sense of why I love this ridiculous little novella so damn much. Voltaire recognized the value of being quick and direct, and that makes it all the more impressive that Candide accomplishes so much. It's an aggressively contemporary snapshot of his world, dialed right into the late 1750s, yet the tone and the feel of the book are surprisingly modern, because the Age of Enlightenment was a complete and total mess, and unfortunately, that's relatable. Living through history is an occupational hazard nobody has ever survived. The question is what we do with our little garden. See, it is a good thing Lisbon got completely obliterated by that earthquake after all. Otherwise, we wouldn't have Candide. Flawless logic. Thank you so much for watching. In the interest of not spoiling all the fun, I didn't talk about the part where Candide arrives in actual literal El Dorado, or why on earth he decided to leave. But that's why you should read it for yourself and find out. While you're all laughing at Voltaire's hilarity, I've gotta get back to work, so I'll see you in the next video.