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What You’ll Love about… Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire
Like The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, Candide exposes the deep divide between reality and the idealistic view of the world promoted by European culture. It is one of the most direct, unflinching looks at humanity’s appetite for destruction that you will encounter in literature.
Candide is arguably the most important European text produced during the period of history known by some as the Enlightenment, which was a European intellectual and cultural movement during the 1700s. In a nutshell, the Enlightenment was a time when educated Europeans questioned humanity’s cultural, political, religious, and individual systems of value. The term has become a little fraught lately. While it is indisputable that European intellectuals were questioning tradition and traditional forms of transmitting knowledge, it is Eurocentric to refer to this period of history as the Enlightenment. And although important ideas about freedom were being born and transmitted, it’s worth mentioning that the global trade in enslaved Africans was booming during this time, and European countries were violently colonizing much the non-European world. Candide captures that irony exceptionally well.
Candide is a scorching rebuke to the Enlightenment celebration of reason as humanity’s greatest blessing, and it lays heavy scorn on the notion that humanity can…
