She had access to the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Voltaire's mother, Marie Marguerite Daumard, was the daughter of a member of Parliament and sister of the comptroller general of the royal guard. After he and his friends are killed, they are brought back to life first rich, then poor and finally, they wind up on a farm in Turkey.

The tale is a fantastic picaresque journey that takes Candide around the world. Voltaire answered back three years later with the tale of Candide. Rousseau answered the poem with a letter, which was leaked to the press, saying it was Voltaire who was mistaken.

Voltaire had already attacked this philosophy of optimism in his poem on the 1756 Lisbon earthquake. This philosophy states that since God created the world and God is perfect, everything in the world is ultimately perfect. The reception of the work was controversial in fact, the Great Council of Geneva immediately denounced it and ordered all copies to be burned.Ĭandide parodies the philosophy of optimism put forth by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz. le Docteur Ralph, translated in 1759 as Candide Or All for the Best. He criticized everyone and signed his works with 'Ecrasez l'in-fame' or 'down with infamy.' Though he wrote more than eighty volumes of material, his most popular work remains Candide ou L'optimisme, traduit de l'Allemand, de Mr. François-Marie Arouet, best known under his pen name, Voltaire, is such a historical giant that some scholars, like Ariel and Will Durant, call the eighteenth century the 'Age of Voltaire.' Voltaire was unrivaled in stature as an author.

Candide by Voltaire