1759

1759 is the year the introduction identifies as the moment Voltaire wrote Candide, giving the book a precise historical point of origin without making the year a date within the story. The account presents the work as a swift, enduring attack on Panglossian optimism: its philosophical argument is carried not by an extended treatise but by comic reversals, rapid travel, and the closing insistence that people must cultivate their garden.

Composition and Purpose

The introduction states that Voltaire wrote Candide in three days. It links that speed to the book’s exceptional concision and abundance of wit: the work is described as about a “Hamlet” and a half in length, yet full of mockery, invention, concrete things, and intellectual play. Its quickness is not presented as haste that leaves the work thin; rather, the narrative moves with the energy of a game while repeatedly putting its central philosophical claim under pressure.

The date also anchors the target of the satire. Candide was written in ridicule of the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds. In the story, Pangloss supplies that doctrine with deliberately neat examples, arguing from the supposed purposes of noses, legs, stones, and pigs to the conclusion that everything is for the best. The tidy logic establishes the optimism that the wider narrative will test against experience.

The Eighteenth-Century Form

The introduction makes 1759 a point of comparison with a hypothetical book written a century and a half later. It imagines that a later writer might dwell on sights and sounds absent from Voltaire’s brisk account: changing Atlantic landscapes on the voyage from Cadiz to Buenos Aires, Mediterranean cliffs and distant horizons, and the calls of birds in Paraguay. The contrast emphasizes what the earlier book chooses not to linger over. Its travel is a means of moving the argument through different circumstances, rather than an occasion for sustained landscape description.

The same comparison distinguishes Voltaire’s method of satire. A modern writer, the introduction suggests, might examine a more complicated doctrine with slower, more patient analysis. Candide instead exposes its target through quick turns and familiar institutions made absurd. The introductory account also contrasts the book’s treatment of war, which presents slaughter and pillage as conducted according to the laws and usages of war, with a hypothetical later satire that might approach poverty through both pity and ridicule. These are reflections on how the work’s eighteenth-century method differs from an imagined later one, not claims that the book adopts the later approach.

Reception and the Work’s Ending

The introduction describes Candide’s laughter as durable across five or six generations of readers and insists that the book has not grown stale. It attributes that vitality to a distinctive combination: the narrative is extraordinarily rapid, yet it makes room for concrete details and compact intellectual turns. Its gaiety is part of its attack; the mockery of the belief that happiness is guaranteed by the order of the world becomes, in the introduction’s account, a source of comic energy.

The conclusion gives that attack a practical counterpoint. After Pangloss begins another argument, Candide answers that they must cultivate their garden; Pangloss interprets work through the example of humanity’s placement in the Garden of Eden, while Martin urges them to work without disputing. The ending does not supply an elaborate new system to replace the one challenged throughout the book. Instead, it shifts attention from the assurance that all is for the best to shared labor as a way of making life tolerable. In that movement, the work associated with 1759 closes its philosophical journey with an action rather than a final abstract proof.