Candide Satire

Candide In one of his most famous works, Candide, Voltaire leaves no stone unturned in terms of what he satirizes. Though a great many topics are touched upon, Voltaire ultimately uses Candide to satirize the philosophy of optimism offered by the German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. By examining Voltaire’s satire of armies, we can see that he uses the pointless atrocities and violence in Candide as a basis to discredit the German philosophy of optimism. The first instance in which Voltaire utilizes armies to discredit the philosophy of optimism occurs shortly after Candide is banished from Westphalia. After simply toasting to the good health of the Bulgarian king, soldiers handcuff him and take him to their regiment. Here he is trained as a soldier and beaten, “they gave him thirty blows with a cudgel. The next day he did his exercise a little less badly, and he received but twenty blows. The day following they gave him only ten, and he was regarded by his comrades as a prodigy (Ch. 2).” Candide has been taken against his will to join an army, and even with his full compliance he is
2 when Candide goes for a walk. With his short walk in the woods marked as desertion, Candide is court-martialed and offered the choice of being flogged thirty-six times by his whole regiment or having twelve musket balls shot into his brain. Being a student of Pangloss, and thus subscribing to an optimistic outlook, Candide uses “the divine gift called free-will” to choose the floggings. In this case we see that Voltaire is both satirizing the foolishness of the army for punishing someone for taking a walk as well as including a hint of satire with Candide’s notion of his “divine gift.” There is a sense of optimism in Candide’s ability to choose his undeserved consequence. Voltaire uses this exaggerated punishment of four thousand floggings to once again satirize the harshness of