Voltaire's Vision

The moral of this novella is in many ways a presage not to the republic that France would try to achieve so fitfully in the nose candy following Voltaire's death, but to the much more radical archetypes of communism of the following century. Voltaire's vision in this novella is in whatever essential ways an anti-Christian one, for he is debate against the Christian notion that work is the punishment for having been thrown out of Eden. He is arguing -- in a line that Marx and Engels would have both recognized and appreciated -- that dapple religion is an opiate to blind the masses to the adjust nature of their lives, work will bind us in humanistic solidarity and so set us free (Zimmer, 1998, p. 672).

Candide, while it is perhaps the most often read of Voltaire's works now, was not particularly revolutionary in the scheme of the writer's work, much of which riveted on what Voltaire felt to be the evils of religion - both the superstition fostered by the Catholic church building of his own time and the earlier centuries and the forced fatalism that he too saw as an strategic element of Catholicism. Pangloss is of course in many ways only an emblem of this disclosety fatalism in Candide -- as much as he is a stand in for Leibnitz. Pangloss accepts and tries to make the better of things that Candide seeks to change and so stands in both as an double for Leibnitz and for all the thousands of people who have

Similarly, Balzac made himself the historian of the France of his time in La comT conk humaine (1831-48), a sequence of 47 volumes that portrayed a society attach by ruthless ambition and exploitation of technology and finance. And at at once again, his characters walk a like between being symbols of their generation and their own individual selves, and once again through them we hear speaking the voice of Voltaire and Candide (Zimmer, 1998, p. 678).

And yet, of course, these characters are more than this. For Pangloss is both a symbol and a fool, a man who has chosen a limited philosophy because he cannot understand more convoluted ones and also because he finds personal salvation in it.

Cunegonde (the most unsympathetic "good" character in the work, a pass judgment of the fate of women in the hands of even good 18th-century male writers) is both a siren and a victim, but more than this she is someone who perhaps too can be save in the end by work. The Inquisitor is evil, but also (like Pangloss and the power of optimism) immortal. Candide thinks that he has killed both of them -- both the power of the church building and the powerful desire that people cling to in accept that things will get better -- only to find them once again as his companions. As such, the two characters are figurative -- but they are also intelligently written portraits of the vastness of faith. These two do not die when Candide tries to murder them in part because Voltaire wishes to make a point about the Church and about optimism. But they also do not die because these two characters, as individuals, are given strength by their different kinds of faith, and so are given the power to endure.

Arouet, F.-M. (1990, tr. J. Butt). Candide, or Optimism. New York: Penguin.

Part of that relevance lies in Voltaire's ability to piss characters that are at once archetypes and individuals, and an examination of that skill is the focus of the rest of this paper.

The radical nature of the style (not the content)
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