Candide

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    Voltaire was one of the most influential philosophers and writers of the Enlightenment, and one of his most famous works is, Candide. Candide was written in 1759 as a work of satire that attacked society and represented Enlightenment ideas. Although Voltaire became very famous through his philosophic works, he was unpopular with some monarchs, and was even exiled from several places for attacking rulers. Voltaire uses this work mainly to attack European society through corrupt rulers and how…

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    Candide by Voltaire is an incredibly captivating novel with real world influences that help establish the work’s core themes. The trail of destruction left by the earthquake in Lisbon was of cataclysmic proportions; Candide and Pangloss were in awe as they were surrounded by death and devastation. I interpret this event as essentially, one of the first of many turning points in Candide’s attitude. More specifically, the earthquake forces Candide to replace his absolute optimism with a…

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    Voltaire’s Candide Through the 17th and 18th centuries, a European intellectual movement started where developments in art, philosophy, and politics took off. The Enlightenment, as it was called, revolutionized the intellectual and political ways of thinking in Europe. From the movement, came out many men such as: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and others who contributed greatly during this time of the enlightened. François-Marie Arouet,…

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    throughout Candide in order to emphasize his criticism of optimism. First his philosophy goes completely against what happens to him and the people around him in the real world. This shows the difference between action and theory, while Pangloss may believe in the best of all possible worlds, the actions that occur in the world say otherwise. Pangloss is infected with syphilis, is almost executed, and imprisoned; yet he stays optimistic through the end of the novel…

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    character development highlights the role of women at the time, their submissive nature and their usefulness to men. Regardless of this lack, Voltaire represented women’s resilience and survivors of sexual exploitations. He depicted women surprisingly in Candide, raping of Cunegonde by the Bulgar is described as “until she could be raped no more” (Voltaire and Cuffe) followed by her “disembowel[ment]” (Voltaire and Cuffe) where the reader assumes her death but she appears to a surprise in the…

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    Candide: Class and Wealth In his novel Candide, Voltaire uses satire to show the folly of wealth and class status. One of the major themes of the novel is how those with wealth and higher social class corrupt and gain power over others. The classes, the poor and the wealthy, are often in conflict with each other, and wealth is often fleeting—gone as fast as it was obtained. Candide, the naïve protagonist of the story, encounters many examples of injustice throughout his journey of love and…

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    the novella Candide the author Voltaire chooses to end his book with the words, “we must cultivate our garden,” this ending line to the book had a pessimistic connotation. This line implies that in order to really progress in the world you need to focus on ways to fix yourself rather than focusing on ways to engage with others in order to find ways to fix the world. Two characters in Candide who portray the meaning of this line throughout the story are Candide and Pangloss. Both Candide and…

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    In Voltaire’s Candide and Wiesel’s Night there are two competing philosophies of optimism and pessimism. Night is a memoir of Wiesel’s time spent in holocaust camps during World War II. It is heartbreakingly real and unapologetic, quite the opposite of Voltaire’s Candide , which is complete satire debunking the philosophy of optimism regarding the human condition. In both texts, the characters were experiencing war, religious intolerance, starvation and sickness, and both main characters, Elie…

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    Voltaire is one of the immortal names defined in the 18th century . His real name is François-Marie Arouet , born in November 21 , 1694 , in Paris . Voltaire was famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. As a satirical writer, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance and the French institutions of his day. Moreover , The intellectual movement known as…

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    Under the guise of sarcasm and an erratic and fantastical plot, Voltaire’s Candide examines human nature and the human condition in the context of an 18th century France. This is done so not only through the derision of philosophical positions such as Optimism and Pessimism, but also of the religious intolerance of that day. It may seem at first that Voltaire views humanity in a dismal light and merely locates its deficiencies, but in fact he also reveals attributes of redemption in it, and thus…

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