Free French Literature: A Very Short Introduction by John D. Lyons

speak about anything, probably a dig at Leibniz's
prolific polymathic output) who teaches a teleological optimism:
everything was created providentially for the best and could not
be otherwise. Pangloss's assertions immediately appear absurd to
the reader but not to Candide:
    everything being made for an end, all is necessarily for the best end.
Consider that noses were made to wear spectacles: therefore we have
spectacles. Legs were clearly made to be in hose, and we have hose.
    As a literary creation, Candide is a highly successful character
in both common meanings of the term: as a narrative `person'
and as the possessor of a certain `character' (or personality trait)
taken to its extreme. Voltaire describes him at the outset by
saying `He had reasonably good judgment along with complete
simplicity; that's why, I think, they called him Candide' (Il avait
lejugement assez droit, avec l'esprit le plus simple; c'est, je crois,
pour cette raison qu'on le nommait Candide). For Voltaire's satire
of Leibnizian optimism and of all those who cling to ideologies
in order to avoid facing unpleasant realities, it is important
that the personage we follow around the globe be a mixture
of perceptiveness and exceptional persistence within the rigid doctrine that Pangloss taught. Thus Voltaire was able to continue
accumulating examples of natural horror (the Lisbon earthquake
of 1755), Roman Catholic hypocrisy and intolerance (the autodafe
in which the Portuguese priests burned three men to prevent
further earthquakes; the grand inquisitor's sexual activities; the
Jesuit kingdom in Paraguay), the murderous cruelty of European
kingdoms and the empire, the mutilations of African slaves in
Surinam, and various examples of venality and corruption, while
Candide only very slowly gives up his reassuring Panglossian
certitude that there must be a good reason for all this. By the time
he sees the slave whose leg has been amputated as punishment for
attempting to escape and whose hand has been cut off to get it out
of the way of the sugar grinder, Candide does, however, exclaim
`Oh Pangloss! ... you did not know of this abomination. That's it -
I will have to renounce your optimism: When asked at this point
what `optimism' is, Candide replies, `It's the mania of claiming
that everything is all right when you are suffering' (c'est la rage
de soutenir que tout est Bien quand on est mal). If Leibniz had
been Voltaire's only target, and if he had not so perfectly matched
his hero to the road show of horrors to produce such comic
dissonance, Candide would not have survived in the popular
imagination. But what Voltaire does here provides a microcosm of
the work of the plzilosoplzes in setting reason against deep-seated
cultural habit, against all the institutions that extinguish both the
capacity for judgement, the responsibility for clear perception of
the world, and a natural empathy.

    The tension between social facade and inner nature
    One of the most enduring literary successes of the century, an
immediate best-seller with continued broad appeal (and the
basis of at least four films), was Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's
epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). One of the
characteristics of the epistolary form makes it particularly hard
to locate a message or intention in any simple way, since there is
no overall narrative voice. The book has variously been seen as anti-aristocratic (this is how the book was perceived by many of
Laclos's contemporaries), feminist, anti-feminist, moralistic, and
immoral. As a collection of letters set mostly in chronological
order, the work at first seems to offer neutrality in point of view,
but the letters written by the two highly self-conscious dominant
characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil
(dominant both in the number of letters they write - though
there are twice as many from Valmont - and in their clever
manipulation of the