In these chapters, Voltaire especially attacked intolerance, injustice, and cruelty in the Church as he saw it. Once more he made a tacit plea for the use of reason and the rejection of superstition. He first leveled his critical guns at individual members of the Church who ignored their sacerdotal vows and failed to follow vocation. The social disease that Pangloss caught from Paquette was traced to a "very learned Franciscan" and later to a Jesuit. There are anti-religious satire and a rejection of the Providential theory (that of a benign God who remains concerned with the condition of humanity) in the details relating to the charitable Anabaptist, who continued to be his brother's keeper at the cost of his life. The brute whose life he had saved swam safely to shore.
Primarily it is the account of the auto-da-fé that is most devastating. The term, a Portuguese one, means "act of faith." This was the Sermo generalis, an assembly convened for the purpose of trying and, if deemed necessary, passing sentence on individuals charged with heresy. To the masses, and to many others, the name suggested the very worst horrors of the Inquisition. It is essentially this concept that Voltaire presented in his tale. The author's mockery and irony are evident throughout. Note, for example, his account of the "pathetic sermon followed by some beautiful music" heard by the condemned Biscayan, the two Portuguese, Pangloss—and by Candide, who was flogged in time to the music. Note further Pangloss' earlier discourse with the man familiar with the Inquisition. This incorporates one of Voltaire's objections to the philosophy of optimism; for him, it contradicted the doctrine of the Fall of Man.
The Lisbon earthquake and fire took place on November 1, 1755. As many as 30,000 people were killed and the city reduced to ruins. This was the crucial event that led Voltaire to make his two strongest attacks on philosophical optimism, in Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, written shortly after the disaster occurred, and in Candide.
Voltaire achieved one of his several climaxes in the story when he had his young hero bewail the fact that he had to witness the hanging of his "dear Pangloss" and the drowning of his "dear Anabaptist, best of men," and to learn that the pearl of young ladies, Madamoiselle Cunégonde, had been disemboweled—all without learning the necessary cause thereof.
