Abstract
Products of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and William Hogarth were pioneers and masters of satire, a comic form with a long venerable history reaching back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Both were apt observers of a society adrift in a sea of moral aimlessness, rotten with greed, ambition and cynicism. Voltaire’s Candide and Hogarth’s great paintings and engravings both entertain and inform, using exaggeration to ridicule the behavioral excesses of rich and poor alike.
As products of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and William Hogarth expressed their contempt for those bourgeois manifestations of society that would eventually bring down the French nobility, the Bourbon ...
