Candide and Its Ageless Satire

There are so many subjects that Voltaire satirized hundreds of y7ears ago which remain, today, worthy of continuous interest and further satire. He entitled his major word, Candide, with the subtitle, L'Optimisme. But, his "hero" found out what a fallacy being overly optimistic was then- and continues today.

Religin, of course, even in the 17^th century, deserved satire. Voltaire lived during a time when religion, especially Catholicism in his native France, was encumbered with the need for payments to keep the Vatican and the various bishoprics afloat. The author sends Candide to Eldorado, the exact opposite of the Church's need for treasures: " Here in Eldorado there are no courts, prisons, or lawyers, and no one is interested in gold and silver. The natives believe in God but they don't pray, in the sense of asking for help or grace or cure, because they already have all they need. Their form of prayer is simple worship and giving of thanks" (Wood 196). But, Voltaire goes well beyond chastising, through irony and satire, the pecuniary needs of the Church. He also expects us to realize that most optimism is truly foolish. And that foolishness extends to the modern reader who can see all sorts of personal paradoxes in the Dr. Pangloss character.

Voltaire makes the characters in his satire reject the idea that every move a human makes must be carefully planned and thought out. There is destiny, of course, and yet, there is a free will which permits man to survive even the holocausts of the Bulgars, in our lifetime, the Nazis and Serbs and Rwandans and other enemies of Mankind.

Pangloss, of course, is a user in the guise of an optimist. We can even, if hard-pressed, equate what he says with the current problems elected officials have with the companies they left, enriched, in their private lives. How fascinating that Panglosss states that for private misfortunes are public benefits; so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good.

Much of Voltaire's barbs are not always overt. A casual reader can read the work simply as a sort of fantasy adventure. But, one critic sums up some of Voltaire's targets in Candide: " It does not lack for aggressive humor. I once made a list of the targets at which he takes aim in the book. Among them are Homer, Frederick the Great, philosopher-mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, the pope, Jews. Jesuits, the Knights of Malta, sailors, the Portuguese University of Coimbra, Westphalia, the German language, the French and especially Parisians, suspicious foreigners, and 'Negro pirates'" (Johnson 69).

Today, we face some of the same problems that Candide, naïve as he began his adventures, surely was. We have become hardened by atrocities and terror and war. We have, somehow, stuck our noses into the affairs, foreign and domestic, of other nations and people. But, perhaps we need to reflect on Candide's conclusions to use for ourselves, hundreds of years after Candide was written: " After witnessing and personally experiencing the effects of political violence, personal and commercial greed and ambition, religious hypocrisy, rape, torture, murder, betrayal, and even an earthquake, Candide's group finally comes to rest in Constantinople, where Candide, after observing what he perceives as a Turkish farmer's satisfaction with his common existence, utters his famous injunction that we each must cultivate our garden" (Ryden, 139).

References:

Johnson, Michael: "The Delightful Voltaire" Bloomington:

The American Spectator Jul/Aug 2010 . Vol. 43, Iss. 6;

pg. 68-70

Ryden, Wendy: " Gâteau or Baklava? The Price of Pastry in

Voltaire's Philosophical Narrative" Washington:

The Explicator Winter 2009. Vol. 67, Iss. 2; p. 139

Wood, Michael: "Notes on Candide" Middlebury VT:

New England Review , 2005. Vol. 26, Iss. 4; pg. 192-203