Satire has been a very effective form of social criticism because authors like Voltaire and many others during the Age of Enlightenment could just write books about the problems that affected them, but they found in satire the best way to make critics about all of the imperfections that disturbed a great part of the society. Satire has been shown to be designed to make criticism approachable through humor. It differs from comedy because it pokes fun at specific aspects or flaws in people or institutions in a direct, or like in the novel Candide, in an indirect manner.
The novel is filled with satirical points throughout the journey of a young Candide across the world. Volitare uses the novel as a way to mock the idea of “everything happens for a reason” by displaying its absurdity through hyperbole. Religious satire is also used in showing the hypocrisy of religious officials on how they preach about being saints and praising the Lord, yet then proceed to do sinful things, for example, a friar steals, a monk buys a prostitute, and a Jew buys a woman for a sex slave.
Had Voltaire been more direct with Candide, the repercussions could’ve been massive for him. When it was first released, it was widely banned in Paris, most parts of Europe as well as being added to the Roman Catholic Church’s list of banned books just for mentioning the witchcraft of religion, political sedition, and intellectual hostility. A more direct response would’ve caused religious and secular authorities to not only denounced him as an author, but also would’ve wanted to protest against him and force for some form of harmful punishment against him.
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Jesuits of the Society of Jesus would have decided to take matters into their own hands and offer a form of payback against Voltaire for humiliating their religion especially when he wrote a very popular line about the Jesuits, “Let’s eat some Jesuit” when Candide and Cacambo fall into the hands of cannibals dressed as Jesuits. The entire message of Candide was to expose the religion and certain philosophies of life in a way to offer humor to a story that deep down revealed very disturbing truths about the world surrounding Voltaire at that time.
