How Candide drew on Gulliver’s Travels
A documented line of influence: Voltaire demonstrably engaged Jonathan Swift’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726
EnlightenmentThe influenced
Candide
Voltaire · 1759
EnlightenmentRelevance
6/10
On Candide’s page
- Candide is Swift's invention turned on philosophy — the wide-eyed traveler whose globe-trotting unmasks a fashionable creed, here Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds"
- Voltaire read Gulliver's Travels on its first publication and praised Swift as "the Rabelais of England"; the form runs straight into his tales (the Big-Endian quarrel resurfaces in Zadig)
- Read Swift first and you'll see the machine Voltaire inherited — then sharpened to a blade
On Gulliver’s Travels’s page
- Voltaire read Gulliver's Travels in English the year it appeared, met Swift in London, and called him "the Rabelais of England"
- Swift's recipe — a credulous traveler whose wanderings expose the follies of philosophy — runs straight into Voltaire's contes philosophiques (Zadig's Big- and Little-Endian quarrel borrows directly)
- Candide perfects the satirical-traveler form Swift had handed him, this time aimed at Leibnizian optimism