Candide en Dannemarc ou l'optimisme des honnêtes gens (review)

In 1760, a year after the publication of Candide, there appeared a sequel, Candide: Seconde partie. This competent pastiche, published anonymously, is now known to be the work of the abbé Dulaurens; at the time, Grimm (in order to protect Voltaire) attributed it, implausibly and mischievously, to Thorel de Campigneulles, a journalist of impeccably orthodox views. Campigneulles seems to have taken his revenge a few years later by publishing, also anonymously, Candide en Dannemarc, a continuation of the work which he had been falsely accused of writing, in effect Candide Part Three. Édouard Langille's edition is to be welcomed: although the novel's literary qualities are minimal, it is an intriguing example of that important fictional sub-genre, the suite. Whereas Dulaurens continued Voltaire's novel by attempting to imitate Voltaire's style, and so perpetuate its ideology, Campigneulles quite deliberately sets out to refute Voltaire's critique of optimism by having Candide mature into a happy three-dimensional character. Freed from the dungeons of a bloodthirsty baron, Candide marries his beloved Zénoïde, a classy Danish blonde (Cunégonde having been conveniently killed off by Dulaurens), and the young couple live happily and boringly ever after, with Candide becoming a wise and trusted adviser to the monarch. Two encounters towards the end of the novel, with Martin (remember him?) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, serve to reaffirm Candide's new-found philosophical serenity. Candide en Dannemarc, with its worthy and platitudinous sentiments, did not enjoy the same success as Dulaurens' more raucous Seconde partie (which was often reprinted, sometimes together with Candide), but even so it went through three editions (and not two, as claimed here, p. 4): the octavo edition published in Rouen in 1767 was followed by a duodecimo edition in the same year, and an octavo edition in 1769. The 1769 edition contains a dedication, not reproduced here, but apart from that the variants between these three editions are of no consequence. (There is a confusion in the textual apparatus: most of the variants attributed to the 1769 edition in fact first appeared in the 1767 duodecimo edition.) The text is extensively annotated: the linguistic notes are especially useful, but some of the explanatory notes are oddly judged: does the likely reader of an edition such as this need to be told, for example, that Tacitus was a Roman historian? The introduction presents the content of the novel, and argues that the early chapters set in a prison anticipate gothic fiction. Importantly, Langille confirms the attribution of this work to Thorel de Campigneulles, and so it is a pity the author's name does not figure on the title page of this edition. There is no reference here to any of the recent scholarship on this Grub Street figure, and in particular his links with Voltaire would be worth following up. A writer who satirized La Nouvelle Héloïse in an epistolary novel written by a monkey to his teacher (Le Nouvel Abaillard, 1763) clearly deserves further attention.