Social Change In Voltaire's Candide

Evanesce were the ample souls disentangled from conflict and their once fervent bodies. Erosion of soil and the plummeting of leafs mask the grounds that were once embrued with their ardent blood. Blood that had aged and had witness unceasing violence and reasons. Reasons that had once lead them, supporters of social change, into battle. Reasons that had been held by indiscernible ties to an idea that binds the succession of events: The Seven Year War, the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille, are wars and battles fought that can testify to enthralled reasons for rebellion and expansion. At the helm of such reasons, lies the idea of a stronger nation that could only happen with bridging the gap between the hegemony and the lower

Voltaire’s previous depictions of the awful carnage left from waged wars that were declared from a King (8), coupled with the “cruel and ignominious logic” of societal intolerance of sects and differing individuals (9), unexpectedly parallels Eldorado and its odd foundation of an almost totalitarian theocracy, but is somehow without flaw. When Candide is in search of answers to the functioning of such a quintessential society, he asks the most learned man in the realm about where they may find some priests for, presumably, further questioning of their religious customs and is met with the answer being that they are “all priests,” and thus Candide exclaims, “‘What! You have no monks instructing and disputing, and governing and intriguing, and having everyone burned alive who is not of their opinion?’-‘We would have to be foolish indeed,’ said the old man” (47). Furthermore, the conduction of the King to his guests are as if Candide and Cacambo were almost contemporaries or fellows of the King, as seen when they learn that the custom greeting is to “‘hug the King and kiss him on both cheeks’” (48) and respect was matched with his nature, as discernible when he allows them to leave since “All men are free” and further aids them on getting out by “ordering the engineers" to create something that will safely transport them across (49). Though Eldorado is similarly structured to other societies in the fact of it being a theocracy that is ruled by a king, the differences lie in the near equal freedoms and treatment of all individuals, all the citizens “being priests” and treated equally by the king, in lieu of prejudice of lower class