François-Marie Arouet's Literary Analysis

François-Marie Arouet, who eventually became the famed writer known as Voltaire, was born into a middle-class, Parisian family on November 21, 1694. He was born into a France plagued by extreme poverty and under the rule of the religious King Louis XIV and the “austere and oppressive religiosity” of his court, an involvement which likely encouraged Voltaire’s subsequent critiques of organized government. From the age of nine until his seventeenth year, François-Marie received his formal education at the Jesuit college of Louis-le-Grand, studying Latin and Greek literature instead of law, which his father urged him to study. Known for his “brilliant and sarcastic wit” both during and immediately following his school years, François-Marie unfortunately found himself imprisoned in the Bastille in 1718 for his scathing critiques of the duke of Orleans; it was during this detention that he composed his first dramatic tragedy, Oedipe, and adopted the aristocratic pen name of “de Voltaire.” Claiming such a pseudonym implied that his view of himself had shifted from middle-class Parisian to a newfound status as a French aristocrat, which angered the French establishment. Unable to garner support from his friends in the French aristocracy, Voltaire was forced into exile in England from May 1726 until November 1728. During this time, Voltaire took note of such English institutions as English Parliament and their representative government, their religious tolerance of the Quakers and other fringe religious beliefs, and their superior advancement into empirical science and philosophy—embodied by Bacon, Locke, and Newton—as well as their appreciation for unconventional art and literature, focusing particularly on William Shakespeare. He praised the progressiveness of English society in his 1733 publication, Lettres philosophiques, comparing England’s progressivism to the oppressiveness and religious intolerance of his native France. However, despite his misgivings towards French government and his controversial reputation there, his outlook on life and the world as a whole aligned with the Enlightenment perspective of optimism and Enlightenment mathematician and philosopher “Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz’s theory that God would not create a universe other than the best of all possible universes.” That is, until a series of catastrophes in the mid-18th century profoundly altered his view that human suffering and natural disasters were overall “good in the general arrangement” of the world. In the wake of a devastating earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 and the outbreak of the Seven Years War among the German states in 1756, Voltaire seemingly began to reject Liebniz’s “concept of a rational and well-regulated universe,” as evidenced by the dialogue between Candide and Master Pangloss in his 1759 publication, Candide. Voltaire characterizes Candide as a young and naïve consummate optimist—at least according to our modern definition of the word “optimist”—who wholeheartedly ascribes to the philosophy of the foolish Pangloss, teacher of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology, and his insistence that their world was “the best of all possible worlds” and every negative thing that occurred was “all…for the very best end.” Even when Candide is expelled from his home and his first love, flogged in Portugal during the Portuguese Inquisition, forced to fight in a savage battle between the Bulgars and the Abares, and served as an involuntary witness to the nonsensical death of James the Anabaptist (who he tolerates despite their differing beliefs), he persists in believing Pangloss and his traditional viewpoint that “what is bad in relation to you is good in the general arrangement.” Voltaire’s Pangloss also adopts the Leibnizian method of arguing “à priori” or, in other words, arguing based on theory rather …show more content…
By including such characters as the Franciscan friar, the old woman as the illegitimate child of a Pope, and the cruel Catholic Inquisitor, Voltaire successfully communicates his skepticism of the moral standing of the established church, the Catholic church particularly. He also expresses derision toward absolute monarchy and oppression by lauding the benevolent monarch of El Dorado and the freedom his subjects enjoyed; he also criticized the oppression of speech and thought, as well as the dangers of superstition by including the tale of Candide and Pangloss in Lisbon. Based on this evidence, the only possible conclusion one can arrive at is that Candide is a representative piece of Enlightenment literature that effectively communicates many ideologies associated with the