to question his optimistic view of the world. By the end of his life, however, Candide settles down on a small farm with the woman he sought all his life (now grown quite ugly and disagreeable), and he brushes aside his original belief that things are all ordered for the best. He recognizes that the attempt to try to ignore the inevitability of suffering and evil in life leads to a tragic failure: the failure to try to improve the world in whatever ways are possible. He is now more content with the attitude that “we must cultivate our garden,” thus abandoning the question of the good of the whole universe for the task of alleviating the misery of existence in his small corner of the world.

Babouc

In Voltaire’s shorter tales Babouc and Memnon, the issue of the apparent dominance of evil over good receives an answer similar to that given by Zadig in 1747. As in the novel Zadig, the protagonists learn that this world is imperfect but that it plays its appointed role in a universe that is ordered by Providence.

In Babouc, the jinni Ithuriel descends to earth to send Babouc on a fact-finding journey to Persia. Babouc is to travel throughout Persepolis to see if the Persians are worthy of punishment or destruction because of their evil actions. Babouc sets off and soon finds himself in the midst of a war between Persia and India. This war, begun over a petty dispute, has been ravaging the country for twenty years. Babouc witnesses bloody battles, treachery, and cruelty on both sides. He also witnesses many amazing acts of kindness and humanity. His journey continues in this vein. For every set of abuses in religion, politics, sexual conduct, and education, he finds also some good and noble elements. His cry of surprise echoes throughout the piece: “Unintelligible mortals! How is it that you can combine so much meanness with so much greatness, such virtues with such crimes?”

By the end, he agrees with a wise man whom he meets that evil is prevalent and good people are rare, yet the best is hidden from a visitor and needs to be sought more diligently. As he examines the society, he finds that those who have obtained positions of power through corrupt means are capable of devotion to their work and often pursue their careers with devotion and justice. He gains compassion for the people and their leaders and devises a way in which to communicate what he has learned to the jinni. He has a metalsmith fashion a statue out of every kind of stone, earth, and metal and takes this figure back to Ithuriel, asking, “Will you break this pretty little image, because it is not all gold and diamonds?” Ithuriel immediately comprehends and pardons the Persians, deciding not to interfere with “the way the world goes.” Even though the world is not fully good, it contains enough good to merit its continued existence.

Memnon: Or, Human Wisdom

In Memnon: Or, Human Wisdom (not to be confused with Memnon: Histoire orientale, the original title of Zadig), Voltaire takes a different path to a similar moral. In this humorous tale, a young man named Memnon plans to become perfectly wise by ridding himself of all of his passions. He decides to renounce love, drinking, wasting money, and arguing. He is assured that this will lead him to financial and emotional security, remove all hindrances to the exercise of his reason, and thus make him happy. After he forms this plan, he looks out his window and sees a young woman in tears. He rushes to counsel her, sheerly out of compassion, and ends in her embrace. Her uncle enters, and only a large sum of money convinces him not to kill Memnon. Memnon then has dinner with his friends and consoles himself by getting drunk and gambling, which leads to an argument in which he loses an eye. “The wise Memnon is carried back home drunk, with no money, and minus an eye.” He recovers a bit, only to find that his investors have bankrupted him.

He ends up sleeping on a pile of straw outside of his house and dreams that a six-winged heavenly creature, his good jinni, comes to him. Memnon wonders where his good jinni was the night before and is told that he was with Memnon’s brother, who was blinded and imprisoned. Memnon comments that it is worthwhile “to have a good genie in a family, so that one of two brothers may be one-eyed, the other blind, one lying on straw, the other in prison.” The jinni helpfully points out that the situation will get better if Memnon abandons his ridiculous attempt to be perfectly wise. This world is only one of many others, all of which are ordered by degrees of perfection, and the earth is far down near the craziest end of the scale. All is well, the jinni assures him, when one considers the arrangement of the universe as a whole. Memnon says that he will believe that all is well when he can see that it is with both eyes.

Jeannot and Colin

Although Voltaire’s fiction depicts a crazy world where fortunes are uncertain, evils abound, and goodness does not ensure happiness, there are two things which are valued in most of his stories—the search for knowledge and the companionship of trusted friends. In Jeannot and Colin, Voltaire examines the worth of friendship and learning over the illusory happiness to be gained from wealth and power.

Jeannot and Colin are friends and roommates at school until Jeannot’s father sends for him to come home and enjoy the new family wealth. Jeannot does so, scoring his old friend and turning with relish to his new life of leisure. His mother and father discuss his future with a tutor, but each area of study, whether philosophy, mathematics, or history, is judged of no use to a young man of society who now has servants to do as he wishes. They decide to teach him to dance and be attractive, so that he can shine in social graces. He becomes a vaudeville singer and charms all the ladies of breeding. This, however, does not last: His father is bankrupted, his mother forced to become a servant, and Jeannot himself is homeless. In a state of distress, he runs into his old friend, Colin, whom he had snubbed. Colin is overjoyed to see him and offers to take Jeannot into his home and his business and to help Jeannot’s mother and father out of their difficulties. Colin’s kindness and forgiveness change Jeannot’s heart and allow Jeannot’s natural goodness to grow, free from the ravages of society. Jeannot lives happily, assisting his parents and marrying Colin’s equally sweet-tempered sister.

Philosophical reflections and social satire weigh down the plots of some later stories, such as The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Parson Goodman, making them tedious. These stories show the drier side of Voltaire’s satire. At his best, however, Voltaire offered his readers richly woven tales which critiqued society, satirized pretensions, expressed new philosophical ideas, and simply entertained. The stories include much humor and piercing insight into the common follies of humanity. These philosophical tales succeeded, as no straightforward philosophy could, in offering many people new perspectives on reason, experience, and humanity.

Voltaire: The Poet and Philosopher

Very early in his life, Voltaire gained a reputation as the outstanding poet and playwright of his time. Yet, although his poetry and plays earned for him fame and considerable sums of money, most are now seldom read or performed. Henriade, his one serious epic poem, is considered heavy reading. Some of Voltaire’s poetry, however—especially pieces such as Le Mondain (1736; The Man of the World, 1764) and Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake—has survived the test of time. His best poetry presents his philosophical ideas in the critical, often satirical, and epigrammatic style that is so characteristic of almost all of his writing. The Man of the World and Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake were vehicles for Voltaire’s ideas—ideas that summarized the principal intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment.

Voltaire held firmly to the idea that reason, human intelligence, was the cure for all ills. He employed reason as a weapon in his attack against the social and political abuses of the old regime, as well as its religious intolerance. In The Man of the World, he stressed the importance of economic progress and the right of individuals to enjoy the luxuries and pleasures that modern society had begun to produce. In Poem on the Lisbon Earthquake, written just after the terrible earthquake (1755) in Lisbon, Portugal, which killed some thirty thousand people, Voltaire questioned the philosophical optimism of the famous German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and the English poet and essayist Alexander Pope. He soundly rejected the notion that “all is well” here on earth and that one should accept Divine benevolence as an explanation for all that befalls humans.

Voltaire’s concern for the individual’s place on earth, the role that humans play in making their own history, was also apparent in the approach that he took in writing The Age of Louis XIV and The General History and State of Europe. In both these works, Voltaire broke new ground in the serious writing of social history. He very carefully documented his many volumes, often using unedited texts or securing eyewitness accounts. Even today, his The Age of Louis XIV is considered an interesting history of the French king.

From one of Voltaire’s earlier works, Letters Concerning the English Nation, to one of his later works, the Philosophical Dictionary, he continued to define and spread far and wide his ideas on liberty, politics, religion, and literature. His Letters Concerning the English Nation, the principal literary result of Voltaire’s three-year stay in England, had a profound influence when first published on the Continent. “The first bomb launched against the old regime” is the way the well-known French literary historian Gustave Lanson summarized the impact that piece had on France. In much the same style as that of a modern journalist, Voltaire presented ideas and information on English society in clear, direct, and often cutting prose. Readers of his day had little difficulty in understanding that Voltaire was drawing direct comparisons—always to the detriment of the old regime—between the societies of England and France.

While living in England, he wrote especially on the religious and political liberties enjoyed by English citizens. In short “letters,” published in his book Letters Concerning the English Nation, he described the many religious sects (Quakers, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Unitarians, for example) that tolerated one another and avoided religious persecution. In another letter, this one on the English Parliament, Voltaire underscored the limitations that English government placed on its monarchy; the same restrictions on kings did not exist on the Continent, and Voltaire made a point to highlight the differences in the two political systems. The last letter of the volume, and also the most controversial of its time, was an attack on the religious pessimism of the Jansenist writer Blaise Pascal. Voltaire, concerned with worldly pleasures, refused to accept Pascal’s position that humans were fundamentally mean and condemned to be unhappy while on earth.

The Philosophical Dictionary

These themes are continued and elaborated upon in the Philosophical Dictionary. Short, caustic, satirical entries titled “tolerance,” “torture,” and “tyranny” in the Philosophical Dictionary are typical in style and content of so much of Voltaire’s writings. In these pieces, Voltaire denounces the folly of humanity’s intolerance, the despotism of unlimited political powers, and the excesses of religious fervor. The image that finally emerges in these works is that of a mature and measured writer, a writer who has completely mastered his craft. Also appearing in these works is the definition most widely applied to the term “humanist.” Voltaire, perhaps more than any other modern Western writer, defined and summarized European humanism and human emergence from the age of despotic religious and political authority. His impious expression Écraser l’infâme (to crush the infamous) became one of the slogans of the eighteenth century. It was not so much directed against religion or even the Church of Rome as against those people (enemies of Voltaire) who used religion to justify literary censorship and their own misuse of authority.

The themes of social justice, religious tolerance, and the acceptance of the relative nature of an imperfect world were the central subjects of Voltaire’s philosophical tales. Even though he expressed disdain for novels or short stories as a genre, it is these works that are most often read today. Beginning with Zadig, he finished some twenty-five philosophical tales. As with all of his tales, Zadig was meant to be entertaining without any regard for verisimilitude or the likelihood that so many adventures, or misadventures, could really befall his heroes and heroines. Voltaire never missed the chance to impart a message or to use literary entertainment as a means of propaganda. Zadig, the hero of the tale, tries in vain to understand rationally why some humans are happy and others are not. In the end, having become ruler of oriental Babylon, he opts to reign wisely in his own kingdom in order to establish peace for his subjects. Zadig (unlike the French monarchy) became the enlightened sovereign, giving his people abundance and glory.

The tale Micromegas was written while Voltaire was at the château of Cirey with Mme du Châtelet, and her scientific influence on Voltaire was evident. Micromegas, an intergalactic traveler, has more than one brush with the principal scientific theories of the age. Voltaire took the opportunity to ridicule the prestigious French Academy of Sciences for still adhering to Cartesian astronomy (named after René Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician) and ignoring the explanations posited by Sir Isaac Newton (the English scientist, mathematician, and philosopher). Ridicule and exaggeration were at once part of Voltaire’s style and philosophical message. Exaggeration in Micromegas took the form of actual physical size: While visiting different planets of the universe, Micromegas is alternately viewed as a giant and a lilliputian. Voltaire meant to underscore the importance of maintaining an open mind and of avoiding a slavish devotion to one’s own perspective.

Candide, the most widely known of all Voltaire’s works, is the philosophical tale of young Candide’s fall from paradise (the château Thunder-ten-tronckh) and of his sojourns from Europe to Latin America and finally to Constantinople. Voltaire had recently arrived at his last home, the château of Ferney, and he was still shocked by the number of lives that had been lost in the huge 1755 earthquake in Lisbon. Candide became his angriest cry against those who would explain away both natural and human-made disasters by appealing to Providence. Voltaire’s prose was never more sarcastic and ironic in its condemnation of war, dogmatism, and intolerance than in this tale, which takes its readers from the torture chambers of the Portuguese inquisition to the golden streets of Eldorado and, finally, to the simple garden cultivated by Candide and his beloved Cunegonde.

Voltaire's Revolutionary Impact

Voltaire was the most influential writer in eighteenth century France. He epitomizes the philosopher of the siècle des lumières, the Age of Enlightenment; his curiosity embraces all the developments of his day, whether French or otherwise European, scientific or literary. His faith in human reason does not waver, although his optimism about human progress often does. His writings reflect the changing literary tastes of the century as he defends a waning classical tradition while himself introducing the most outrageous innovations. His theater particularly embodies both of these tendencies, whereas his tales tend to exploit traditional literary forms in order to introduce a unique type of satiric philosophical story.

Voltaire’s long fiction includes many rather short stories, which have been called indiscriminately romans philosophiques (philosophical novels) or contes philosophiques (philosophical tales). According to Henri Coulet, Voltaire himself used the term histoire (story). Because satire such as Voltaire’s depends on economy of style and the tales have no real development of plot or character, they are limited in length by the genre itself.

Candide is considered to be the most perfect example of the philosophical novel, revealing Voltaire’s brilliant irony and vivacious wit. All the tales are humorous tragicomedies and include incidents that are by turns absurd, grotesque, poetic, romantic, and shocking. The unifying element is always the philosophical theme that Voltaire is stressing. Voltaire began writing his tales at the age of forty-five, when his ideas were firmly established; hence, the concerns and reforms he seeks to address remain fairly constant throughout the tales. Despite the fact that these stories are meant to appeal primarily to the intellect, they are eminently entertaining. Voltaire’s writings are rooted firmly in the humanistic rationalism of the first half of his century rather than in the literature of pre-Romantic sensibility, which made its appearance in the late 1700’s.

Henri Bénac’s suggestion that the tales fall into four chronological groups related to the development of Voltaire’s thought is widely accepted. Bénac proposes that the first two groups—of 1747 to 1752 and 1756 to 1759—reveal Voltaire’s growing realization that war must be waged against evils such as intolerance, injustice, corruption, and ignorance. The first group includes such stories as Le Monde comme il va (1748; revised as Babouc: Ou, Le Monde comme il va, 1749; Babouc: Or, The World as It Goes, 1754; also known as The World as It Is: Or, Babouc’s Vision, 1929), Memnon: Or, Human Wisdom, and La Lettre d’un Turc (1750); Zadig and Micromegas are the best known of the group. The second group includes History of Scarmentado’s Travels, which is the outline of Candide. In the third group figure Jeannot et Colin (1764; Jeannot and Colin, 1929), Le Blanc et le noir (1764; The Two Genies, 1895), and, best known, Ingenuous, The Man of Forty Crowns, and The Princess of Babylon. According to Bénac, the tales in this third group are, like Voltaire’s pamphlets, weapons in his war against oppression of all kinds. In the last group, Bénac sees Voltaire searching for a morality on which to base a humane and free society. Tales in this period include L’Histoire de Jenni (1775) and Les Oreilles du Comte de Chesterfield (1775; The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Parson Goodman, 1826).

Voltaire's Approach to Society and Satire

The concerns of the early tales recur throughout all the stories, but Voltaire presents the different tales with a rich range of tones. Zadig, like other tales of this early group, is imbued with sunny humor and gaiety despite the sardonic irony that underscores the misfortunes of the hero. Voltaire sketches his hero Zadig with an unusually delicate touch, and some passages dazzle momentarily with rare poetry: “He marveled at these vast globes of light which to our eyes appear to be only feeble sparks. His soul flew up into the infinite and, detached from his senses, contemplated the immutable order of the universe.”

Memnon: Histoire orientale contained fifteen chapters that reappeared in Zadig in 1748. The story of Zadig is in the picaresque tradition, which is to say that the hero, on his travels, meets with many adventures. The plot of such a tale is of necessity episodic and highly imaginative. Zadig, a wealthy, virtuous, and handsome young Babylonian, is about to marry the beautiful young Semire, who loves him “passionately.” When a jealous youth, Orcan, attempts to abduct Semire, Zadig bravely rescues his betrothed, receiving a wound that might mean the loss of an eye. Instead of expressing her gratitude, Semire protests that she hates one-eyed men, and she promptly marries Orcan. Zadig recovers quickly and marries another woman, Azora, whose faithfulness he puts to the test by pretending to have died. Unfortunately, Azora fails the test. Zadig encounters difficulties with the law when he makes scientific deductions from observing the tracks of the queen’s dog and the king’s horse, leading a huntsman to deduce that Zadig stole the animals. Zadig eventually becomes the king’s prime minister.

His next misfortune arises through no fault of his own: Queen Astarté falls in love with him. The king, in jealousy, plots to kill them both, and Zadig has to flee. As he arrives in Egypt, he sees an Egyptian beating a woman, who asks Zadig to save her. In the ensuing fight, Zadig kills his adversary. Zadig is arrested and imprisoned for this act, then sold as a slave and taken to Arabia by his master, Sétoc, with whom he becomes close friends. Zadig dissuades a young widow from burning herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, as is the religious custom. He also persuades an Egyptian, an Indian, a Chinese, a Greek, and a Celt to worship the same Supreme Being. Zadig is accused of impiety by Arabian priests and condemned to be burned. The young widow whom he saved now helps him escape.

Zadig next goes to the island of Serendib (Ceylon) on behalf of Sétoc. He makes a good impression on the king of the island and helps him to find an honest minister. On his travels, Zadig meets the brigand chief Arbogad and learns that King Moabdar has gone mad and been killed, and Astarté has disappeared. Zadig eventually discovers that Astarté is a captive of Ogul, who is sick with an imaginary illness. Zadig cures Ogul, and the two return to Babylon, where peace is restored. Zadig wins a tournament that is held to decide who shall be the new king of Babylon and marry Astarté. Zadig wins the tournament but is cheated, and his rival claims the victory. In the middle of his despair, Zadig meets a hermit who reveals to him the secret of happiness, and Zadig learns to accept the ways of Providence. Zadig guesses the correct answers to the riddles and finally marries Astarté.

Zadig the hero—whose name in Arabic means “just”—attempts to be happy in a world where goodness is frustrated by absurd and illogical interventions of fate. At one point, Zadig says: “I was sent to execution because I had written verses in praise of the King; I was on the point of being strangled because the Queen had yellow ribbons; and here I am a slave with you because a brute beat his mistress. Come, let’s not lose heart; perhaps all this will end.”

The absurdity of Zadig’s world, which is out of control and beyond the powers of logical explanation, is not the horror evoked in Franz Kafka’s fiction; unlike Kafka, Voltaire does not attempt to create a sense of dreamlike but undeniable reality in either setting or characterization. Voltaire’s exotic Eastern novel is in the tradition of the fifteenth century The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, also known as The Thousand and One Nights, translated from the Arabic by Antoine Gallard and much in vogue after the success of Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721; Persian Letters, 1722). The events are as unreal as those of the fairy tale, and the sensibility of the reader is not touched by Zadig’s dilemmas. Instead, Voltaire disturbs the comfort of the reader’s reason, logic, and innate sense of order and justice; the irony of Voltaire is at work. The frustration of Zadig becomes that of his audience. The knight Itobad steals Zadig’s white suit of armor during the night, leaving his green suit in its place so that Zadig cannot claim the hand of Astarté, and Zadig cannot prove that he is the victor of the tournament, because the combatants must conceal their identities until a victor is proclaimed. Zadig has often been punished unjustly for being good, and here he is once again cheated of a happiness that is almost within his grasp. The audience is robbed of an anticipated happy ending and is frustrated by this anticlimax.

Voltaire was a master of the art of satire, and he often made use of anticlimax as an effective satiric technique. Zadig, after bewailing a list of horrifying punishments he has narrowly escaped, says, “Come, let’s not lose heart; perhaps all this will end.” This anticlimactic statement satirizes both Zadig’s naïve optimism and the ridiculous optimism of the philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Friedrich August Wolf—that “this is the best of all possible worlds”—which was much in vogue in the eighteenth century.

This leitmotif, the attack on optimism, is one of the many minor satiric barbs that Voltaire uses to spice his tale. Other satiric attacks abound in Zadig and reappear throughout the tales. Eighteenth century readers, usually members of the nobility and upper middle class, took delight in synthesizing the apparent subject of Voltaire’s narrative with the real and often audacious object of its satire. Voltaire makes a dangerous allusion to the court when the fisherman tells Zadig how archers “armed with a royal warrant were pillaging his house lawfully and in good order.” The ironic effect is achieved by the surprising juxtaposition of “pillaging” and “lawfully.” Voltaire’s irony had its basis in reality: He had been forced to flee the court at Versailles after making disparaging remarks about the courtiers being cheats. In Zadig, Voltaire also frequently satirizes the judicial system and judges who are “abysses of knowledge,” who “prove” Zadig looked out of a window even though Zadig has answered none of their questions.

Voltaire’s anticlericalism and antireligious bent often figure in the satire of Zadig. Almona the Arab widow intends to burn herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, as the Brahman religion demands. Zadig the philosopher reasons her out of this plan, convincing her that she is about to take a ridiculous course in order to satisfy her vanity and not her religious principles. Zadig also persuades Sétoc that it is ridiculous to worship shining lights (the stars), and he demonstrates his reasons by kneeling and appearing to worship lighted candles. The “bonzes,” who represent the monks, “chanted beautiful prayers to music, and left the state a prey to the barbarians.” Zadig’s rationalism (and Voltaire’s) is primarily concerned with people’s practical problems in society.

Voltaire’s primary philosophical theme, however, is people’s concern with destiny. Zadig vacillates between hope and despair as fate deals him many adverse blows. Despite his ingenuity and virtue, which he displays when he acts as the prime minister of King Moabdar, Zadig is presented as the plaything of destiny. The fisherman’s story and the hermit incident reinforce the supremacy of this philosophical question as the main theme. How do philosophers explain the sufferings of a good person in the hands of a malevolent destiny? Voltaire resolves this problem happily with a deus ex machina ending. The angel Jesrad, representing divine intervention, tells Zadig to stop his questioning and simply worship Providence. Most men, Jesrad explains, form opinions with limited knowledge. Zadig’s virtue triumphs, and he wins his queen and rules with “justice and love. Men blessed Zadig and Zadig blessed heaven.” The skies of Zadig remain free of the blackness of Candide.

Micromegas

Micromegas, which appeared in 1752, is a philosophical tale in a more literal sense, being primarily a vehicle for ideas on relativity. It is a very short tale, with almost no action (in stark contrast to the episodic Zadig) and only two main protagonists. Micromegas (which is Greek for “little big one”) is a very tall inhabitant of the planet Sirius who has been banned from court for writing a book about insects that the “Mufti” of his planet has found to be heretical. He goes on an interplanetary voyage, finally arriving on the planet Saturn, where he meets a dwarf. (Voltaire intended his readers to recognize in the dwarf a caricature of his own enemy, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle.) The two travelers arrive on Earth and finally discover minute humans in a boat. The travelers attend a banquet at which various forms of philosophical credos are represented, allowing Voltaire to launch a satiric attack on the theories of Aristotle, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, and Leibniz. Voltaire approves of the philosophy of the follower of John Locke. A storm develops, and the philosophers fall into the pocket of Micromegas. Although the giant is angry that such small creatures have so much pride, he gives a book to the philosophers; its pages, however, are blank. Voltaire gives the closing line to the dwarf (his enemy, Fontenelle), who, upon receiving the blank book—supposedly a philosophical treatise revealing the final truth about things—says, “Ahthat’s just what I suspected.” This last line was extremely offensive to Fontenelle, because it implied that he agreed that all of his metaphysical speculations over the past years had been wasted effort—that such truths were impossible to discover and prove. This attack on metaphysics is the main thrust of Voltaire’s satire in Micromegas. Voltaire ridicules the philosophers in the boat, implying that “our little pile of mud” is relatively unimportant when seen in relation to the rest of the cosmos and that the opinions of its inhabitants are hence practically worthless. The philosophers in the boat all talk at once and all have different opinions. Voltaire shows that this kind of truth is “relative” to the person uttering it, and unreliable.

Voltaire’s Micromegas is in direct imitation of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), and Montesquieu had previously used this type of travel story in Persian Letters. Voltaire, then, used an established subgenre, the fictional travelogue, as a vehicle for social commentary: The traveler in a strange land, seeing things for the first time, has no prejudice and puts into a new perspective situations that have been seen in only a certain way for centuries. This fresh perspective opens the way for critical appraisal and reform.

In Micromegas, Voltaire makes little effort to convince the reader of the reality of his story; the tale must be accepted as fantasy. The satire is less complicated, less adroit, and less sparkling than it is in Zadig. The main purpose of the satire is to address subjects of great interest to Voltaire’s contemporaries; little of the subject matter of Micromegas is of interest to the modern reader. These two early works, Zadig and Micromegas, do, however, share a lighthearted spirit of enjoyment as Voltaire ridicules general stupidity and personal enemies. In these works, too, Voltaire formulated what would become the constant subjects of his satiric attacks throughout his tales.

Candide

Candide belongs to the second group of tales described by Bénac and is distinguished by its radical pessimism and bitter irony, in contrast to the sunny atmosphere of the previous two tales. Candide is considered the epitome of the philosophical tale, and it remains highly relevant today. Unlike Voltaire’s other writings, Candide is still read everywhere. The tale’s atmosphere is dark and often despairing. Voltaire was shocked by the horrors and atrocities of the Seven Years’ War, which began in August, 1756, when Frederick the Great invaded Saxony. The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 also horrified Voltaire, causing him to reflect on what kind of Providence could inflict death on the innocent and guilty alike. The optimistic philosophy of Leibniz and Wolf seemed totally absurd in the midst of so much human suffering.

The satire in Candide is directed above all against this optimistic philosophy, epitomized in the character Pangloss. The characters in this tale are caricatures, deformed so that each represents only one characteristic or outlook. Candide, the hero, represents naïve, good, and reasonable humanity. The philosopher Martin symbolizes a cynical Manichaeanism that acknowledges the power of evil as well as of good in the world. James, who represents real human goodness and charity, is allowed to drown in stormy seas after rescuing a sailor who had attempted to murder him. Such is the bitter mood of the tale.

The form of this novel is basically picaresque, as in Zadig, but Voltaire also parodies the novel of adventure and the novel of sentiment. The characters continually die horrible deaths after suffering gruesome tortures in various lands, but they somehow miraculously (and ridiculously) reappear, having been saved or cured. Their tearful reunions are a parody of the sentimental literature that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740-1741) introduced to France from England and that infiltrated the bourgeois dramas of Diderot, and indeed of Voltaire’s own theater. These reappearances also reinforce the central unity of the novel. A finely orchestrated rhythm unifies the entire tale; it is not simply that the main aim of the satire holds the tale together, as in the other stories. The fates (and philosophies) of secondary characters affect the hero in a rhythmic ebb and flow of alternating hope and despair that echo across the desolate landscape of a sad humanity in the throes of war, persecution, and suffering.

A gloss of the incidents in the tale reveals that there is no development of character or plot as such, and it underlines the rapid and vertiginous pace of the tale’s episodes. This brisk pace lightens the seriousness of the atrocities being described, preventing the reader from dwelling on them or taking them to heart. Hence, Voltaire employs a technique of diminution, undercutting the value and dignity of human life.

Candide lives happily in a château in Westphalia with the baron of Thunderten-tronckh. Pangloss, the disciple of the optimistic philosophy of Leibniz, also lives there as tutor, as does Cunegonde, the baron’s beautiful daughter, whom Candide loves. Candide agrees with Pangloss that all works out for the best in this wonderful world at the château. The baron, however, discovering the two lovers embracing, chases Candide out of the château. He is carried off forcibly to join an army and fight. After deserting, he goes to Holland, where he meets Pangloss, who has become a beggar and is barely recognizable with the sores of a terrible disease. Candide learns that all the people of the château have been killed.

Candide takes Pangloss to his benefactor, James the Anabaptist, who restores the sick man. The three then set sail for Lisbon, where James has a business engagement. On the way to Lisbon, their ship is wrecked in a storm, and James is drowned, while a sailor who had tried to murder him is saved. In Lisbon, Pangloss and Candide live through an earthquake that kills thirty thousand people. As Candide and Pangloss wander through the destroyed city, Pangloss attempts to comfort the citizens with his philosophy that “all is for the best”—a philosophy that, as Voltaire makes clear in his juxtaposition of Pangloss’s theories to the suffering about him, is ludicrous if not cruel. Overhearing Pangloss’s remarks, an officer of the Inquisition questions Pangloss about his belief in Original Sin and Free Will. Pangloss, sputtering his rationalizations, is arrested along with Candide—“one for having spoken, the other for having listened with an air of approval.” Pangloss is hanged, but Candide is saved by the timely arrival of Cunegonde, who has escaped from the massacre of her family.

As things are beginning to seem more hopeful, Candide is obliged to kill two people, and he has to flee to America. He takes refuge with some Jesuits in Paraguay, where he miraculously meets Cunegonde’s brother, who has also escaped the massacre at the château and has become a priest. Although he embraces Candide as a brother, his mood suddenly shifts when Candide announces that he intends to marry Cunegonde, and in the ensuing fight, Candide kills the brother of his beloved. After similar incidents in Eldorado, Surinam, Venice, and Constantinople, Candide finally finds Cunegonde. After all of her suffering, she has become very ugly, but, true to his word, Candide marries her. He then takes the advice of a wise old Turk and installs himself and his companions in an estate. He refuses to ask any more philosophical questions about evil and suffering in favor of hard work and practical reality—thus the novel’s famous closing line: “we must cultivate our garden.”

In 1759, the year that Candide was published, Voltaire bought Ferney, an estate on the French-Swiss border, which has led critics to surmise that Candide’s conclusions about work and the happiness to be found in practical progress are those of Voltaire. Once Voltaire was installed at Ferney, he gained confidence and energy and bombarded his public and his enemies with pamphlets, essays, plays, and stories, waging numerous legal battles on behalf of those persecuted for religious reasons. Ingenuous was written during this last, very active period of Voltaire’s life. Although Voltaire was seventy-three years old when he wrote this work, his incredible intellectual and creative vigor had not diminished.

Ingenuous

Ingenuous is one of the weapons Voltaire used in his unremitting battle against intolerance and injustice and belongs to the third group of novels delineated by Bénac. Voltaire’s confidence had returned, and he wrote with a sure hand; none of the tales that follow Candide can rival the grandeur of Ingenuous.

Ingenuous is the most romantic of Voltaire’s stories, and its plot is narrative rather than episodic. The tone of the story is more naturalistic, as are the characters. The device of a voyage is used again; the religious and social systems of France in the time of Louis XIV are seen through the eyes of the Huron stranger, who, without prejudice and with candid reasoning, questions institutions and beliefs that have been taken for granted and must now be considered from a new perspective.

The character of the Huron is in the tradition of the “noble savage” popularized by a missionary, baron de Lahontan, who praised the uncorrupted American Indian. The unity of the tale lies in the unfolding of the story of two lovers: Hercules Kerkabon (as the Huron is later named) and Mademoiselle de St. Yves. The satire used here also unites with the central love theme, targeting the corrupt Catholic Church and its priests, monks, and practices, which are instrumental in separating the lovers and ruining their chance for happiness. Voltaire also satirizes the court officials and Jansenism.

Voltaire’s wit has a somewhat subdued tone throughout Ingenuous; the satire resides in the calmly reasoned arguments of the Huron, who questions all the basic doctrines of Jesuit and Jansenist alike. Voltaire, using the Huron as his mouthpiece, explains very simply all of his objections to the two religions. At the time of writing this tale, Voltaire was involved in the trials of the Calas family, the Sirven family, and La Barre, and his hatred of religious persecution and his anger at the injustices meted out by a corrupt judicial system were therefore as intense as they had ever been.

The story reflects the century’s taste for cosmopolitanism. The Huron has been reared by a Huron tribe in Canada and arrives on the Lower Brittany coast in 1689. It is “discovered” that he is the lost child of the Abbé Yerkabon and his sister. Their brother went to Canada as a soldier and was killed by the Iroquois. The Abbé claims Hercules as his nephew and baptizes him as a Catholic. The beautiful Mademoiselle de St. Yves acts as his godmother. Hercules later falls in love with Mademoiselle de St. Yves but cannot marry his godmother, because the Church forbids it. Mademoiselle de St. Yves is sent to a convent, and Hercules, who is by now a hero for helping to defend the French against an English attack, goes to Versailles to engage the king’s help in his marriage scheme. At Versailles, he is arrested and imprisoned in the Bastille, where he meets Gordon, a Jansenist. After much study and discussion, he converts Gordon to Deism. Now Mademoiselle de St. Yves goes to Versailles to save Hercules, but she must submit to a government minister in order to obtain her lover’s release. She never recovers from the shame and dies of her chagrin. Hercules is tempted to take his own life but recovers himself and becomes an excellent officer and philosopher. The tale does not end with the expected happy ending for the lovers, but Voltaire suggests that even if ambitions and ideals cannot be attained, there are compromises that can be made and one can be tolerably happy—a message similar to that of Candide.

The Man of Forty Crowns

The Man of Forty Crowns, published the year after Ingenuous, displays a strong contrast in style. The two tales have in common the underlying interest of Voltaire in practical things. In Ingenuous, Voltaire has Hercules recover from his loss and become a good soldier; in The Man of Forty Crowns, Voltaire has his protagonist discuss tax reform with a mathematician. There is a great difference, however, between these polemics and those of Ingenuous. In the later tale, Voltaire writes for a clever and agile mind able to follow the mathematical bent of his arguments. There is scarcely a plot or an appealing character to enliven the discussion. Voltaire, as usual, satirizes monks (who do not pay taxes), despotic monarchs, unfair judicial systems, and ignorant people who think they know more than they do. This highly polemical tale, amusing for Voltaire’s eighteenth century circle, is of little interest today; not even the odd humorous remark, such as the suggestion that smiles and songs be taxed, can redeem the lack of relevance or interest of this story for a modern reader.

Voltaire’s tales do suffer a slight impoverishment in translation. The musicality of the French language offsets the dryness of the succinct, economic prose and the laconic, pointed understatement. Polemical tales such as The Man of Forty Crowns particularly suffer in English translation.

Of Voltaire’s many tales (some two dozen in all), Candide remains the most popular. Perhaps it has universal appeal because the evils it portrays persist in today’s world. Wars are still waged in the name of religious causes, and political prisoners continue to be tortured and cast into jail without trial. Unfortunately, Voltaire is no longer here to provoke people’s consciences and fire their minds with his energetic fury. Without him, the genre of the philosophical tale lies in disuse.

The Detective Element in Zadig

A first reading of Zadig may suggest that it is inappropriate to consider this “philosophical tale” an early detective novel. Like most of Voltaire’s major works, however, Zadig can be interpreted from several different perspectives, and each critical approach enriches the understanding of Voltaire’s artistry. Readers who favor sociocriticism have analyzed Voltaire’s effective denunciation in Zadig of social exploitation, religious hypocrisy, and intolerance. Although Voltaire called Zadig an “Oriental story” whose action takes place in fifteenth century Babylon, in it, he discusses the social problems of his own era, not those of medieval Babylon, about which he and his contemporaries knew very little. In eighteenth century France, true censorship existed; Voltaire himself had been imprisoned twice in the 1720’s because of his criticism. The pseudo-Babylonian elements in Zadig made it easier for Voltaire to avoid problems with the French police.

The many levels of irony and the refined style in Zadig have attracted much critical attention since the eighteenth century, and several scholars have noted that Voltaire’s style combines formal eloquence with subtle wit. His arguments are presented in such an aesthetically pleasing and yet unpretentious manner that it seems inappropriate to question his sincerity. His very style creates a favorable impression on his readers. In addition, his consistent understatement and the aesthetic distance that he maintains between his third-person narrative and his fictional characters make his philosophical tale appear objective and thus worthy of serious attention. Moreover, his well-balanced sentences permit and even encourage diverse interpretations. Readers of Zadig conclude that Voltaire respects all intellectual freedom; this interpretation leads them to respond favorably to Voltaire’s perception of reality.

In the development of the detective genre, Zadig is important not because of its well-constructed plot and refined style but rather because it illustrates appropriate ways of explaining perplexing situations. In his influential work Les Pensées (1670; Monsieur Pascal’s Thoughts, Meditations, and Prayers, 1688), Blaise Pascal argued that there existed two major ways of perceiving the world. Those who use purely deductive and logical reasoning practice “l’esprit de géométrie” (the spirit of geometry), whereas those who discover truth intuitively practice “l’esprit de finesse” (the spirit of finesse). Voltaire frequently referred to Pascal’s distinction. According to Pascal, each individual uses a unique blend of these two major types of reasoning, and neither “the spirit of geometry” nor “the spirit of finesse” suffices in itself to explain reality. Each person must sense intuitively when it is necessary to resort to deductive reasoning to discover a specific truth. Zadig illustrates the usefulness of both “the spirit of geometry” and “the spirit of finesse.” Later detective writers could learn from Zadig, if not directly from Pascal, that both deductive and intuitive reasoning are essential to any search for truth.

Like such amateur sleuths as G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Zadig does not seek out opportunities to solve crimes. He is not a professional detective who seeks monetary gain. No one ever questions the sincerity of Zadig’s motives. If, by chance, someone asks questions about specific crimes, he willingly works to explain logically how things actually happened.

In chapter 2, Voltaire states that Zadig’s marriage to Azora has serious problems. Zadig decides to divorce his wife; this act leaves him with much free time, which he spends studying “the properties of animals and plants.” Zadig soon acquires objective knowledge, and he is able to recognize “a thousand differences” in nature “where others would see everything as uniform”—he has become an expert in zoology and botany.

Near the palace one day, the queen’s eunuch asks Zadig if he has seen the royal dog. In reply, Zadig observes that the dog is a small spaniel bitch that limps and has recently given birth to puppies. Although the eunuch assumes that Zadig has seen the animal, Zadig denies it. A few minutes later, court officials come by and inquire about the king’s missing horse, which Zadig also describes. Although Zadig states that he has seen neither animal, his audience is unconvinced; he is arrested for stealing both spaniel and stallion.

During his trial, Zadig ably defends himself, explaining that specific tracings on the sand and broken branches in the trees enabled him to determine the physical characteristics of the missing animals. The judges are convinced; because there is no proof that he stole either creature, he is acquitted. This chapter in Zadig has influenced later detective writers because it demonstrates that the objective analysis of physical clues can prove innocence or guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Detective writers after Voltaire would strive to develop equally creative and totally logical explanations for perplexing cases.

Not all the characters in this philosophical tale reason as effectively as Zadig. Near the end of the piece, he meets a hermit who practices “the spirit of finesse” in a strange and unpersuasive manner. (The hermit is the antithesis of the reasonable Zadig.) After Zadig and the hermit have spent a pleasant night as guests of a kindly widow, the hermit repays her hospitality by drowning her fourteen-year-old nephew. The hermit justifies this murder by claiming that if this adolescent had lived, he would have strangled his aunt and Zadig within two years. Even after the hermit transforms himself into a winged angel, Zadig refuses to accept the hermit’s questionable defense, noting that there was a simple alternative to this murder: “Would it not have been better to have corrected this child and rendered him virtuous rather than drowning him?” Thus, logic discredits all attempts to justify murder.

Although the hermit acted with the purest of intentions, his action is nevertheless criminal. Zadig, like later detectives, understands that people are to be judged by their actions and not by the ingenious explanations they may present in defense of their crimes. Unless the absolute value of each life is accepted, society will soon fall into chaos. Zadig realizes that the hermit is basically a well-intentioned murderer who used specious reasoning to justify murder.

In his 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, Julian Symons perceptively states that although Zadig does contain an “ingenious piece of analytical deduction,” it is not merely “a crime story.” In Zadig, Voltaire wrote primarily about the search for happiness in an imperfect world. Zadig, however, is a detective in two ways: He uses deductive reasoning to solve a perplexing case and also recognizes the faulty reasoning of a criminal.