Religious Intolerance & Voltaire's Candide

The purpose of this research is to examine Voltaire's Candide in relation to religious intolerance. The plan of the research will be to describe the background in which the novel was written and then to discuss the pattern of events and ideas in the narrative of the novel and the means by which those ideas are expressed in the work. The main focus will be on demonstrating evidence of Voltaire's own intolerance for religious, based on his ridiculing of God.

It was in 1758 that Voltaire wrote Candide, a satire, that became his best-known work. At the time Voltaire wrote Candide, he was living near Geneva, in Ferney (Voltaire 378). As a matter of fact, Voltaire had been in political exile or in political controversy several times during his professional life. He was imprisoned in the Bastille for quarrels with the French nobility in the 1720s, but he became a court favorite in France in the 1730s and 1740s. He took a job in the German court of Frederick II, but he fell out of royal favor in Germany and traveled in England and Europe until 1758, when he moved to Ferney for good. It was then that Candide was written. It was published anonymously, and Voltaire denied authorship for many years even though authorship was attributed to him (Holmes 50).

Candide is a novel about a young man named Candide brought up in a fine castle in Westphalia, Germany. The novel tells how Candide is driven out of the castle because of his love for Cunegonde, the daughter of the Baron of Thunder-ten-t

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ly misunderstands the evil and disorder as if they were aspects of preestablished harmony. This misunderstanding leads him to remain optimistic, but it also keeps him from making moral judgments in the way that Voltaire would like. Consider the voyage of Candide, Cunegonde, and the old woman are to Paraguay. Cunegonde, who has been repeatedly raped and humiliated by a series of men, "is still terrified at what I have seen and experienced." She is verging on despair. Candide says, "All will be well . . . Certainly, the new world is the best of all possible worlds" (Voltaire 133). After each succeeding escape from death and cruelty, and as such cruelty is connected to religion, Candide begins to discard Pangloss's ideas bit by bit. In Surinam, Candide and his servant Cacambo encounter the slave whose leg and arm have been cut off for trying to escape and who is bewildered by having been told by Dutch missionaries that "we are all sons of Adam, both blacks and whites" and who has concluded that, if that religious teaching is true, "it is a shocking thing to use one'e relations in this barbarous manner" (Voltaire 152-3). In other words, slavery has specific religious approval. Shocked by the "abominable piece fo cruelty and villainy

Category: Literature - R