Candide
by Voltaire
Table of Contents
Introduction
Voltaire was born François-Marie Arouet in 1694 to a middle-class Parisian
family. He became famous in France for his satirical writing at a young age. At the age
of twenty-one, he was imprisoned in the Bastille for several months for a poem that
satirized the French monarch. Upon his release in 1718, he assumed the pen name
Voltaire, an anagram of the Latin spelling of his surname. In spite of his incarceration,
Voltaire never stopped writing his biting satire, and he never stopped getting into trouble
for it. He was imprisoned again in 1726, and the condition of his release was that he
agreed to a three-year exile in England. Voltaire was welcomed in England by other
great thinkers and philosophers of the day such as Alexander Pope, John Locke, and
Sir Isaac Newton.
Through the lens of history, Voltaire is seen as a preeminent writer of the
intellectual period known as the Enlightenment or Age of Reason. This period was
characterized by a decisive move toward understanding the world through science and
reason, as well as a spirit of social reformation encompassing the ideas of equality
among men and personal liberty. Although Voltaire’s work is grounded within this
period, Candide demonstrates that the Enlightenment was also characterized by
differences of opinion and philosophical debate.
The central focus of Voltaire’s satire in Candide is the idea, popular with many
thinkers of the day, that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” The
character of Pangloss,...
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