Candide
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50 free Candide trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Candide is short, fast and merciless. Voltaire sends a trusting young man out of a sheltered castle and into war, shipwreck, earthquake and the hands of the Inquisition, all to test his tutor's claim that everything happens for the best. More than two and a half centuries later it is still one of the most widely taught books in French literature, and still funny. This quiz follows the whole journey: the opening chapters in Europe, the crossing to the Americas, and the long road back east to the ending. Expect questions on Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss and the Old Woman, on the people and events Voltaire was mocking, and on how the book was published, banned and adapted. It works as a check before an exam or an essay, as a refresher for a book club, or simply as a way to see how much of the story has stayed with you. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which legendary land does Candide stumble upon, a hidden kingdom with no prisons, lawsuits or monks?
El Dorado
El Dorado is the one happy society in the book, where children use gold and jewels as playthings. Candide still leaves after a month because he misses Cunégonde.
Q 02Which city is flattened by an earthquake just as Candide and Pangloss reach shore after a shipwreck?
Lisbon
Lisbon really was destroyed in 1755 by an earthquake, a tsunami and fires. The disaster convinced Voltaire that a world this cruel could not be the best one available.
Q 03In Candide, which item does Pangloss say noses were made to carry, proving everything has a purpose?
Spectacles
Spectacles, says Pangloss, are the reason noses exist, just as legs were plainly designed for stockings. Voltaire uses the backwards logic to mock thinkers who find a purpose in everything.
Q 04Long before Candide, Voltaire was twice locked up in which Paris fortress for offending the mighty?
The Bastille
The Bastille held him for eleven months over a satirical verse about the Regent, and again in 1726 after he challenged a nobleman to a duel. He took the name Voltaire after the first stay.
Q 05In Candide, a maimed slave says his lost hand and leg are the price of which luxury Europe enjoys?
Sugar
Sugar cost him a hand to the cane mill and a leg for trying to run away. The sight makes Candide cry out that he must at last give up his tutor's cheerful philosophy.
Q 06The Old Woman in Candide reveals she was born the daughter of a princess and which kind of ruler?
A pope
A pope fathered her, the invented Urban X, so she is illegitimate by definition. A later note in Voltaire's name joked about the author's tact in choosing a number no real pontiff had used.
Q 07In 1929 US customs seized Candide as obscene on its way to a French class at which university?
Harvard
Harvard received its copies that August, after the course had ended. The customs man explained that the book had been let through for years until one of his colleagues actually read it.
Q 08Candide ends with its hero cutting off Pangloss's final lecture and saying they must cultivate what?
Our garden
Our garden is Candide's whole reply: stop theorising and get on with useful work. He takes the idea from an old Turkish farmer whose family lives contentedly off a small plot.
Q 09Which composer set Candide as a Broadway operetta that flopped but became a cult hit on record?
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein's 1956 show closed after just 73 performances. Its overture has outlived the run, earning a lasting place in the orchestral repertoire.
Q 10What gets young Candide thrown out of the Baron's castle in the opening chapter of Voltaire's tale?
A stolen kiss
A stolen kiss with the Baron's daughter Cunégonde behind a screen earns Candide a kicking out of the door. He spends the rest of the story trying to find her again.
Q 11In which region is the Baron's castle where Candide grows up, taught that all is for the best?
Westphalia
Westphalia gives Voltaire his first joke: the Baron counts as one of its mightiest lords because his castle has a gate and windows.
Q 12What relation is Candide rumoured to be to the Baron whose castle he grows up in?
His nephew
His nephew, the old servants suspect: the son of the Baron's sister and a neighbour she refused to marry because his coat of arms showed only seventy-one noble quarterings.
Q 13Which army's recruiters trick Candide into uniform, an army Voltaire used as a stand-in for Prussia?
The Bulgars
The Bulgars buy Candide dinner, toast their king with him and then clap him in fetters as a recruit. Their enemies in the novel, the Abares, stand for the French.
Q 21Which South American land, run in Candide by priests with their own army, does the hero flee to?
Paraguay
Paraguay in the novel is a state where, as Candide's valet puts it, the fathers own everything and the people nothing. The commandant he meets there turns out to be a face from home.
Q 22In Candide, the Oreillons plan to cook the hero because his robe suggests he belongs to which order?
The Jesuits
The Jesuits are so hated by the Oreillons that Candide is freed the moment the tribe learns he has just run one through. Their cry about eating one became a popular catchphrase.
Q 23Which animals does Candide shoot in South America, thinking he is saving two women from them?
Two monkeys
Q 14Which disease has left Pangloss a beggar covered in sores when Candide finds him again in Holland?
Syphilis
Syphilis costs Pangloss an eye and an ear before he is cured. He proudly traces the infection back through a chambermaid, a friar, a countess and a page to one of Columbus's companions.
Q 15Jacques, the kind merchant who shelters Candide in Holland, belongs to which Christian sect?
Anabaptist
Anabaptist Jacques, a man who had never been christened, is the one person in Holland who shows Candide any charity. A preacher fresh from a sermon on charity has just refused him bread.
Q 16Which punishment does the Inquisition give Pangloss in Candide, though he turns up alive much later?
Hanged
Hanged because heavy rain made a fire impossible, Pangloss survives when the wet rope fails to tighten. He wakes up screaming as a surgeon who bought his body begins to dissect it.
Q 17Which ceremony is staged in Candide in the belief it will stop further earthquakes?
An auto-da-fé
An auto-da-fé is what the University of Coimbra prescribes in the novel, ruling that burning a few people over a slow fire is a sure way to keep the earth from shaking.
Q 18In Candide, which body part does the Old Woman lose to starving soldiers who eat it during a siege?
A buttock
A buttock was cut from every captive woman at Azov after a preacher persuaded the starving Janissaries not to kill them all at once. The Old Woman tells it to show her woes outdo Cunégonde's.
Q 19To which South American port do Candide, Cunégonde and the Old Woman sail after fleeing Portugal?
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires is where a governor with five surnames takes a fancy to Cunégonde. Candide has to run again when officers arrive hunting the killer of the Grand Inquisitor.
Q 20Which quick-witted valet leads Candide through South America and talks captors out of eating them?
Cacambo
Cacambo, a quarter Spanish by birth, has been a choirboy, sacristan, sailor, monk, pedlar, soldier and lackey. His practical sense is the opposite of Pangloss's theorising.
Two monkeys fall to his double-barrelled Spanish gun, and the women weep over the bodies. His valet explains that the animals were probably their lovers.
Q 24Which animals carry the jewels Candide takes away from the hidden utopia he visits in South America?
Red sheep
Red sheep, a hundred of them and faster than fine horses, leave loaded with gold and gems. Swamps, deserts and precipices claim nearly all of them, and a ship's captain steals the last two.
Q 25In which Dutch colony does a swindling ship's captain rob Candide of a fortune and sail off without him?
Suriname
Suriname is where the merchant Vanderdendur takes Candide's money and sails off without him. A local judge then fines Candide for complaining too loudly about the theft.
Q 26Which gloomy scholar joins Candide's journey after winning his contest for the unhappiest man?
Martin
Martin, robbed by his wife, beaten by his son and abandoned by his daughter, expects the worst of everyone. He spends the rest of the journey arguing against every hopeful thing Candide says.
Q 27What reason is given in Candide for England shooting one of its own admirals?
To encourage the others
To encourage the others is the dry reply Candide receives at Portsmouth. Voltaire was thinking of Admiral John Byng, shot by firing squad in 1757 for failing to do his utmost against the French.
Q 28In which city does Candide dine with six strangers who all turn out to be dethroned kings?
Venice
Venice at Carnival hosts the strangest supper in the book: all six guests are real figures, deposed or would-be monarchs from Turkey and Russia to Poland and Corsica.
Q 29Which relative of Cunégonde does Candide run through with a sword, only to find him alive later?
Her brother
Her brother, the young Baron, attacks Candide for daring to propose marrying her. Ransomed by Candide years later, he objects to the match all over again.
Q 30Near which great city do Candide and his companions finally settle on a small farm?
Constantinople
Constantinople is close enough for the household to sell its vegetables there. It is also where Cunégonde has ended up, washing dishes for an exiled prince.