: A romp through the 18th century!
Do an AP Template for either Candide or Moll Flanders
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
— Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.120-121)
Essay Prompts:
Before you read Candide , carefully read through this packet. Also look up the Spanish Inquisition , the Lisbon earthquake , and the myth of El Dorado in Spanish colonial times. Candide is, of course, a satire. How does
Voltaire satirize: Love, War, Civilization, Philosophy, Religion, Kings, Clergy, Commerce, Government – and just human life in general? Note what aspects of the novel are more serious in tone. Choose three of Voltaire’s targets. What, if anything, does Voltaire advocate for improvement on the status quo of the human condition?
Is this, as Pangloss proclaims, the best of all possible worlds ? Can philosophy save us?
For Moll Flanders , how does Defoe use satire in this novel to comment on the plight of women in 18 th century
England? Choose three different areas of inequality that he focuses on in the picaresque story of Moll. Do you think this satire would have been effective as a tool for arguing in favor of women’s rights? Why or why not?
Elements of Satire
Satires mock: human institutions, including religions, politics and political systems, social or other classes, philosophy or ideas, social practices or codes of behavior, groups of any sort, individuals of any sort – in fact, the entire human race! How important is it for us to be able to excoriate ourselves? Satire can be considered as a genre, as an important element of a work, or as a motif within a work. Satire is didactic literature used to make an ideological point. To make this point, authors of satire often use the following tools: Satire points out a problem, but offers no solution! (Remember, therefore, to keep it out of your intimate life!) Debates in satires mock the very attitudes and viewpoint they profess, by revealing faulty logic to the extreme. The 18 th century’s new openness, brought on by Enlightenment thought, made this century ripe for satires.
Satire works like caricature: It highlights faults until they’re completely absurd, so no one can miss them.
Sarcastic Language:
 irony, understatement, and hyperbole
 sardonic (cynically mocking) language
 cruel, biting jokes
 ridicule
 malapropisms and other variations on diction
Satire also makes use of:

Faulty Logic to Mock Faulty Logic

The Absurd

Ridiculous Coincidences

Caricatures, especially eccentrics and pedants
 An “Innocent” Observer or Narrator
 Capricious Journeys of a Rogue Character (“picaresque” novels follow this format)

Other Miscellaneous plot forms in generally episodic narration: These are called Menippean satires, for example, Alice in Wonderland .

Humor or Dark Humor

Use of Farce: Slapstick humor, physical and situational humor, high sexual content

Use of Burlesque: Parody or Travesty.

VOLTAIRE, whose real name was Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778)
Voltaire believed he was the bastard child of an officer/songwriter. He hated his father, Francois
Arouet, a civil servant, and went to live with his godfather the Abbe de Chateauneuf, a freethinker and epicurean. Voltaire was educated in Paris, by the Jesuits, went to study law and lived in The Hague. A scandal with a woman brought him back to Paris, where he changed his name and joined the literary society. He writing reflected his mammoth talent, as he wrote plays, pamplets, books, dialogues, history, social and literary criticism, texts in science and philosophy, and of course, satire. In his life he was not really successful as a writer of literature, although he achieved a great deal of notoriety as a social critic and satirist.
Voltaire fought with a member of French high society, was beaten and thrown in the Bastille, brought to Calais, and went to London for exile. He loved England, was down with Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.
He was down with * John Locke’s views on the rights of man, and was a proclaimed Deist: someone who believes that God created everything, and set the clock ticking to watch it all happen. He hated * Jean-Jacques
Rosseau , and the feeling was reciprocated. He knew both Casanova and Edmund Gibbon. He admired English liberalism, where religious and philosophical questions were openly discussed, which was not true in France, still under the thumb of the Catholic Church. He liked Quakers, in particular. He liked Shakespeare, but called him a drunken savage. He was not fond of watching performances.
He went back to France and wrote histories and his famous Lettres Philosophiques (Letters Concerning the English Nation) calling for religious tolerance and a life that pursues heaven not through penitence, but happiness by progress in sciences and arts, as he felt this was the essential direction of modern mind.
A warrant for his arrest was issued for this publication. He went to hide out with Mme Gabrielle-
Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet on her estate in Cirey. She was a French mathematician and physicist with a name to match her stature as a genius. She published a paper on the nature of fire and translated Newton’s Principia Mathematica . She was married, but had an affair with Voltaire, and later, another man at the same time. When she died in childbirth, all three men were present.
He went to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Prussia, and was an agent in the War of the Austrian
Succession. He had a relationship with his own niece, and became censured just about everywhere he went. He finally had asylum in Geneva, but provoked the hostilities even of the Swiss. He hated that a new sentimentalism seemed to be winning out over reason, as the French Revolution and the Age of Romanticism approached. He was for workers’ rights, and agricultural reform, but also supported capitalism and material prosperity. He spent the last years of his life in Freney, in France near the French-Swiss border, in an idyllic pursuit of endowing the town with art, industry and culture. He built a theater as well as a church, and purchased estates around which he began planting gardens. "I have only done one sensible thing in my life," said Voltaire, "to cultivate the ground. He who tills a field, renders a better service to mankind than all the scribblers in Europe." It was there he wrote Candide
When he died, he was buried, hugger-mugger with Christian rites, before the Church’s prohibition of such came through. In the realm of credulity stretching coincidences, Voltaire was later held responsible, by some, for the French Revolution, an assertion he might have satirically promulgated himself, were he not already dead. (Voltaire, of course, would have in fact despised mob rule.
Ecrasons l’infâme
! )
GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ:
Leibniz was a mathematician and philosopher who shared the world with Voltaire. He did try to prove mathematically, that his world was, in fact, the best of all possible worlds. Recently, a copy of Newton’s
Principia was sold that was filled with his notations. Leibniz was actually a brilliant person, and one of the few around who not only understood Newton’s document fully, but refined the principles of calculus that Newton discovered. Possibly because of this, and Mme du Chatelet’s justified admiration for Leibniz, he was no friend of Voltaire’s and his philosophy became Voltaire’s prey. (Leibniz also came up with the idea of using the binary system to make a calculator, but he abandoned it. Well, maybe he wasn’t so smart after all!)
*Look up these philosophers and find discover what their philosophies proclaimed!

Brief 18 th Century European History
Seven Years War
1756–63, worldwide war fought in Europe, North America, and India between France, Austria, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and (after 1762) Spain on the one side versus Prussia, Great Britain, and Hanover on the other. (Look up a map of the
Europe during this time, and find that Germany and Italy don’t exist!)
Nature of the War
The struggle was complex in its origin and involved two main distinct conflicts—the colonial rivalry between France and
England and the struggle for supremacy in Germany between the house of Austria and the rising kingdom of Prussia. It was preluded in America by the outbreak of the last of the French and Indian Wars and in India by fighting among native factions and the struggle there between the French governor Dupleix and the British statesman Robert Clive.
The War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) had left Austria humiliated. Seeking to recover Silesia from Prussia,
Empress Maria Theresa even before the conclusion of that war had secured the alliance of Elizabeth of Russia. In the years following the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), Kaunitz, as Austrian ambassador to France and then as chancellor, worked for a rapprochement with France.
The War Begins
In 1755, when hostilities broke out in North America, George II, king of England and elector of Hanover, negotiated the
Treaty of Westminster with Frederick II of Prussia, who guaranteed the neutrality of Hanover. This event hastened the alliance (1756) of France and Austria, sometimes called the “diplomatic revolution.” Shortly afterward Frederick II opened hostilities by invading Saxony. In Jan., 1757, war was declared on the aggressor in the name of the Holy Roman Empire.
Austria concluded alliances with France and Russia and was joined by Sweden. The main European phase of the war began with the Prussian invasion of Bohemia early in 1757.
Conduct of the War
Victorious at first, Frederick was severely defeated by the Austrians under Daun at Kolin (June, 1757) and had to evacuate
Bohemia. The fighting was carried into Saxony and Silesia, where Frederick gained the great victories of Rossbach (Nov.,
1757) and Leuthen (Dec., 1757) over the French and Austrians. The Russians, who had invaded Prussia, were defeated by
Frederick at Zorndorf (Aug., 1758). The English and Hanoverians, at first unsuccessful against the French in NW
Germany, began a vigorous effort when William Pitt (later earl of Chatham) came into power; the troops then won the victories of Krefeld (June, 1758) and Minden (Aug., 1759).
However, Frederick soon found himself in an almost desperate situation. He was badly beaten by Daun at Kunersdorf
(Aug., 1759) and in Nov., 1759, Daun captured a Prussian army of 13,000 at Maxen. In Oct., 1760, the Russians took
Berlin. Days later, as Frederick’s army approached, they evacuated it, and in November Frederick defeated Daun at
Torgau. Nonetheless, his situation remained critical, especially after the fall of Pitt (1761) deprived him of British subsidies. The death (Jan., 1762) of Elizabeth of Russia and the accession of Peter III, Frederick’s ardent admirer, helped save him from defeat.
Peace
By the Treaty of St. Petersburg (1762) Russia made peace and restored all conquests; Sweden made peace in the same year.
Now fighting alone in the east, the Austrians were soundly defeated at Burkersdorf (July, 1762). The French, too, had suffered severe reverses. In America they had lost Louisburg (1758), Quebec (1759), and some possessions in the West
Indies; in India, the British victories at Plassey (1757) and Pondichéry (1761) had destroyed French power; on the sea, the
French took Port Mahón from the British (1757) but were defeated by Hawke in Quiberon Bay (1759). The entry of Spain into the war under the terms of the Family Compact of 1761 was of little help to France, where the war had never been popular.
After protracted negotiations between the war-weary powers, peace was made (Feb., 1763) among Prussia, Austria, and
Saxony at Hubertusburg, and among England, France, and Spain at Paris (see Paris, Treaty of, 1763). The treaty of
Hubertusburg, though it restored the prewar status quo, marked the ascendancy of Prussia as a leading European power.
Through the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain emerged as the world’s chief colonial empire, which was its primary goal in the war, and France lost most of its overseas possessions. For Russia the Seven Years War was the first great venture into purely European affairs.
See studies by L. J. Oliva (1964), R. Savory (1966), and H. H. Kaplan (1968).
The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. Copyright © 2001-05 Columbia University Press.

The following song is from Candide, the 1956 musical by Leonard Bernstein. This is Cunegonde’s lament, as she is forced once again into being a kept woman, albeit in a rather lavish state. Broadway luminaries filled this show, which was not-so-subtly targeting the 1950’s McCarthy-era world.*
Cunegonde : And here I am, my heart breaking, forced to glitter, forced to be gay.
Glitter and Be Gay
Glitter and be gay,
That's the part I play;
Here I am in Paris, France,
Forced to bend my soul
To a sordid role,
Victimized by bitter, bitter circumstance.
Alas for me! Had I remained
Beside my lady mother,
Pearls and ruby rings...
Ah, how can worldly things
Take the place of honor lost?
Can they compensate
For my fallen state,
Purchased as they were at such an awful cost?
Bracelets...lavalieres
My virtue had remained unstained
Until my maiden hand was gained
By some Grand Duke or other.
Ah, 'twas not to be;
Harsh necessity
Brought me to this gilded cage.
Born to higher things,
Here I droop my wings,
Ah! Singing of a sorrow nothing can assuage.
And yet of course I rather like to revel,
Ha ha!
I have no strong objection to champagne,
Ha ha!
My wardrobe is expensive as the devil,
Can they dry my tears?
Can they blind my eyes to shame?
Can the brightest brooch
Shield me from reproach?
Can the purest diamond purify my name?
And yet of course these trinkets are endearing,
Ha ha!
I'm oh, so glad my sapphire is a star,
Ha ha!
I rather like a twenty-carat earring,
Ha ha!
If I'm not pure, at least my jewels are!
Enough! Enough!
I'll take their diamond necklace
Ha ha!
Perhaps it is ignoble to complain...
Enough, enough
Of being basely tearful!
I'll show my noble stuff
By being bright and cheerful!
Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha!
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!
Ha ha ha ha ha! Ha!
Observe how bravely I conceal
The dreadful, dreadful shame I feel.
Ha ha ha ha!
Extra Credits 
Explain how Voltaire’s satire is relevant to the McCarthy Era. Discuss how specific aspects of society that
Candide mocks were also worthy of mockery in the 1950’s. Why is the word “gay” in this song an inside joke among the writers, musicians, and producers of this show?