The heroes of Voltaire's stories appear 'from outside,' and their fresh perception particularly vividly highlights the ugliness of reality.
In this reality, priests attack Zadig for dissuading widows from burning themselves on the corpses of their husbands. The simple-minded do not understand why marriage with the beloved requires the consent of the Pope, who lives in another country and speaks a foreign language, and why the actions of religious people are so at odds with the Bible. The giant Micromegas is asked not to bother destroying the Earth, since people can handle it themselves, and the optimist Candide encounters cruelty and violence as a natural state of the world.
Voltaire was not a revolutionary, but his intelligence and talent compelled him to accurately probe society's 'pain points.' His stories, written in the second half of the 18th century, still read in many ways as if they were written yesterday.