Bonjour Candide!

Voltaire

We recently started reading Candide by Voltaire. For those of you who are not familiar with Voltaire, he was a French philosopher who took a major role in the Enlightenment.

Even though I have just read the beginning of Candide, it has been clear that Voltaire is mocking various aspects of life and ultimately, the reader. The way he uses elements of satire to ridicule the reader is actually very entertaining, for me at least.  I found myself reading a paragraph, re reading it, and then, asking my self what did Voltaire really mean when he wrote this. After doing this for like 15 pages I had three conclusions.

Number one, he is making fun of optimistic people. He keeps writing things like “For all this, […] is a manifestation of the rightness of things, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could not be anywhere else. For it is impossible for things not to be where they are, because everything is for the best” (pg 33). The context of this phrase is when following an earthquake many people are dead, and after having dinner with the moaning survivors he tries to calm them down by saying this. I don’t know you, but if I was in the position of those survivors, my entire community destroyed and a foreign person comes and tells me this, the only thing that would go through my head is a way to shut that “optimistic” person up. Seriously.

Number two: He makes fun of other philosophers. Maybe "criticizes" would be a better word. For this he uses Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, who gets caught by Lady Cunégonde, daughter of the most influential nobleman in Westphilia,  “misbehaving” with another woman behind some bushes. He later gets STD.  I mean clearly not a common behavior in the philosophers’ stereotype.

And Number 3: He ridicules naïve people. The main character Candide, gives us a feeling of someone very naïve.  Every problem he goes through of what I’ve read has been because he was extremely naïve. Which makes me think maybe he is implying that optimistic people make them naïve.