Criticism In Voltaire: François-Marie Arouet's Candide

Voltaire. Candide. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Classics, 1947. Print. François-Marie Arouet, or Voltaire was an Enlightenment thinker, whose ideas are portrayed in his satiric novel, Candide. In this short novel, Voltaire critiques French society of the time, and attacks Leibnizian optimism through his sarcastic representation of Professor Pangloss, one of the optimist philosophers. Throughout the book, he describes the reality of society, which is that of misery and pain. This novel was written in 1759 during the Age of Enlightenment, when Voltaire was already a known writer who was famous for his satirical wit. Enlightenment thinkers were mostly philosophers who invested their thoughts in reasoning, or people who applied the ideas from the Scientific

He pushed culture towards science-based reasoning and separation of church and state. With the Age of Enlightenment and Voltaire’s philosophy, Candide is a great story that both entertained the audience of the time and taught them a lesson on what the future of civilization should be. The plotline of this tragedy and love story starts with Candide, an

He mostly attacks the population of Africa and the New World and portrays them to be barbaric human beings. When Candide and Cacambo are walking in the countryside of the New World, they run into Oreillons. The Oreillons form a mob and cry, “He’s a Jesuit! We shall have our revenge and enjoy a good meal. We’ll have a Jesuit for dinner, we’ll have a Jesuit for dinner!” (70). The Oreillons want to eat Candide because he is supposedly a Jesuit, which depicts the picaresque nature of the novel. Once they find out he is not a Jesuit, they treat him with great hospitality. Hence, religion is ruining the relationship between this barbarian culture and the European Jesuits. He is also relating these barbarians to his bigger Enlightenment thinking that men are naturally evil or savage, as these men liked to practice cannibalism. It adds to the bigger question of why people still engage in cannibalistic activities in such an advanced day and age. Voltaire is suggesting through this passage that society should not be savage, something that is shown through cannibalism in the New World and through the Inquisition in the Old World. Both societies are just as savage, making Europeans no better than these other cultures, and they need to become more rational in their