Voltaire

In "Un jeune homme simple" (2024), Dominique Fernandez traces the journey of young Arthur from the Auvergne, an uneducated provincial who finds himself in hyper-ideologized Paris. His encounters with, among others, radical feminist, ecological, and literary circles reveal contemporary society as permeated by moralism, woke dogmas, and cultural conformism. The protagonist's naiveté serves as a touchstone for modern elites: precisely because Arthur doesn't understand the capital's "codes," he exposes its hypocrisy and ultimately chooses to return to the Auvergne, where "safe, proven values" and a simple love await him. – The review explicitly places the novel within an intertextual lineage to Voltaire's "L'Ingénu" and interprets Arthur as a contemporary reincarnation of the enlightened outsider. Like Voltaire's Huron, Arthur, through his unvarnished judgment, exposes the absurdities of each era—once religious rites, now ideological orthodoxies. However, Voltaire's impulse is reversed: where the ingenu is forced into resistance in the world, Fernandez sees withdrawal as the only remaining form of integrity. The review's argument thus employs a twofold comparison: it reads Fernandez's satire as a modern continuation of Voltaire's critique—and simultaneously as an ironic antithesis in which the naive hero no longer fights but leaves corrupt civilization behind. Central to the review is also the observation that Fernandez portrays contemporary sexual liberation not as progress, but as a new form of conformism: what was once transgressive appears in Parisian circles as a commercialized ritual that has lost its rebellious energy. Fernandez's treatment of homosexuality in his work reveals this loss of the "gloire du paria" as a recurring motif: from "L'Étoile rose" (1978) and "La Gloire du Paria" (1987) to the double novel "L'homme de trop" (2021/2022), he describes the assimilation of the once resistant minority as a cultural leveling that gives rise to desires for a new radical difference – most recently in transgender.